The Ireland I grew up in was steeped in Catholicism. Time and space were patterned by religious rituals, architecture, artefacts, events. Church steeples punctured skylines symbolising the highest societal value and pinpointing the geographical locus of the community. It was normal to happen upon grottos of the Virgin Mary around street corners or on obscure country roads, huge crosses were visible on hillsides or rocky outcrops that dotted Ireland’s rural landscape[1] and most homes had a glowing red candle under an image of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. As a curious child, I was fascinated by it all and was always asking questions about religion.
The Catholic churches of my childhood were bustling centres of ritual and community with lots of priests and large congregations. In my own small hometown there were two Catholic churches, an active monastic order of Carmellite nuns and a Mercy convent of nuns - all on one side of the river. There was a selection of well-attended daily morning masses and for Sunday masses and religious festivals there were overflowing pews, a shortage of car-parking spaces, and a stream of well-dressed people dropping coins into baskets for church-gate collections for various charity causes. On Sunday mornings we dressed in our ‘Sunday best’ with freshly polished shoes, and fasted until after mass as there was a rule to have had nothing eaten for at least one hour before taking holy communion. In the 1970s, the priest still placed the communion wafer on our tongues. After mass, people stopped off at the local newsagent to pick up the Sunday newspaper and perhaps buy treats of sweets or chocolate. All other shops were closed. Unlike today, there were no cafés, cinemas or theatres open.
Nuns and Christian Brothers taught in most primary and secondary schools and the schools were often located within walking distance of the local church. We regularly traipsed to the nearby church for religious celebrations and rehearsals, and our classes often sang hymns from the altar or organ gallery. Both my primary and secondary school principals and many of my teachers were nuns. Over 99% of pupils in my school were Catholic. There were just two girls from Protestant families in my class in primary school and even this level of a mix was rare. These girls were allowed to opt out of religious education, so they busied themselves at the back of the class drawing, reading or writing whilst the rest of us learned Catholic teachings. Those girls seemed so interesting, cultured, and exotic to me. It was in their houses that I came across rice, kidney beans and BBC Radio 4 for the first time. Perhaps because Catholicism was so much a part of our lives, I was intrigued by what lay beyond the Catholic world view. We didn’t learn about any other religions in school.
As well as school breaks for Christmas and Easter there were saints’ days and ‘holy days of obligation’ when Catholics were expected to attend mass. One particularly memorable optional ritual was the blessing of the throats on Saint Blaise’s day on the 3rd February when the priest held two long cool wax candles crossed against the neck as a preventative against sore throats. Another day’s name I remember was Saint Swithin’s Day which was on July 15th. It was said (but not necessarily believed) that the weather on Saint Swithin’s Day would predict the likely outcome for the following forty days. The most important saint’s day in Ireland was Saint Patrick’s Day on March 17th. It was usually cold and often rained and a mostly miserable affair involving parades filled with tractors, lorries, Irish dancers, packs of local scouts, girl guides, swimming clubs and the local brass band. There was great excitement that evening when a short clip from our hometown parade was shown on the 6 o’clock news.
Our entire lifelines were studded with religious rituals. Baptism at birth, first confession around the age of six followed a few weeks later with first holy communion when girls wore pretty, white dresses with veils, and boys dressed in freshly creased suits. The sacrament of confirmation marked entry into adolescence around the time of puberty. These events were major milestones. The custom was for family, friends and relatives to give money for communion and confirmation so there was often large amounts of handy cash for the taking.
When Pope John Paul II came to Ireland in 1979, an estimated 2.7 million people went to see him.[2] Towns and villages emptied of people who travelled to witness his appearance. His visit was seen by many as the high point of Irish Catholicism. Although my family didn’t make what would have been an arduous trek to see the Pope, it was one of the highlights of my childhood to be one of two girls chosen from my class to hold the Papal flag in a special mass in the local parish church. Numerous baby boys born that year were called John Paul.
The 1980s saw a change in Ireland. The decade was filled with scandals as society ruptured and cracks started appearing in the Catholic edifice. In 1982 a school teacher, Eileen Flynn, was sacked from her position in a convent secondary school after having a child with a married man. Although she brought a court case against the decision, she eventually lost the case three years later. In January 1984, Ann Lovett, a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl, died whilst giving birth alone at a grotto dedicated to the Virgin Mary in Granard, County Longford. Ann’s baby also died. The story made mainstream news and signalled a deepening divide between a conservative Catholic past and a burgeoning liberal future. Just months later, in April 1984, the remains of a baby boy who had been stabbed 28 times washed up on White Strand Beach in County Kerry. The Gardaí (police) took a young unmarried woman named Joanne Hayes in for questioning as she had been admitted to hospital on the night the body was discovered complaining of severe bleeding and a scan showed she had recently given birth.[3] Within hours both she and her family had signed statements admitting their involvement in the death of the child. The body of Joanne’s own baby was later found on the family farm and forensic evidence showed that Joanne could not have been the mother of the baby found on the beach. The father of Joanne’s baby was a local married man. Joanne, in her 1985 memoir, My Story, portrayed herself and her family as very religious, kneeling to say the Rosary each evening and never missing mass on Sundays or holy days, and this, it has been suggested, was a way of garnering sympathy from readers.[4] Both the Ann Lovett and the Kerry Babies case were defining moments in an Ireland that was breaking away from the stranglehold of the Catholic church.
