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7 Roddy_Population_Printer.indd 7 15/09/2014 11:47 Introduction emigration for the increasingly fractious relationship between Protestant and Catholic in Ireland are likely to have promoted considerable comment. If historians of Irish emigration therefore have an incomplete understanding of the Irish churches’ engagement with the matter, what of religious historians’ grasp on migration? The most prolific and influential historian of nineteenth-century Irish Catholicism, Emmet Larkin, has recognised the significance of emigration to the church in two discrete
further self-congratulation. It was repeatedly asserted that Irish Catholics had proved themselves ‘inviolably attached’ to their religion, and capable of retaining their faith through centuries of challenges.17 Most recently, neither penal laws nor opportunistic proselytism had swayed anything more than a small minority away from Catholicism. As Cardinal Gibbons of Baltimore observed of the Irish, ‘no other people ever suffered for their Catholic faith as they’.18 This, many commentators felt, put Irish Catholicism on a higher plain. A Donnybrook priest told his
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
Tiger, true to Wilde’s definition of the cynic as ‘one who knows the price of everything, but the value of nothing’, Walsh says: ‘I’m not interested in what people think. I just do what I do and it’s very successful.’21 The Irish apocalypse and intimations of redemption In the premodern cosmology of traditional Irish Catholicism, the interior that matters is the interior of the soul. In modern Irish consumerism, it is the interior of the house. Walter Benjamin says, ‘The bourgeois interior is a dialectical image in which the reality of industrial capitalism is