A New Ireland

How Europe's Most Conservative Country Became Its Most Liberal

Niall O'Dowd

• Publisher: Skyhorse
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781510749306
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Conservatisme et libéralisme

It's not your father's Ireland. Not anymore.A story of modern revolution in Ireland told by the founder of IrishCentral, Irish America magazine, and the Irish Voice newspaper. In a May 2019 countrywide referendum, Ireland voted overwhelmingly to make abortion legal; three years earlier, it had done the same with same-sex marriage, becoming the only country in the world to pass such a law by universal suffrage. Pope Francis's visit to the country saw protests and a fraction of the emphatic welcome that Pope John Paul's had seen forty years earlier. There have been two female heads of state since 1990, the first two in Ireland's history. Prime Minister Leo Varadkar, an openly gay man of Indian heritage, declared that "a quiet revolution had taken place."It had. For nearly all of its modern history, Ireland was Europe's most conservative country. The Catholic Church was its most powerful institution and held power over all facets of Irish life.But as scandal eroded the Church's hold on Irish life, a new Ireland has flourished. War in the North has ended. EU membership and an influx of American multinational corporationshave helped Ireland weather economic depression and transform into Europe's headquarters for Apple, Facebook, and Google.With help from prominent Irish and Irish American voices like historian and bestselling author Tim Pat Coogan and the New York Times 's Maureen Dowd, A New Ireland tells the story of a modern revolution against all odds.

SECTION TWO

CHAPTER 15

Come Walk among Us, Patrick

“I arise today with a mighty strength.”

St. Patrick’s Breastplate poem

Shortly after escaping slavery in Ireland, where he had been brought as a captive at age sixteen, St. Patrick describes in his “Confessions” how an unearthly vision came to him.

There, in a vision of the night, I saw a man whose name was Victoricus coming as if from Ireland with innumerable letters, and he gave me one of them, and I read the beginning of the letter: “The Voice of the Irish”; and as I was reading the beginning of the letter I seemed at that moment to hear the voice of those who were beside the forst of Focult . . . and they were crying as if with one voice: “We beg you, holy youth, that you shall come and shall walk again among us.” And I was stung intensely in my heart so that I could read no more, and thus I awoke . . .⁶⁴

He was deeply reluctant to return to where he had been a captive after being snatched from his Welsh home by Irish pirates and sold to a farmer in Northern Ireland whom he worked for as a slave for six years.

Still doubting the vision, Patrick says he was visited again the following night. “And another night—God knows . . . most words which I heard I could not understand, except at the end of the speech it was represented thus: ‘He who gave his life for you, he it is who speaks within you.’ And thus I awoke, joyful.”⁶⁵

Armed with those visions, Patrick, likely in his midtwenties and despite the harsh objections of his family—we know his father was Calpurnius, a tax collector in Roman Britain—began studying for the priesthood in order to return to the country where he had been held in bondage.

Ireland had been inhabited since the Stone Age about 6,000 BC, and what “religion existed was a form of sun worship.” Newgrange in County Meath, with its famous sun chamber is the greatest example.

About 600 BC came the arrival of the Celts. They spoke a separate language related to the Irish language of today. They were a warlike race, aided by superior weapons, and were greatly feared as a fighting force. They sacked Rome in 390 BC. The Greeks painted them as chariot soldiers and were afraid of their size and ferocity.

The Celts themselves created separate kingdoms in Ireland and often fought. Among the most famous warrior was High King Niall of the Nine Hostages, that number of hostages dictating how many fiefdoms he reigned over.

A team of geneticists at Trinity College Dublin led by Professor Dan Bradley discovered that as many as three million people worldwide may be descendants of the Irish warlord, who was the Irish “High King” at Tara, the ancient center of Ireland from AD 379 to AD 405. He and Alexander the Great are widely considered two of the most fecund men who ever lived.

Professor Bradley stated, “In many countries, powerful men historically have more children, and it’s not that hard to believe that it happened in Ireland, too. We estimate there are maybe two to three million descendants in the modern age, [of Niall of the Nine Hostages] with a concentration in Ireland, obviously.”⁶⁶

The Celts had a vibrant culture. Poets and harpers and other musicians attended the king’s court. Hostages, whose lives had been handed over as pledges of fealty by lesser kings, often provided amusement at banquets. Brehon laws ruled, covering every aspect of life and adjudicated by judges known as Brehons.

This was the Ireland that Patrick entered in AD 432 on his proselytizing mission. Up until Patrick’s time, nothing was written other than in ogham, a “cumbersome system of representing letters by short lines.”

According to the late Cardinal Tómas Ó Fiaich (pronounced “O Fee”), a leading early Christian historian, St. Patrick was the author of the first known documents to be written in Ireland. Ó Fiaich describes Patrick’s Latin (remember, he was a Roman Britain) as “rugged and abrupt,” but its impact was incredible.

As Ó Fiaich notes, Patrick’s writings provide us with our only contemporary narrative of the conversion of Ireland to Christianity. There is dispute over how many converts there were to Christianity already in Ireland. Palladius, an emissary from Rome, had been in Ireland before Patrick and baptized significant numbers.

