Irelands Census 2011 and Catholicism - the demise of organized religion in Ireland

Read more: The Irish are fast losing their religion say experts

On Sunday, 10th April the people of Ireland will fill in their census forms under wildly different circumstances than when they last did so in 2006. But aside from the inevitable stark figures surrounding employment and the people who’ve had to leave the country to get it, there is another question that will also speak volumes: the question on religion.

Apart from the usual campaigns to get Jedi Knight or Pastafarianism officially on the books, or this year in particular augment the number of people who claim no religion, this year’s religion statistics will be a crucial chapter in an intriguing story.

In 1981, when priests were still more feared than the guards, the percentage of Roman Catholic people in Ireland was 93%. In 1991, a couple of years before my first communion, the figure was 91.6%. By 2002, around the time our school chaplain conducted our catechism-heavy Leaving Cert religion class, that was down to 88.4% and by 2006 it was down again to 86.8%. Now granted, the physical numbers of people self-identifying as Catholic has actually gone up along with the population, but that may be coming to an end.

First of all, in the same thirty year stretch that self-identifying Catholics went down by 6%, the amount of people claiming no religion quadrupled. Secondly, what the figures don’t account for is the amount of nominal Catholics, those who go to mass at Easter or Christmas and other such events but otherwise wouldn’t attend religiously. As it were. It’s those people that will likely signal a watershed moment in Irish life. For while the changes in Ireland’s economic structure have been noisy and tumultuous, a much more quiet social revolution has been building steam over the last few years, and it’ll come to a head soon.

Back in 2006, I wouldn’t have dreamt of putting down anything other than Roman Catholic on the census form. Now, there’s no way in Hades I’d tick that box. In 2006 I was happy to belong to the broad church, as it were, comfortable with the idea that mass was the way I demonstrated faith even if I personally disagreed with large swathes of Catholic doctrine, focusing more on the spirit rather than the letter of the law. Five years later, a combination of the deplorable revelations of the Murphy and Ryan reports and general exasperation at the Church’s increasingly insane intransigence eventually made me give up. I’m hardly the only one.

If as I suspect the number of people identifying as Catholics drops quite sharply in this census (or indeed the one after) that in itself will be significant, but more significant still will be the way that bears out in real life. A great many social events in Ireland still revolve around the Church, like baptisms, communions and confirmations. A lot of people who aren’t ardent mass-goers still attend these events, either through social convention, a residual sense of duty, keeping up appearances or just wanting a quiet life. More and more, they’re treated as pageants with an hour-long sit surrounded by stained glass attached anyway. Priests may disapprove of that, but so weak is their bargaining position nowadays, they can hardly turn down the business. But what happens when people eventually decide they won’t go through the pseudo-religious motions anymore, especially people of my generation who’ll likely be having the majority of their kids in the next decade or so? That answer to the question will depend on education.

The Church doesn’t just hold a lot of the cards in terms of social functions; it also controls the vast, vast majority of primary school administration. If you apply to be a teacher in a primary school a priest will be on the interviewing panel, and if you want to send your child to that school then communion and confirmation prep will form a large proportion of their second and sixth class, with a healthy dose of religion thrown in all the other years. If you’re not comfortable with that, your options aren’t exactly extensive.

In certain situations the Church seem willing to relinquish that control and if they do, like the census figures themselves, the attendance at religious rituals not really adhered to will slide gradually but noticeably, as indeed is proper. But if the Church doesn’t move quickly enough, or far enough, then a new generation of non-believers who have no allegiance to Catholicism, aren’t afraid to say as much and not inclined to pass it on will not be slow to question the absurdity of the status quo. The census on the 10th April is, in one form or another, likely to prompt a High Noon that’s been a long time coming. Thank God for that.

Read more: The Irish are fast losing their religion say experts

Ireland needs to grow up - Queen Elizabeth's visit to Ireland

At the risk of getting a pasting, here goes: I fully welcome the Queen’s visit to Ireland in May, or whenever it is she’s coming.

You’d think in an Ireland that has done a lot of growing up in years passed this would go without saying, and for the vast majority of people it probably won’t be an issue, but already I can hear the hysterical cavalry saddling up. Within days of the announcement, I began hearing all sorts of reasons why she shouldn’t come: the expense, the worry that her coming will cause trouble, or simply because she’s the Queen. None of these pass muster. 

First of all, why so hostile? When it boils down to it, the Queen is just another head of state, like Mary McAleese with a room full of jewels, visiting a neighbouring country, as heads of state are wont to do. And if the notion that the Queen is “just another head of state” horrifies you, why on earth would it? Even when the Anglo-Irish relationship was at its most fractious, the Queen’s role in the defining moments of The Troubles was negligible. It’s not as if she ordered the introduction of internment without trial, ordered people shot on Bloody Sunday or took a horrifyingly obstinate line against the hunger strikers personally. In that respect the Queen is a victim of her position: she can’t speak out against government policy no matter how much she might abhor it, as all hell would break loose otherwise. If you have a gripe with, as Gerry Adams referred to them as, “legacy issues”, then blame Margaret Thatcher, or Jim Callaghan, or Harold Wilson, or Ted Heath. Not the woman who spends her days visiting factories and youth centres and Commonwealth countries. 

