Once, around 1973, when having coffee with a group of friends in UCD, one of our number who was from a farming background told us that every Sunday his parents and siblings would put on their good clothes, pile into the family Cortina and drive to a church about four miles away to attend mass. Every week at the same point on the return journey his father would say: ‘Thank God that’s over for another week!’ This recollection was met with nods and rueful smiles. It did not need to be said that we all experienced mass as a painful duty rather than as something spiritually fulfilling. There was a slight feeling of regret that, before giving it all up, our experience of religion had been an empty one. Other recollections followed, including one of a much-admired priest who somehow managed to get through the mass in twenty minutes. The narrator assured us that people travelled considerable distances to attend his high-speed mass.

We had all read the historian KH Connell and discussed the implications of his work. We knew that there was an important historical context but were not sufficiently aware to know that the five generations that preceded us were caught in a historical trap whose jaws were finally opening, and that we were among the first beneficiaries. It certainly did not occur to us to be grateful for our forebears’ doggedness, without which the freedoms we were claiming would hardly have been possible. We preferred to see them as resulting from our intelligence and determined iconoclasm.

It was not just our memories and those, possibly apocryphal, anecdotes which suggest a spiritual aridity around mass attendance. There are numerous memoirs of life in twentieth century Ireland which depict religious observance exclusively in terms of social conformity. One person recalling the early-to mid-twentieth century said:

‘And as for religion? I was brought up in it, afraid of everyone. You had to go to mass, and you had to do everything right.’

This recollection reflects the acute pressure to conform in public. It was a society where the danger of non-conformity was social marginalisation rather than legal or police threats. Those who did adhere to expected behaviour tended to get on well enough with diocesan priests and other authority figures, such as guards and teachers. But even among the relatively secure, there was underlying fear and caution. In a society which was structurally exclusionary, no one was safe and the best protection available was to maintain the appearance of conformity. This was particularly the case for those with assets, such as a farm, to protect.

Following the famine, as part of a radical social and economic transformation, a new and distinctive Catholicism took root in Ireland. It was as if Ireland was experiencing a second conversion to Christianity, and it was perhaps the first time in the history of European conversion that it was not necessary for the church to navigate, and significantly embrace, a deep pre-existing weave of traditional beliefs. This novel situation arose because Irish society, especially rural society, was turning away from much of its traditional culture, including many traditional forms of belief. The new Catholicism would have little interest in integrating with traditional communal practices and would be characterised by an emphasis on form and orthodoxy. In taking this path, it could be said the church was reflecting the Irish zeitgeist of the time. The process, which was realised over a number of decades, has been described by historian Emmet Larkin as a devotional revolution. There were certainly big changes. Before the famine mass attendance among Catholics was in the region of thirty three percent. By the end of the nineteenth century it was over ninety percent.

From the church’s point of view, the transformed post-famine Ireland must have appeared as a place of enormous possibilities for it as an institution. This turned out to be only partially true. Acceptance of the church in the new Ireland, while sometimes perceived as unqualified, would in fact be as circumscribed as it was in other times and places. The institution would have to adapt to the rigorous socio-economic and political protocols of a society transformed following the catastrophic defeats of the 1840s.

In order to be widely accepted in the new Ireland the church was, among other things, required to support a popular politics increasingly concerned with land redistribution, oppose the interests of the landed gentry, accept the necessity of late marriage and legitimise a cult of sexual restraint (purity). The church was also obliged to look benignly on the widespread aspiration to replace imperial government with a local legislature. These were all contrary to normal Catholic practice or principle. The church was historically supportive of empire but in Ireland it had to do the opposite, it had to support the ideal of national autonomy. Support for the Catholic church and the extraordinary status it was afforded in the century following the famine came with a significant price tag. The institution had to embody and reflect society’s political and economic priorities. In the process the diocesan church became a  watchman of public conformity. It became a socially coercive institution, but it was a licensed coercion, approved by society.

