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Ireland - Religion

According to the 2011 census, the religious affiliation of the population is 84.1 percent Catholic, 2.8 percent Church of Ireland, 1.07 percent Muslim, 0.99 percent Orthodox Christian, 0.90 percent unspecified Christian, 0.53 percent Presbyterian, less than 0.1 percent Jewish, and 5.88 percent unaffiliated. Christian and Muslim Africans, Muslims from North Africa and the Middle East, Muslims and Hindus from South Asia, and Orthodox Christian communities in particular continued to grow, especially in larger urban areas.

Historically a kind of surrogate state the Catholic Church operated an almost parallel system of governance through its lattice of some 1,000 parishes managed by its priests. Churches acted as anchor tenants both in remote rural outposts and in mushrooming suburbia. Since the population explosion of the 1970s some 90 new Catholic parishes have been created in the greater Dublin region providing a sense of continuity amidst the high rise apartments and rampant shopping centres. Recent immigration, though it has changed the religious complexion of the population, has not done so in a fundamental manner, primarily because many of the immigrants have come from largely Catholic countries, such as Brazil and Poland.

The constitution and other laws and policies protect religious freedom. The constitution prohibits promotion of one religious group over another as well as discrimination on the grounds of religion or belief. The government does not restrict the teaching or practice of any faith. There is no state religion.

The constitution provides that “publication or utterance” of “blasphemous matter” is an offense punishable in accordance with law, but it does not define blasphemy. In the absence of legislation and in the uncertain state of the law, the courts have not prosecuted anyone for blasphemy in several years.

There is no legal requirement that religious groups or organizations register with the government, nor is there any formal mechanism for government recognition of a religious belief or group.

The government permits, but does not require, religious instruction in public schools. Most public and private primary and secondary schools are confessional, and their boards of management are governed partially by trustees who are members of religious denominations. Under the terms of the constitution, the Department of Education provides equal funding to schools of different religious denominations, including Muslim and Jewish schools, as well to nonconfessional schools. Although religious instruction is an integral part of the curriculum of most schools, parents may exempt their children from such instruction.

Publicly funded church-linked schools are permitted to refuse to admit a student not of that religious group if the school can prove the refusal is essential to the maintenance of the “ethos” of the school (for example, too many Catholics in a Muslim school could prevent the school from having a Muslim “ethos”). However, there have been no reports of any children refused admission to any school for this reason. By law a religious school may select its staff based on their religious beliefs.

In the year AD 432, according to the common account, St. Patrick, the principal apostle of Ireland, came over to preach the Gospel. Some think that Pope Celestine sent him; and, indeed, it would have been no great wonder if he did, considering how ready at such works the popes were in those days. But, however, there is no good ancient authority for supposing that he came from Celestine, and some of the most learned in these matters think he did not, especially because none of our old Irish histories mention anything about Celestine having sent him. He is said to have died in 492, aged l20 years, after having ordained very many bishops and priests throughout Ireland, and appointed the city of Armagh to be the place of the chief bishop of the whole island.

The Reformation never made much progress in Ireland, and though the Church of Ireland (Protestant) was established by law, it was only the church of a small minority [in 1869 it was disestablished]. The Church of Ireland accordingly was no longer a state church, and none of its bishops had a seat in Parliament in London.

Limerick, the last place in Ireland that held out for James, capitulated on 03 October 1690. By a 1691 decree of the English Parliament upward of 1,000,000 acres of land were confiscated and divided among Protestants. In order to keep down every movement of the Catholic population, cruel penal laws were passed against those who adhered to that form of religion. By these laws the higher Roman Catholic ecclesiastical dignitaries were banished from the island; the priests were not allowed to leave their counties; no Roman Catholic could hold a public office, acquire landed property, enter into a marriage with a Protestant, etc.

The later difficulties in the early 20th Century in establishing a public system of education in Ireland had their origin in the times following the efforts to make the people abandon the Roman Catholic Church. As a consequence, the parents refused to patronize the government schools. The laws of the time of William III and Queen Anne made it a crime for Catholics to teach or to have their children taught by Catholics, or to send them abroad where they would be educated in Catholic schools. The rigid enforcement of these laws resulted in a large proportion of illiteracy among the Roman Catholics.

The Catholic Emancipation Act was an act of the British Parliament passed in the 10th year of the reign of George IV., 13 April 1829, by which the Catholics of Ireland were relieved of civil disabilities still persisting there after the more odious and oppressive provisions of the penal laws enacted in 1691, in violation of the stipulations of the Treaty of Limerick, had been gradually done away. The design of those penal laws was the extermination of the Catholic religion in the island and the administration of the government purely for the behoof of the "Protestant interest" and the "English interest". Daniel O'Connell, already a highly successful counselor-at-law, though not a barrister, owing to his disability as a Catholic, took the leadership of the Catholics of Ireland, and from 1824 till the act of emancipation was passed, Ireland was the scene of an unprecedented popular agitation, never equaled in any country till the agitation for the repeal of the union with Great Britain was set on foot immediately after the grant of Catholic emancipation.

