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improve land holdings gave rise to important demographic and cultural changes: restricted opportunities for marriage and changes in inheritance patterns were underpinned by a new puritanism in matters of sexual morality. Native Irish-speakers had either perished or left the country and Irish Catholicism lost the remnants of an easy-going Gaelicism which had not attempted to regulate
-enlarged residential districts had important implications for the creation of separate associational cultures. This was particularly the case for the numerically much weaker Catholic population. By the third quarter of the nineteenth century Irish Catholicism was undergoing what has been described as a ‘devotional revolution’, characterised by the introduction of a whole range of new ceremonial practices. In most parts of Belfast, however, any public display of Catholic ritual or religious imagery remained out of the question. Even in the absence of provocation, Catholic churches
a minority of Catholic congregations had any direct involvement in them. Rather, a very small number of congregations, primarily native Irish congregations – particularly the Sisters of Mercy and the Christian Brothers – aided by imported French congregations based on the mission of their founding members, operated these schools. In terms of hierarchy within Irish Catholicism, these congregations did not have a high status in comparison with for example, the Jesuit Fathers or the Loreto Nuns. In addition to the role of the state and the Catholic Church
centuries-old colonial tropes of the ‘simple’ Irish peasant and the ‘complex’ British landowner continue to permeate such perceptions, it cannot be denied that cultural stereotypes of Ireland and Irishness have always included variations on drunken stupidity, mystical spirituality and fervent Catholicism. However, when the global gaze fixed on Ireland in 2015 as it became the first country in the world to legalise same-sex marriage by popular vote, and again in 2018 with the removal of the country's long-held constitutional ban on abortion, the persistent image of Ireland
Europe. It provided a meta-narrative through which they interpreted their own exile and the persecution of their Ireland-based peers. Surviving historical and literary relics provide a fascinating insight into the complex, interconnected struggles between Irish Catholicism and Protestantism, Hanoverian and Stuart royalism, and Franco-British imperialism. The activities of these Irish Jacobite exiles in the realms of diplomacy, espionage, politics and especially warfare provide a fitting testimony to their cultural fluidity, mobility and vulnerability. Their often
with Mgr. Worlock and was eventually sent to the ICMC, the work unfinished, to be locked in its safe in Geneva and “never to be published or publicised” ’.34 While Spencer wrote to Fr. Conor Ward in the wake of the London meeting that ‘I do not envy you the task of prosecuting any sociological work in Ireland’,35 Irish Catholicism arguably turned out to provide a more congenial environment for such work than its English counterpart in the 1960s. While the tendency of Irish Church leaders to believe that ‘any comments about the inadequacy of religious preparation were
the de Valera government, the time for waiting for change had passed, and more immediate action was required. To complicate this picture, the Roman Catholic hierarchy had united with the forces of large cattle ranchers and industrialists to keep the truly democratic voice of Irish Catholicism suppressed. These combined forces, he argued in The Bothy Fire, had blocked the potential for change in the de Valera administration and rendered impotent the working poor, on whose support de Valera was elected: ‘The Catholic Fascism of Cardinal McRory [sic] is the deadly
Irishness, Catholicism, and anti-Britishness. Sectarian attacks on war memorials were said to constitute a clear case of how the memory of fallen soldiers – as with the memory of martyred Covenanters – was under attack in Scotland. For example, in 2016 the cenotaph in Coatbridge (commemorating those killed during the First World War) was scrawled with pro-IRA graffiti, with phrases including IRA, PIRA (Provisional IRA), Provos, and 1916 – a reference to the Easter Rising, the hundredth anniversary of which was being widely commemorated in Ireland and elsewhere at the time
and http:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=pvhYqeGp_Do. 2 Ibid. 3 See Radio Times, 3 March 1966, 43; ‘Tom Lehrer’, Radio Times, 7 April 1966, 43. 4 M. Muggeridge, ‘The English Cardinal’, Radio Times, 14 April 1966, 53. 5 M. Kenny, Goodbye to Catholic Ireland (Rev. ed., Dublin: New Island, 2000); L. Fuller, Irish Catholicism Since 1950: The Undoing of a Culture (London: Gill and Macmillan, 2004); K. Kehoe, Creating a Scottish Church: Catholicism, Gender and Ethnicity in Nineteenth-Century Scotland (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009). 6 J. C
2 Sinéad O’Connor: the story of a voice 50 Five Irish Women Sinéad O’Connor is surely Ireland’s best-known woman artist. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, her startling appearance and the extraordinary vocal performances on her first two albums brought her huge fame as an international rock star. From the beginning, she combined an ambiguous sexual appeal, a distinctive clarity of voice and an aura of intense personal anguish. Although she became an early icon of the Celtic Tiger era, her attitudes towards Ireland, Catholicism and the music business were at