J. Anthony Gaughan
These essays discuss how Irish people identified themselves throughout the vicissitudes of their history. It is no surprise that religion is an ever recurring theme in that regard.
Even before the time of St Patrick, Christianity was a factor in their self-consciousness. This was particularly the case in the middle ages. Social life centred around monasteries. These were associated with venerated founders, they provided religious services and were extensive urban centres.
Donnchadh Ó Corráin has little difficulty in illustrating that the Irish then were as subject to the human condition as those of any other age but he does acknowledge that, while the Ireland of that time was not an ‘Island of Saints’, it could be described as an ‘Island of Scholars’.
The Reformation and Counter Reformation had a profound influence on Irish identity. More than two and half centuries of battling English hegemony and religious persecution left Irish Catholics with a deepened commitment to their faith.
Then Daniel O’Connell’s harnessing the Catholic Church in the struggle for Catholic Emancipation and to his subsequent movement to Repeal the Union with Britain conjoined Catholicism and Nationalism. This was a heady mix which lasted for some 150 years.
A substantial minority of Irish people professed the faith of the Reformers and remained committed to the Union and staunchly loyal to the British Crown. Such loyalty was not limited to Protestants.
Ciaran O’Neill highlights the Esmonde family of County Wexford as an example of Catholic Unionism in the South of Ireland. Eamon Phoenix profiles Sir Denis Stanislaus Henry (1864-1925). A Catholic from Draperstown, County Derry, he served as an Ulster Unionist MP and later as Lord Chief Justice of Northern Ireland.
A number of factors combined to reduce the link between Catholicism and the identity of the Irish people from the 1970s onwards.
According to Prof. Tom Bartlett: “By 2010 Irish distinctiveness had apparently vanished and so too had Irish exceptionalism. Where once just about everything on this island was unfathomable, mysterious or exotic to the outsider, by 2010 all that remained to puzzle the traveller was the undimmed urge of the Irish to attend the funerals of distant acquaintances, the undiminished support for the field sports organised by the GAA, the unquenchable determination to drink to excess, and the near total refusal to speak Irish. To these we might add, perhaps that the Irish still retained a way with words and music and dance.”
Yet in the National Census of 2011 more than 84% of Irish people declared they were Catholics.
In the light of the high intake of non-nationals of varied faiths in recent years and the almost palpable hostility of sections of the Irish media to Catholicism this was a remarkable result.
Those campaigning for a secularist rather than a pluralist Irish State and not a few revisionist historians received the result with disbelief! It clearly meant that most Irish people continue to espouse Catholicism as a major part of their identity.
That is a faith lived in the context of unprecedented and bewildering change, and a moral judgement on its complexity and quality is best left to theologians.