The social power that followed inevitably from this ‘license’ was exploited politically by the church, which was not content with being simply an instrument of society. As if in compensation for the compromises it was forced to make, it sought to dominate and lead society. Concerted efforts were made to undermine the Irish enlightenment tradition in its liberal and democratic manifestations. At the time of the land war, to give one example, the bishop of Meath Dr Thomas Nulty engaged in active and ruthless campaigning against the liberal tradition. He declared the voice of that tradition, the Westmeath Examiner, to be ‘dangerous to the faith and morals of the people’. His clerical mouthpieces outlandishly claimed that a patriotism which denied the priests their historic role as moral and political leaders of the people was a false patriotism. As one historian put it, for the priests ‘a secular nationality was worse than no nationality at all.’

It is the cultural memory of this anti-liberal, anti-Enlightenment clerical tradition that explains many examples of liberal exultation over the fall of the church in our own time.

The coercive aspect of Irish life was particularly registered by the young.
One man born in 1922 recalled:

‘We were all afraid of the priest. It was frightening…There was a local teacher, a local garda and the local priest and we were afraid of our life of all of them. If we saw or heard of them walking the roads, we would hide until they passed by.’

People were under observation.

‘And even when we weren’t in school, we were being watched. You wouldn’t miss mass but every month on a Sunday, we had to go to devotions at three o’clock. It was a killer.’

The broadcaster John Quinn, who died in January 2026, published a memoir in 2008, Goodnight Ballivor, I’ll sleep in Trim. He describes the parish priest of his youth:

‘Fr Patrick Farrell dominated Ballivor for forty-two years … [He] strode around the village, his black cassock billowing in the breeze … ‘Recite the Memorare …’ he might bark, and woe betide you if you stumbled through the reply or – worse still – failed to reply.’

Quinn was an altar boy and had to memorise the Latin responses which ‘we learned and parroted without understanding a single word’.

In the light of such memories, it might be wondered whether the mass is an inherently arid experience or whether it was simply that way in Ireland. The latter, it would seem, was the case. Other Catholic peoples’ responses to the mass and especially other Catholic peoples’ responses to Irish Catholicism, make this clear.

Using political skills which were developed within Irish popular politics from the 1820s, Irish-born bishops became dominant in the American Catholic church. By the end of the nineteenth century, they enjoyed a near hegemonic power which did not begin to weaken until the 1960s. It was a power which was used to impose post-famine Irish style Catholicism in America. Irish bishops, who unwittingly carried with them influences from low church Irish Protestant evangelicalism, regarded the devotional style of Poles and Italians as inimical to church unity, dangerously emotional and bordering on superstition. The answer was to use the power of the institution to suppress national deviations, just as had been done in post-famine Ireland. However, in this case they were not pushing an open door.

The Irish style was not at all liked by other Catholics, who regarded it as empty orthodoxy. Indeed, American Catholics such as the Italians, the Germans and the Poles were appalled by the demands of the Irish church leadership. One historian commented: ‘The Poles believed the Irish bishops neither understood nor respected their spirituality.’ Another said: ‘German Catholics resented what they saw as the Irish reduction of Catholicism to clerical authority and moral rectitude, stripped of its music, its learning and its profound communal traditions.’ The Irish were accused of promoting a non-mystical, cold, rules-based, spiritually empty and authoritarian religion, hostile to custom and community. The thin gruel of Irish low church Catholicism provoked widespread hostility within American Catholicism. Some commentators used the term ‘Irish Ascendancy’ to describe the level of control. Even voices from within the Vatican felt compelled to complain: ‘Their religion is harsh and narrow, more moral law than mystery.’ There were even reports of the Irish locking away the Italians’ processional statues, a proscription with a decidedly reformationist whiff.