Patrick did not openly fight the pagan beliefs he encountered, rather he co-opted them, and major pagan festivals became Christian Holy Days, too. He baptized thousands, ordained clerics everywhere, and swept through the land like a veritable hurricane.

He knew the pagan Druids feared him. It is recorded that they even aimed a curse and prophecy at him:

Across the sea will come . . .

crazed in the head,

his cloak with hole for the head,

his stick bent in the head.

He will chant impieties

from a table in front of his house;

all his people will answer:

“so be it, so be it.”⁶⁷

He befriended many in the wealthy class, and many of the women followed him to become nuns and brides of Christ.

He writes:

. . . There was a blessed Irish woman of noble birth, a most beautiful adult whom I baptised. She came to us a few days later for this reason. She told us that she had received word from a messenger of God, who advised her that she should become a virgin of Christ, and that she should come close to God. Thanks be to God, six days later, enthusiastically and well, she took on the life that all virgins of God do. Their fathers don’t like this, of course. These women suffer persecution and false accusations from their parents, and yet their number grows! We do not know the number of our people who were born there. In addition, there are the widows and the celibates. Of all these, those held in slavery work hardest—they bear even terror and threats, but the Lord gives grace to so many of the women who serve him. Even when it is forbidden, they bravely follow his example.⁶⁸

Patrick had two goals: to convert the pagans and to set up church structures throughout the land. To do so without modern communications, roads, rail, telecommunications, and so on was an incredible feat, but Patrick never weakened.

He used the blueprint of the Church structure in his native Britain with bishops controlling dioceses. In addition, however, he set up Monastic settlements staffed by monks whose great goal was to spread the word of Jesus all over the known world.

Given how political the Church would become in later centuries, it is jarring to see the original spirit was one that was ascetic, contemplative, and soft-spoken in its proselytizing. There are no reports of pogroms or deaths as a result of the takeover by Christianity of the pagan land.

Far from being bellicose, the monks, in essence, retired from the world, fasted, devoted themselves to God, and composed prayer. It was the golden age of Irish Christianity. Saint Colum Cille in Derry, Saint Kevin in Wicklow, Saint Brendan in Clonfert, to name but a few, spread the gospel, preserved manuscripts, and lived the aesthetic life. The monks soon spread the new gospel all over Europe, founding over 150 monasteries where they studied the sacred scriptures, copying important manuscripts, none more so than the Book of Kells, the unfinished eight-century masterpiece barely saved from destruction from rampaging Vikings who landed on the Scottish island of Iona and attacked the monastery there. The book is now Ireland’s most valuable manuscript ensconced in Trinity College Dublin. According to Arthur Kingsley Porter, Yale professor, the success of the Celtic Church was a success of major political and religious magnitude.

The French writer Charles De Montalembert said, “It cannot be sufficiently repeated that Ireland was then regarded by all Christian Europe as the principal center of knowledge.”

Cardinal Tómas Ó Fiaich stated, “The achievement, culturally as well as religiously, borders on the incredible.”

What occurred over those centuries created an unbreakable bond between the Irish Celtic Church and its devotees, inspired by the pastoral message of Patrick, his monks, and holy men who had spread the gospel throughout the world.

The bonds would be tested in full by the foreign invaders massing on their shoreline in 1169 lured to Ireland by a chieftain who would go down as one of Ireland’s greatest traitors.

CHAPTER 16

A Bitter Lover Invites the English In

“Here’s a health to the Protestant Minister

And his church without meaning or faith

For the foundation stones of his temple are

The bollocks of Henry the Eight.”

Irish poet Brendan Behan

Religiously colonized in the fifth century by Patrick, the Irish faced a very different colonization battle when the Anglo-Normans turned their attention to the smaller island to the West. As noted historian FX Martin stated, “No other event (the Anglo-Norman invasion) except the preaching of the gospel by Saint Patrick and his companions has so changed the destinies of Ireland.”

But before the Normans came the Viking raiders in their longboats. They established several settlements in Ireland, disturbing the old order.

The Norsemen met their match when the fabled Brian Boru, high king of Ireland, defeated them in a pitched battle in 1014 at Clontarf outside Dublin. Brian is said to have died at battle’s end giving thanks to the Lord and praying in his tent when he was assassinated.

With the Vikings defeated, the Irish went back to their minor and major kingdoms, secure, they believed, in the knowledge their island would not be invaded again.

Celtic Catholicism and identity were about to face a far greater enemy, however, than the Vikings, the impact of which echoes down to the present day. Unlike most wars that follow a well-defined battle plan created over several years, the Anglo-Norman invasion began abruptly over a wife’s affair and a star-crossed couple who eloped.

Dermot MacMurrough, King of Leinster, and Tiernan O’Rourke, King of Breffni, nowadays known as Cavan, were bitter enemies. The reason was plain to be seen. O’Rourke’s wife, Dervorgilla, had either been abducted or eloped with MacMurrough in 1165.

The ancient Iri...