Let’s consider that phrase Gerry Adams used in reference to the visit, actually. “Legacy issues”. I mean, where do you start with that one? Throughout the general election campaign I was critical of the way Micheal Martin insinuated Sinn Féin still had a whiff of dodginess about them, and how it was wholly disingenuous of him to encourage Sinn Féin into power-sharing and talking about a new future in the North while simultaneously intimating they weren’t fit for office and their old past in the South.  Now sadly it seems Gerry has used that same act on the Queen. Given the fact power-sharing was delayed in the North for so long by the likes of the Democratic Unionist Party because of the legacy issues they had with Sinn Féin, it was a bizarre choice of words. Nearly two years ago to the day Martin McGuinness called the dissidents who killed the soldiers at Massarene Barracks “traitors”. That was a huge leap from the dark days of “These shootings are inevitable given the actions of the British Government”, or words to that effect. Why a woman in her eighties still bothers them so much is beyond me. 

And then there’s the money issue. We can’t afford visits like this, apparently. An economic situation like ours will inevitably account for an increase in utilitarian deficit hawks, but the cost of such a trip would be miniscule compared to, say, the cost of buying and then storing voting machines. Then of course, the old Wilde maxim about the difference between price and value comes into play. Within the space of twelve months, we’ll have had the first British monarch to visit the Republic of Ireland, and an unvarnished mea culpa from the British Government on Bloody Sunday. The Saville Report, incidentally, cost £200 million, a figure scorned by those on the troglodyte wing of the DUP. You can’t put a price on banishing old ghosts. 

That the Queen coming would stir emotions is unsurprising, but it certainly isn’t logical. It is however a chance to show that Ireland doesn’t have to feel like a victim for the whole of its existence, that it can look at its past with acceptance and its future with hope, and that it can look its neighbour and former foe in the eye as equals. And even if the silent majority of Irish people don’t, as Ward Bond put it in The Quiet Man, “cheer like Protestants” during her visit, polite indifference would do much the same job. And if the loud minority could keep it down, the kind of people who shout “800 years ya c**t!” at an (Irish) DJ friend of mine with an English accent while he’s working, or who talk about the occupied six counties despite having never been further north than Athlone, that would be even better.

Election after maths - a default victory for Fine Gael's Enda Kenny?

In and around the 2007 mark, some of the higher lights of my existence were regular discussions I’d have with a friend of mine called Estella. Punctuated only by the occasional intake of tea and or scones in our favourite Galway haunt, we’d talk about all sorts of things but invariably, at some point or other, the conversation would swing to our mutual and often acidic dislike of Fianna Fáil. Neither of us could abide the fecklessness, the smugness, the successive waste of opportunity and money, and we were similarly astonished how they seemed to consistently get away with it all.

Estella is at Exeter University now, and in her absence I tried to keep her updated on the seismic events of Election Day we couldn’t have imagined years ago. It’s just a shame she, like a lot of my friends who’ve had to leave Ireland for one reason or another, wasn’t able to vote on this one. It certainly wasn’t for lack of interest.

But if voting was out of the question, revelling in the cataclysmic embarrassment of Minister after Minister would have to do for Estella and everyone else. Mary Coughlan’s vote more than halved  in Donegal South West and was eliminated on the fourth count. Mary Hanafin and Barry Andrews barely scraped 15% between them in Dun Laoghaire while serial poll-topper Willie O’Dea’s vote share dropped by nearly two thirds, an occurrence more embarrassing than having his insane eyebrows shaved off.

The real 'piece de resistance' of this election, the political nerd’s answer to the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, was the downfall of Dick Roche and John O’Donoghue. While they’d have been turfed out on their asses decades ago in most other countries, The Bull and The Roche hung on until last weekend, when their gout-ridden fingers finally gave up the ghost. Dick Roche, who became a terrifyingly present fixture on British TV during the darker moments of the IMF intervention, could only drum up 5%, while O’Donoghue’s vote collapsing by 10% provided him with the opportunity to make a statement that would make even the most sure-stomached among us vomit in outrage: “I hope that the irony will not be lost upon you, that I stand here on my evening of defeat, in a hall, this magnificent sports complex, which I helped to build”. May his kind never be elected again.

Specific cases aside, the big picture of this election is startling. Fianna Fáil have gone from never not having a TD in every constituency to having no party representation in 25 of the 43 constitutuencies.

In Dublin, they have 1 TD out of 47. It’s unbelievable to the point of anomaly. As such if Fianna Fáil’s performance was borne out of mistake after mistake, Fine Gael’s rise to 76 seats was borne out of avoiding too many of them. Enda Kenny didn’t so much win this election as defeat the others on away goals, and at some invisible point during the campaign people decided that a Fine Gael – dominated government was what they wanted and they’d tolerate Kenny to have it.

That sense of default victory combined with the constrictive state of the public purse means that in this, the most transformative election in living memory, the public mood has stayed basically the same. It’s unlikely Enda Kenny can summon us out of our torpor. And with Labour looking all but certain to become junior partners in government, that would leave Fianna Fáil, battered and bewildered though they are, as the single biggest party in opposition. The numbers may be skewed dramatically, but the reality is political reality is the same as it ever was, and from that position Fianna Fáil can rebuild just in time for the centenary of the Easter Rising. After the 2007 election, Estella and I would regularly ask each other “How did Fianna Fáil stay in?” The chances of us in 2017 asking each other “How did Fianna Fáil get back in?” look all too likely

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