So what were the peculiar Irish conditions behind all of this? As suggested, the post-famine transformation was key, but to apprehend the scale of what happened we should look briefly at the exuberant if fragile and transforming world of the pre-famine era, including the great defeats suffered in the 1840s.

The pre-famine decades were arguably the most exciting period politically and culturally in nineteenth century Ireland. Among other developments a national bourgeoisie was coming into being and it was doing the things such people do, opening factories, establishing newspapers and periodicals, developing the arts, trading vigorously, joining the professions, publishing novels, organising politically and building churches. Everyone knew huge threats loomed and that the Irish future without Irish control was grim. The core political ambition was for autonomy and industrial development. It was an era of massive self-belief, passion and hope. (Fergus O’Ferrall’s recent County Longford Explored, gives a sense of this emerging Catholic bourgeoisie in one particular location.)

It was also an era of traditional peasant Catholicism integrated with older mythologies and beliefs. Bourgeois Catholicism in its turn was a repository of meaning and identity. In the public realm the diocesan clergy supported the interests of the secular national leadership and did not attempt to direct or control politics, notwithstanding the verbal dances of mutual deference that occurred. The liberal Catholicism of the O’Connell era fascinated and enthralled large numbers of European Catholics who were moved by evidence that Catholicism and a liberalism could be combined. It remains a tradition open to Irish Catholicism today. The popular liberal politics of the era was national, cross-class, democratic and Enlightenment-based. It had taken mass form in the 1820s and, as a result, Ireland can lay claim to having the oldest mass democratic politics in the world.

Despite the epochal political efforts of Daniel O’Connell and his liberal nationalist supporters, there would be no transformative industrial revolution in nineteenth century Ireland. This was because the immensely powerful imperial interest refused to yield to O’Connell’s demand for legislative independence, which had been demonstrated beyond doubt to represent the will of the people and was understood in Ireland to be the necessary condition for industrial development and a prosperous future.

In the 1840s O’Connell’s liberal nationalist politics, which had united the Catholic bourgeoisie and peasantry, suffered decisive defeats at the hands of the extractive imperial interest. The Catholic bourgeoisie was politically undermined. Its revolutionary strength was drained as it was reduced to a mere middle class, no longer setting the political agenda. In a parallel and grotesque act of passive genocide huge numbers of the rural poor were permitted to starve to death. Thus, the peasantry and the bourgeoisie were defeated and the stage was set for the reordering of Irish agriculture in the interest of political forces based overseas. Indeed, Irish agriculture would become a predominantly low labour, pastoral industry, organised around the English market’s demand for livestock. In the first quarter of the nineteenth century around 40,000 live cattle were exported to Britain per annum. This was to rise considerably after the famine. By 1907-09 an average of 847,023 cattle per annum were exported to Britain. By this time Irish agriculture had become an integrated, powerless and compliant part of the English food system.

It was this transformation which brought into being exclusionary Ireland with its public religious conformity and a structural brutality aimed largely at itself. Put simply, the structures which emerged in the wake of the defeats of the 1840s determined that an economic role was only available to a minority in each generation. The rest would be cast out, not without pain, but cast out none the less. This was the society which embraced the new Catholicism, fearfully clinging to it as a substitute for the social cohesion and webs of cultural meaning that were fast disappearing.

Under what was called the ‘Gregory Clause’, subsistence farms were forbidden. Ambitious peasants and farmers strove to gain access to holdings which became available because of famine, eviction, social competition and the operation of the clause. The key point here is that, notwithstanding the great loss of population during famine, a very large body of peasantry remained in situ in 1850, much of which aspired to continue operating according to pre-famine norms. This population was effectively targeted for dispossession. With the blessing and support of Westminster, micro-farms were wrested from the peasantry by landlords and ambitious neighbours. (Breandán Mac Suibhne has written on this dynamic in west Donegal in his landmark book The End of Outrage.)

