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earliest 77 Roddy_Population_Printer.indd 77 15/09/2014 11:47 Population, providence and empire stages.113 However, Cullen’s opposite number in Paris, Dr John Miley, publicly rejected Maher’s idea at a meeting on Famine relief in Dublin, pointing to the ‘blessed soil’ awaiting regeneration in Ireland.114 He furthermore privately expressed his fears that Maher would influence to leave many of the very class – better-off farmers – that represented the ‘mainstay’ of Irish Catholicism.115 Fr Thomas Cullen expressed a parallel fear that the land of those who left might be
unique to Irish Catholicism since they are each part of the modern ‘power-knowledge’ nexus, as Michel Foucault has termed it.23 The various existing accounts of the Irish postindependence era emphasise that the moral values being incorporated into public policy represented a ‘traditional’ or ‘pre-modern’ formation and were being mobilised to generate a protective shield against the forces of modernisation. However, a distinguishing feature of these sexual discourses being mobilised in 1920s Ireland is their engagement with a key political problem of modernity. That is
these issues in new ways. Arguably, the novels contributed to the broader cultural reconfiguration of sexuality and social change that was under way in Ireland. Even if Irish sexual values and behaviour did not undergo the kind of transformation that became known as the ‘sexual revolution’ elsewhere in the West, sexuality was nevertheless foregrounded in public discourse in that decade. The Vatican Council (1962–65) initiated significant changes in Irish Catholicism and created an expectation that the Church’s position on the use of artificial birth control within
there are two Irish Catholicisms emerging in the tolerant atmosphere of America: the medieval, Spanish and old-Ireland type in which the priests are all-powerful and the people are moral serfs; and a new Irish- American Catholicism which seeks to apply to the Church the militant spirit of the Irish revolutionists who believed in genuine self-determination’. While the Irish ambassador to the Holy See lent his support to US critics of Ottaviani, and Archbishop McQuaid referred to ‘the correction made by the Holy Father, after Cardinal Ottaviani had spoken’, adding
accompany their wives’, writes Taylor, ‘but it was almost always the woman who was represented as the instigator’.9 As Taylor suggests, Marian apparitions were essential to the creation of a modern feminised Irish Catholicism. Through Marianism, Irish women emerged as central actors in popular religion. By the mid-nineteenth century, a uniquely Irish devotion to the Virgin Mary was flourishing. Irish Catholics, for example, celebrated May as Mary’s month. Each May, ordinary Catholics decorated Marian shrines, and pilgrims to these shrines made their way through towns
in childbirth. And she too defied a patriarchal authority: in this case, the doctor. When faced with difficulties such as childbirth, Irish women blended Catholic practice into their vernacular customs, making Irish Catholicism more tangible and tactile in the process, and aligning it with much older systems of belief. gender and space 183 Throughout the nineteenth century and into the first decades of the twentieth century, popular views decreed that pregnancy and childbirth not only left women open to danger but also left their bodies polluted. New mothers
and views on the conflict in Northern Ireland which were sought by the Vatican.’ See D. O’Hagan, ‘Allies or antagonists? Irish Catholicism and Irish Republicanism during the 1980s’ (PhD dissertation, Queen’s University, Belfast, 1998). 46 The acceptance of the Northern Ireland state by the Catholic Church goes back to the 1920s, when Cardinal O’Donnell, Archbishop of Armagh, argued that Catholics must work for the general good of the community in that jurisdiction. See P. Donnelly, ‘Political identity in Northern Ireland: An issue for Catholic theology’, Studies
. 194; garvin, Republic, pp. 33, 152, 186, 194–6, 202–5, 210. 18 louise fuller, Irish Catholicism since 1950: the undoing of a culture (dublin: gill and macmillan, 2002), pp. 62, 136; garvin, Future, p. 150; garvin, Republic, pp. 194–6. 19 John Walsh, The politics of expansion: the transformation of educational policy in the Republic of Ireland, 1957–72 (manchester: manchester university press, 2009), pp. 78–79; Seán o’connor, A troubled sky: reflections on the Irish educational scene, 1957–1968 (dublin: St patrick’s college, 1986), pp. 23, 64, 100, 109. See also
than the memory of wounds (Milosz 1980: 20). Collective memories and interpretations of the past have been more important in recent history than the institutional arrangements themselves. Whereas Scotland was allowed to retain its own church, Irish Catholicism after the Reformation was seen as disloyal and even a threat to London. Land ownership became enmeshed in the troubled relations. The minority who identified with London did so on the basis of religion or rights granted by London rather than geography. In the twentieth century, however, a territorial dimension
on Irish morality generally, but particularly on sexual morality. Apart from his fictional writings, one of McGahern’s best attempts to capture the peculiarity of Irish society and the ways in which the repressive regime of Irish Catholicism colonised desire and the pleasure of sex, was in a series of draft paragraphs in Love of the World that were never included in any final text.11 He describes how love, but particularly sexual love, gives beauty and meaning to the arbitrariness of our lives within the universe: it ‘becomes the rich gift of the life and self