As the split with a past entrenched in Catholicism increased in intensity, in 1985, we had the moving statues of the Virgin Mary. The place that became most associated with the stories was Ballinspittle in County Cork but moving statues were reported all over Ireland. Tens of thousands of people visited grottos with frenzied rumours of apparitions and visitations. The popular story at the time was that the Blessed Virgin Mary was trying to call the Irish people back to God, that the Irish were on the cusp of losing faith, that the Virgin Mary wanted the Irish people to pray so that they would be saved. Many schoolgirls in my own class visited local grottos and whether she moved or not was a great matter of debate.
Meanwhile, American influence was having more of an impact. Just two years after the Ann Lovett and Kerry Babies cases, Madonna released her single Papa Don’t Preach about a teenage pregnancy. The song stayed at number one in the Irish music charts for ten weeks and further challenged social norms prevalent in Ireland of that time. That same year, despite the growing secularisation of Irish society, Ireland rejected 63 to 37 percent a proposal to permit divorce.[5] It was like a battle between two diverging factions in Irish society. Catholicism, conservatism, and tradition on one side, and secularisation, liberalism and change on the other.
Ireland’s national census of 2022 showed Catholicism in decline. There is now just one operational church in my home town, and numbers attending mass have dramatically declined. In almost all towns in Ireland there are now Catholics, Protestants, African Pentecostals, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Pagans, atheists and more. The highest point in the urban and rural skyline today is the satellite dish rather than the church steeple. The unifying belief system of today is centred around concepts of equality, diversity and inclusion with a dash of intersectionality thrown in for good measure whereby people are understood to be either privileged or oppressed based primarily on the identity strands of race, gender, and sexuality.
Just 69% of Irish people in the 2022 national census identified themselves as Roman Catholics.[6] This was the lowest percentage on record. Catholic churches are closing, the number of priests and nuns is in decline and, although most schools in Ireland are still linked to Catholic religious orders, Christian brothers and nuns are almost gone entirely from schools. By 2008 there were only ten Christian Brothers teaching in Irish schools compared to 1000s working in Irish schools in the mid-60s.[7] Churches and other religious buildings have fallen into disrepair. A religious vacuum has opened into which a new belief system centred around the concept of gender identity has slipped and it is this belief system that is on the ascendant.
Ireland, once one of the most Catholic of countries in Europe, has embraced gender identity theory with gusto. In 2015, the country became only the third European country after Malta and Denmark to allow people to legally change their gender without any medical or state intervention.[8] Since then, gender identity theory has been introduced across the entire arc of society and is promulgated at government level where politicians are nudged into actions by powerful non-governmental organisations keen to advance legislation that gives precedence to gender identity above biology. Many journalists and mainstream media outlets in Ireland have also embraced gender identity theory. Gender identity theory is filling the space vacated by Catholicism in Ireland. It’s a large space that’s being filled.
[1] Most of these grottoes and crosses had been built in 1954 which Pope Pius XII had designated a Marian Year.
[2] Ó Corráin, D. (2021) Why did Pope John Paul II visit Ireland? The 1979 papal visit in context. British Catholic History, 35(4), 462-485. doi:10.1017/bch.2021.19.
[3] Maguire, Moira J. (2001) “The Changing Face of Catholic Ireland: Conservatism and Liberalism in the Ann Lovett and Kerry Babies Scandals,” Feminist Studies 27 (2): 335. doi:10.2307/3178762.
[4] Molloy, Ciara and O’Donnell, Ian (2022) “The Kerry Babies, Criminology, and Reinhart Koselleck.” Criminology & Criminal Justice, Oct 3, doi:10.1177/17488958221126674.
[5] Coakley, John (1987) Moral consensus in a secularising society: The Irish divorce referendum of 1986, West European Politics, 10(2), 291-296, DOI: 10.1080/01402388708424632.
[6] Central Statistics Office (2023) ‘Census of Population 2022 – Summary Results’, Available: https://www.cso.ie/en/releasesandpublications/ep/p-cpsr/censusofpopulation2022-summaryresults/keyfindings/
[7] Walshe, John (2008) ‘End of era for Christian Brothers’, Irish Independent, 3 Sept, available: https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/end-of-era-for-christian-brothers/26456484.html [accessed 3 Sept 2023].
[8] McDonald, Henry, and agencies (2015) ‘Ireland passes law allowing trans people to choose their legal gender,’ The Guardian, 16 July, available: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jul/16/ireland-transgender-law-gender-recognition-bill-passed [accessed 3 Sept 2023].