Between 1841 and 1881 the number of fourth-class dwellings in Ireland declined from 491,000 to 41,000. Other less basic forms of rural housing were also to decline throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The evidence of this hollowing out process can still be seen in the remains of the abandoned homes which dot the Irish countryside. These eerie wrecks are evidence of the steady increase in farm size over the century following the famine. The rearing of livestock required larger farms than traditional tillage and behind the bulk of Ireland’s abandoned homesteads were tales of pain and exclusion.

To speak of Irish population decline as something explained by the famine misses the point. After the famine, at around five million, the population of the area which would become the republic was still robust. Had it followed UK norms after 1850, its population would have been around ten million in 1962, possibly more. If Irish population development had matched the Dutch, the early 1960s population of the Republic would have been around twenty million. In 1962 the actual populations of the republic was a mere 2.8 million. Nothing like this happened elsewhere in Europe where populations grew considerably over the same period.

It can therefore be said that the unique Irish population disaster followed from the political defeat of liberal nationalism in the 1840s and the anti-peasant cattle-based reorganisation of Irish agriculture that occurred after the famine.

The defeat of the politics of industrialisation and remorseless farm consolidation gave rise a society ligatured to contraction. This was the environment in which the Catholic church came to, and was required to, play an extraordinarily prominent public role. Traumatising demographic collapse, more than anything else, was the phenomenon that shaped the culture and politics of modern Ireland. It also shaped modern Irish Catholicism.

This aspect of the Irish historical experience is not generally highlighted, perhaps because in comparison to the well-worn grooves of Irish historical deliberation, it is morally fraught and unsettling. One result of this non-engagement is that there are many today who earnestly believe the Catholic church is the cause of all Ireland’s ills. This is not only wide of the mark but amounts to a turning away from history and even a denial of history. When we peel away the outer layers, it emerges that Catholicism was as much an instrument of society as an influencer of society.

The culture, politics and economic life of farming families that survived to live in post-famine conditions revolved around maintaining land holdings intact, struggling to increase farm size and passing land between generations. As there was no custom of rigorous primogeniture, emotional stress and competition existed at the very heart of family life and was no doubt a cause of extensive psychological distress. This was a situation which troubled church leaders and occasional mild criticisms of Irish ‘worldly arrangements’ were made.

Under the prevailing ‘worldly arrangements’, not only had parents to choose a child to inherit and send their ‘surplus’ children away, there was also a continuous need for more land. Irish farm sizes rose inexorably as individuals pursued the holy grail of a secure and viable holding. This meant that those with land wanted more land, while also aware they might lose what they had if they and their families were not permanently careful. As a result, a vicious social competitiveness prevailed just below the surface, even for those who desired to live a moral and decent life, as most did.

Patrick Kavanagh’s novel Tarry Flynn, which was set in the 1930s and published in the 1940s, illustrates these struggles. The hero’s mother was a clever woman but not clever enough. Her attempt to acquire an additional parcel of land backfired and precious capital was lost. Tarry told the story to his close friend Eusebius who sympathised, but as Eusebius walked away Tarry could tell from the back of his neck that he was pleased, while admitting to himself that if the situation were reversed, he too would be pleased.

Tarry was the eldest of the family and potentially an inheriting son but he was insufficiently conformist. It was clear that he was unwilling to accept the prevailing order in all its restrictive limitations. He had the energy of youth including normal sexual energy. But as youthful energy was not socially valued, he ran into problems in the community and particularly with the parish priest. His great crime was showing signs of disruptive energy and independent thinking. That was not something which was welcome in post-famine Ireland. The reason it was not welcome was not for conservative ideological reasons but because it was disruptive of the rigid social protocols around inheritance that defined a society in demographic freefall. This too was the underlying reason for the banning of Tarry Flynn.

