Young choir members pray during a Mass at Dublin's St. Mary's Pro Cathedral Nov. 14, 2025, marking the bicentenary of the church's dedication in 1825 and the feast of the city's patron, St. Laurence O'Toole. The same day Pope Leo XIV officially designated the pro-cathedral as the Dublin Archdiocese's cathedral, ending its 200-year status as a temporary (pro) church. Speaking at a book launch in Dublin in mid-February 2026, Bishop Niall Coll of Raphinoe said young Catholics born after 1995 want doctrinal clarity, not adaptability. (OSV News photo/courtesy Archdiocese of Dublin) Northern Ireland is, by a very long distance, the most religiously affiliating region of the United Kingdom, with just 24% with no religion, a newly released research report has stated.
The equivalent rate for the Republic is 32% identifying with no religion over the same period examined by the researchers, who add: “Meanwhile, a third each of Northern Irish adults identify as Catholic (34%) and Other Christian (35%), compared to the UK averages of 10% and 27%, respectively.” The report called ‘The Turning Tide?’ was released by the Irish Episcopal Conference on March 2.
Tackling the issue whether there is an “uptick” in numbers of people turning to the faith the report says the following: “At the big-picture population level, dividing up Irish (non)religious diversity into just four main categories, there are a number of clear stories.
“Most obvious, is the gradual decline of Catholic affiliation, and the gradual growth of people regarding themselves as having no religion, with the two trend lines more or less mirroring each other.
“Something very notable happens in the most recent (i.e., 2023/24) data: a 7 percentage point ‘swing’ to Catholic and away from no religion. Based on the ESS data alone, it is not clear what has caused this, or how lasting it might prove to be (note the brief uptick/downturn in the 2004/5 data, for example).
“We may also note the slow-but-steady increase of both the Other Christian (combining the ESS’s ‘Protestant’, ‘Eastern Orthodox’, and ‘Other Christian Denomination’ categories), growing from 5% to 9% over the whole period, and Non- Christian religion categories, growing from 0.4% to 4%.
Interestingly, this seeming surge is only apparent in the young-adult segment of the overall dataset: among all-age adults in general, there is only a slight increase in reported attendance (21% to 23%), and the overall Catholic rate remains unchanged (32%6).”
Asking the question if there is “a turning tide for generation secularisation in Ireland”, the report calls for more research, saying there might be something “afoot”, citing previous research from the Iona Institute.