Ireland and the loss of faith

Nov 27, 2022 by

By Francis Phillips, TCW:

, by Mary Kenny; Columba Books.

WHEN we consider the disappearance of shared values today in this country – and in the West generally – as well as the widespread collapse in belief and practice of the Christian faith, it is impossible to ignore Irish history of the last 100 years. For once-Catholic Ireland, a country where religious faith dominated the political, cultural and domestic landscape, has embraced modernity and distanced itself from its ancient religion with extraordinary rapidity.

Mary Kenny, a respected Irish writer and journalist for many decades, attempts here to provide her personal response to the question: How have we got to where we are today? She is not writing a sociological analysis or a scholarly history; more a lively personal account, where autobiography, wider reflections, reminiscences and brief biographies of Irish personalities jostle together to give readers some insight into this lovely, complex island. As someone who spent many childhood holidays in Cork and Kerry with Irish relatives, I share Kenny’s affection; also, her implicit regret at what today’s progressive Ireland has lost.

Her book is divided into two parts: ‘The Context of History’ and ‘Profiles from my Time’. The first part explains the civil war which led to the establishment of the Irish Free State in 1922 and what followed from this. The victors were the ‘pragmatists’, who accepted dominion status within the British Empire, against the ‘romantics’, those who dreamed of a republic. Although the new Irish Senate included both Catholics and Protestants, essentially Catholics were in power. Donal O’Sullivan, clerk of the Irish Senate, could write with confidence: ‘It is hardly too much to say that every Irish Catholic regards the subject of divorce as abhorrent.’

Fianna Fail, the Republican party led by Eamon De Valera, joined the democratic process in 1926 when De Valera realised ‘that the path to power was in parliament and Dail Eireann’. He won the general election of 1931; the Republic – Eire – was born. A devout Catholic among other devout Catholic parliamentarians, De Valera was determined to give Eire ‘a more decisively Catholic identity’. The Irish Constitution, written during this period, prohibited divorce, frowned on working mothers and gave the Church a ‘special position’. Its opening words began: ‘In the name of the Most Holy Trinity . . . we the people of Eire humbly acknowledge all our obligations to our Divine Lord, Jesus Christ.’ Eire was not a theocratic state. Nonetheless, it was a democracy dominated by religious belief and the Church.

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