The psychologically destructive effects of society’s animus against sexual appetite -masked behind the bogus cult of purity- is laid bare in Kavanagh’s poetic masterpiece, ‘The Great Hunger’.  In post-famine Ireland the unavoidable practices of delayed inheritance and marriage rendered the sexual energies of youth taboo, with corrosive effects following throughout society. Pregnancy outside strict social parameters represented a challenge to the orderly transfer of property between the generations. Women who lived within this culture and became pregnant outside marriage were often subject to particularly brutal forms of exclusion.

Within the church the hostility towards independent thinking sometimes reached neurotic levels. ‘A Spoiled Priest’, a frequently republished and unremarkable fiction by Canon Sheehan, was re-issued around the same time as Tarry Flynn was published. It also looked at the ‘problem’ of questionable intellectual impulses from the viewpoint of the religious establishment. The story features an intelligent and able young seminarian who was denied ordination because, despite his apparent orthodoxy, there was some vague aspect to him which suggested independent thinking.

It is difficult not to have sympathy for ordinary people trapped in this world and attempting to live by its protocols. After all, the choices available under imperial government following the cataclysmic defeat of Irish people’s efforts to shape their own future were few. The culture which arose in those conditions was knotted and riven with guilt and contradiction. Economically based conformity and diligent religious observation coexisted with energy-filled survivals of pre-famine culture. Additionally, elements of European anti-Enlightenment thinking, introduced by the church, coexisted with the deep-rooted Enlightenment values of the O’Connell era. Indeed, it was often the case that where economic imperatives did not require intolerance there was social acceptance of difference. In Ireland conformity, exclusion and intolerance were contingent on economic interest. The kind of instinctive conservativism found in many parts of rural Europe did not exist in Ireland. Politically the Irish were devoted to the ideal of overthrowing the status quo; liberation from the imperial maw was the dream. Pictures of monarchs were not usual in Irish farmsteads, rather it was those of secular heroes such as Robert Emmet or with religious themes that decorated farmhouses.

It might even be suggested that ‘the best Catholics in the world’ were not very good Catholics. People were quite happy to go along with what was publicly demanded as set out in ‘The Commandments of the Church’ but when it came to the Ten Commandments the approach was more a la carte, especially regarding those which covered internal reflection. Observation of the tenth commandment was out of the question and there were structural issues which rendered the fourth seriously problematic. Delayed marriage and the libidinal energy invested in sexual repression were, of course unconducive to observing the ninth.

The church was not entirely happy in providing a language of moral legitimacy to cover the social necessity of sexual abstinence. It was, however, something society required it to do. Traditional Catholic teaching is that marriage and reproduction are the proper business of life, at least for the laity and that marriage should be undertaken early in life to avoid temptation and social disorder. ‘Increase and multiply and fill the earth’ is the basic Christian teaching. But this was entirely out of the question in post-famine rural Ireland. The old had to die or retire to a corner before the next generation could take over. Thus, Ireland was a place of relatively late marriage and a great deal of morosely waiting around for life to begin. The church was aware of this conflict with its preferences but had to accept that it was beyond its power to change this core aspect of Irish life.

Bishops and other church dignitaries did, however, from time to time register protests against the non-Catholic practices of the Irish in this area. In the nineteenth century Cardinal Cullen and Archbishop William Walsh voiced their criticisms. In the twentieth century Archbishop Joseph MacRory objected and in the 1950s Archbishop McQuaid felt compelled to once more outline the Catholic objection to the status quo declaring: ‘The postponement of marriage, with all its attendant dangers, is one of the most serious moral problems confronting our people today.’

They were all ignored. On the ground the parish clergy were probably more in tune with social priorities. When priests pulled courting couples out of the ditches, as it is said they did, they would have sent them away with warnings about purity. The more authentically Catholic thing would, like the American Parson Brown of the 1930s song, have been to suggest that they wed. The diocesan clergy in rural Ireland were not so disconnected from reality as to make such a ludicrous demand.

There was another area of church failure to influence behaviour which is worth noting. The diocesan clergy sometimes advocated for improvements in the grim living conditions of agricultural labourers. Their efforts in this area were typically rejected by the farming class, described by one labourer as ‘breeders of fat cattle’ who preferred bullocks to the ‘hardy sons of toil’. 
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This dysfunctional world continued for five generations. Then, in the late twentieth century everything changed; Ireland’s socially coercive environment dissolved, just as speedily as it had arrived. The need to observe socially endorsed religious forms evaporated – as did a lot of other practices – with the arrival of jobs, choice and opportunity. It would have been surprising had it been otherwise. There is really no particular mystery around the collapse of the Catholic church as an institution in Ireland. The world in which it was embedded disappeared, leaving it high and dry and, as it happened, an easy target as fall guy for earlier ‘unpleasantness’. Indeed, blaming everything on the church relieves many from the upset of having to regard their own families in morally negative terms when recalling family stories of exclusion, particularly the exclusion of women.

Back in UCD in the early 1970s we studied religious doubt in Victorian literature. Literary intellectuals such as Tennyson, the Brownings and George Eliot agonised over questions around belief. Intellectually it defined the era. In ‘Dover Beach’ Matthew Arnold, reflecting on the collapse of faith, wrote the famous line:

But now I only hear/ Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar

In Ireland there would be no ‘long withdrawing roar’ merely the casual rejection of an institution which had been closely allied to a social order which was now dissolving before people’s eyes. Doubt was not the issue. Most people continued to believe in God.

The process of rejection was, of course, spurred by the child abuse scandals in the 1990s which were understood as a nihilistic attack on society’s future that no coherent society could accept. Significantly, in the 1940s ‘incoherent’ Ireland turned away when evidence of such barbarism was raised in the Dáil.

There were two further experiences which can be read as contributing to the church’s precipitous decline. The first was the second Vatican council, 1962-1965, which introduced profound changes very much at odds with the institutionally oriented Irish Catholicism of the post- famine era. John Charles McQuaid, who registered the danger, was essentially whistling past the graveyard when he claimed on his return from Rome that nothing had changed. A lot had changed, including a radical turning towards community-based religious expression, which was very much not the Catholic Irish way. From the laity’s perspective, a major change to the apparently timeless forms of Irish Catholicism must have subliminally suggested that, despite what had seemed to be the case, nothing was actually carved in stone.

Another precursor of decline came in the 1980s with the Catholic crusade against individual personal freedoms. This had the effect of establishing a major breach between the laity and the church, during which the church dogmatically demanded obedience and became overtly involved in politics. The church effectively told the laity that the essence of the Catholic religion was the denial of individual freedoms. Anti-liberal rhetoric from the pulpit became the most striking part of the mass.

As myself and some of my old UCD pals went door to door campaigning against the constitutional prohibition on abortion, one of our group told us of an aunt – a returned missionary nun – who had said to him that there was more than one opinion on abortion in the church. This was a view that was heard more than once at the time.

In its simplistic dogmatism the church, influenced it seems by conservative Americans, fatally turned away from society and the possibility of renewal. It was a major miscalculation.

Already contraception, which the church continued to denounce, was widely available and used. Even in the early 1970s my female friends in Belfield who were in relationships had no difficulty acquiring contraception. They all knew which doctors would prescribe the pill. Within a relatively short time divorce, abortion and gay rights were approved by birth Catholics. The church was thus rejected as the repository of community values and the stage was set for the decline which did indeed occur. The institution’s rupture with society was painfully confirmed with the dramatic collapse of vocations. Society was no longer willing to provide it with personnel which, of course, rendered it difficult to find sufficient priests to celebrate mass on Sundays
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Through ritual elaboration the Catholic mass expresses the central Christian message of death, sacrifice, renewal and the continuation of life. It is the Christian response to a core human experience, that of the tension between the twin realities of death and renewal. This sometimes troubling tension pervades the human experience of existence within passing time, an experience which manifests in myriad ways across everyday life. Throughout the human past people have responded with religious ritual deliberately fashioned to exist apart from the everyday. Historically, such rituals offered a transcendent reconciliation of the conflict between growth and decline, life and death. The fundamental energies of life, it seems, consistently fire the desire for such resolution. The spiritual experience that came with ritual yielded hope and purpose to people, enabling them to commit to the present, the business of living, and in due course, the arrival of death.

There is a fundamental human need involved which was hardly going to disappear with the arrival of television and was certainly not going to be met by handing out pictures of foetuses.

The scholar and former nun Karen Armstrong has written lucidly on the subject of myth. She argues that before the Enlightenment everyone understood that Christian mythology was not to be taken literally. The Enlightenment dynamic, which rejected anything not supported by material evidence, had, she says, the effect of making the counter-reformation church insist on the literal truth of its mythology.

Armstrong, who after leaving the convent described herself as ‘a freelance monotheist’ talks of more remote periods of history when there was no division between logos (science) and mythos. Newgrange, it seems to me, offers a good example of this. Clearly there was a union and symbiosis between science and mythology in the successful undertaking to dramatically reveal the prevailing truth of renewal by ensuring a beam of light would enter the inner chamber of the tomb at sunrise during the winter solstice.

Armstrong does not appear to believe such harmony between logos and mythos is possible in the post-Enlightenment world. I am not so sure. The romantic movement was a massive qualification (not rejection) of the Enlightenment. It was a qualification that enabled secularists to find truth in art and literature. In my case it was the qualification which once allowed myself and my college friends to devote ourselves to the twin deities of art and reason. Finding metaphoric truth in myth hardly seems an impossible step.

Following Catholic institutional decline and the emergence of what might be termed narrow liberalism in Ireland, there is evidence that a religious and spiritual emptiness was felt, that the basic human need persisted. In the 1970s there was the hugely popular, if somewhat inchoate, charismatic movement. This no doubt alarmed the hierarchy. It was all emotion, noise and individualism without the deep satisfaction and peace possible with ritual. Unsurprisingly, it faded out in the 1980s. Books on spirituality began to be published and found a market in Ireland. Some were substantial but many, especially those hailing from the US, were risible. Interest in such literature has continued but has become more discriminating.

The new wave of Irish literary writing also engages with the meaning vacuum in post-Catholic Ireland and suggests the church might just have a role to play in addressing people’s spiritual needs. Indeed, the number of young people attending mass has increased. Contemporary writing is no longer greatly concerned with the unpleasant bullying church of the past. The emotional intensity of John Mc Gahern’s landmark novel The Dark no longer offers trauma release to its readers. The novel, which once spoke to readers in a visceral way, is now being read by people with no memory of clerical swaggering.

With individual social freedoms achieved and Catholic notions of authority discredited, new writing often seems sympathetic to religious ritual and beliefs. (Emily Pine is one of a number of academics who has written on the spiritual dimension to the post-secular sensibility in contemporary writing.) In Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World Where are You, Eileen is a character trapped in the moral barrenness of Irish neo-liberalism, surviving as a low-paid literary worker. She is not a believer and yet not fully an unbeliever. She is in a desperate emotional, material, spiritual and intellectual position. She is open to possibilities. While she does not believe, she is moved by the life of Jesus. Alice, the novelist character, is moving hesitantly in the same direction. Both are appalled by the empty culture of market values that surrounds them. The successful Alice’s money is no protection. Both Eileen and Alice find Catholic rituals aesthetically and spiritually pleasing and also perhaps capable of giving to life a wider meaning – not that they can believe or anything like that.

Ironically, what is clear is that in secular Ireland the appetite for spiritual meaning – suspended throughout post-famine ‘Catholic’ Ireland- has reemerged. This appetite, it seems, is substantial. A veneer of meaning is no longer acceptable. (Mind you, if the church hopes to make progress with figures such as Eileen and Alice, it would be advised to address the gender apartheid that mars the institution and undermines its credibility.)

There are many individuals within the church who see the problem – certainly many more than I am aware of. One of the most interesting is the poet and Salesian priest Hugh O’Donnell, who published his views in Eucharist and the Living Earth. He wrote: ‘The Eucharist has become detached from creation and so appears a threadbare ritual with diminishing relevance.’ For O’Donnell, who is horrified by existential threats to the natural world at the hands of the amoral rich, the matrix of the Eucharist is the natural world, along with its numerous creatures and diversity. This clearly echoes age-old human contemplation of seasonal changes and the timeless truths they enfold. For O’Donnell, the natural world in peril is at the heart of the eucharist and ‘[t]he story of the universe needs to become our sacred story not just at an intellectual level but in the way we worship’. His book was published around a decade before Pope Francis’s encyclical Laudato si in which an ecological conversion is called for.

I suspect that for some, perhaps many, O’Donnell’s approach would be found attractive, combining, as it does, the sacred and the reasonable.

Its attraction is perhaps all the greater when it is compared to the vision of social control and dominance, currently promoted by an assortment of public square barkers decked out in the douche-bro glad rags of a debased Christianity, behind which looms the wasteland politics of baronial freedoms for private capital and, of course, the attendant radical social inequality.

Looking in from the outside, as a small A atheist with (as I like to believe) an open mind, it seems to me there are two roads Irish Catholicism can now take. One is the spiritually substantial and socially attractive one indicated in O’Donnell’s writing. The other is sticking with the three-wheeled wagon of social conservativism. This latter is the road I would associate with the Iona institute and its articulate champions. In my view, there is little or nothing in Irish culture and history which suggests that Irish advocates of social restriction have a chance of organically realising their absolutist vision. Could it be the Iona intellectuals, consciously or otherwise, are holding out for a collapse of the long-established traditions of liberalism and democracy in Ireland, perhaps as the result of outside political interference?  Well, we have been there before!

Certainly, Irish social conservatives have been buoyed by MAGA, in so far as it has brought the ideal of conservative social engineering to centre stage. The vice-president of the United States is a social conservative and has issued a conversion statement. He is now a Catholic. He is also a political radical and wishes to see a post-Enlightenment, post-democratic, post-liberal reordering of American society and Europe.

Vance, in his Hillbilly Elegy, effectively came to see Protestantism as incapable of providing the social cohesion he politically desires. Indeed, as an anti-Enlightenment voice he would see the mainstream Protestant tradition as a vector of liberalism and societal disorder. His conversion statement echoes the vanished world of American Irish Catholicism. He values orthodoxy and authority over pluralism, formation over choice and religious form over the individual publicly expressing faith. Old fashioned authority-based institutional Catholicism is what attracts him and there can be little doubt that this has more to do with politics than genuine religious engagement. The prize is America’s fifty-three million Catholics, who could in theory form a determining bloc within the American electoral system.

Vance, however, has missed one important fact. American Catholicism has moved on since the heyday of the institutional monolith. American Catholicism is now Vatican II Catholicism. Catholics, very much including those of Irish ancestry, are not attracted by Vance’s vision especially his concentric circles of love as an instrument of hatred. The US pope Leo has criticised the administration’s ‘exclusionary mindset’ and he is not alone. The latest American Catholic bishop to criticise the current administration for practices which violate the Christian (and it might be added the Enlightenment) principle of human equality is named Coakley who, as the name suggests, is ancestrally one of our own.
 
 
 
Note: This essay does not pretend to offer a comprehensive picture of post-famine Ireland or indeed of religion in post-famine Ireland. It attempts a short historically inflected account of the working out in people’s lives, culture and religion of certain economic structures adopted after the famine. It has not been possible, on this occasion, to look at the urban experience, the North, gender and those fascinating and wonderful areas of society which avoided the conformity juggernaut.