The great feature of the election of 1826 was the revolt of the Catholic freeholders against their landlords. In the chapels the priests were now preaching that the eternal salvation of the voter was at stake; that every tenant who lost his farm on account of his vote had earned the crown of martyrdom, while hell was the inevitable doom of all who at this great crisis proved false to their Church. One hostile observer wrote at the time that "'It is impossible to detail in a letter the various modes in which the Roman Catholic priesthood now interfere in every transaction of every description, how they rule the mob, the gentry and the magistracy; how they impede the administration of justice. ... They exercise on all matters a dominion perfectly uncontrolled and uncontrollable. In many parts of the country their sermons are purely political, and the altars in several chapels are the rostra from which they declaim on the subject of Roman Catholic grievances, exhort to the collection of rent or denounce their Protestant neighbours in a mode perfectly intelligible and effective, but not within the grasp of the law. ... O'Connell is complete master of the Roman Catholic clergy; the clergy are complete masters of the people."

The 1937 Irish Constitution recognized "the special position of the Holy Catholic Apostolic and Roman Church as the guardian of the Faith." Although the constitution of 1937 gave the Roman Catholic Church a "special position" in Ireland, the passage granting preferential standing was removed after a nationwide referendum held in December 1972.

Prior to the 20th Century, Ireland was often said to be "priestridden" [adj. from priest and ridden, that is, managed or governed by priests. Jonathan Swift wrote in 1708 that "the Whigs might easily have procured and maintained a majority among the clergy, and perhaps in the universities, if they had not too much encouraged or connived at this intemperance of speech and virulence of pen in the worst and most prostitute of their party; among whom there has been for some years past such a perpetual clamor against the ambition, the implacable temper, and the covetousness of the priesthood; such a cant of high church, and persecution, and being priestridden..."

Ireland had been oppressively priest-ridden since its independence and the church had shown itself all too interested in temporal power, imposing its views about everything on the state. Gore Vidal wrote that "The origin of the Kennedy sense of family is the holy land of Ireland, priestridden, superstitious, clannish. While most of the West in the nineteenth century was industrialized and urbanized, Ireland remained a famine-ridden agrarian country ..." James Joyce used the word "race" eleven times in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man - each time referring specifically to the Irish people as a race: "We are an unfortunate priestridden race" (37), "A priestridden Godforsaken race!" (37) ... " Stephen Dedalus's father observes, “we are an unfortunate priestridden race and always were and always will be until the end of the chapter."

Historically, Catholics identified themselves as Irish, long-suffering, ordinary, insecure, decent, deprived, unfortunate, fine people, nationalistic and reasonable. Protestants identified Catholics as ordinary people, Irish, priest-ridden, 'breed like rabbits'. Irish Catholics were caricatured as an ignorant, illiterate, superstitious, and priest-ridden people.

St. Augustine declared that abortion is not homicide but was a sin if it was intended to conceal fornication or adultery. During the period of 600-1500, illicit intercourse was deemed by the Irish Canons to be a greater sin than abortion. In 1930, therapeutic abortions were condemned, and, in 1965, abortion was condemned as the taking of life rather than as a sexual sin. By 1974, the right to life argument had taken hold and became part of a theory of a "seamless garment" representing a consistent ethic of life.

The influence of the Roman Catholic Church on Irish society makes it difficult for sex and health educators and HIV/AIDS prevention efforts. Divorce, abortion, consensual sex between consenting adult men, and contraception for those under 18 years is banned in Ireland. Abortion has been illegal in Ireland since 1861. This position was written into the national Constitution in 1963 and reconfirmed by referendum in 1983. By the early 1990s public opinions and court decisions appeared to bring a measure of hope for more lenient attitudes.

Ireland's constitution officially bans abortion, but a 1992 Supreme Court ruling found the procedure should be legalized for situations when the woman's life is at risk from continuing the pregnancy. Irish governments since have refused to pass a law resolving the conñision, leaving Irish hospitals reluctant to terminate pregnancies except in the most obviously life­threatening circumstances and consistent with Catholic teaching.

The Catholic Church takes an absolute moral position against abortion. Ireland's constitution bans abortion, but a 1992 Supreme Court ruling found it should be legal when it is necessary to save the life of the mother. In October 2012, Savita Halappanavar, a 31-year-old Indian dentist, was 17 weeks pregnant when she suffered severe pain due to a miscarriage. Doctors refused her demand for an abortion, saying Ireland is a Catholic country and that they could not do anything as long as there was a fetal heartbeat. She died of blood poisoning on October 28, 2012, a week after she was admitted to a hospital and three days after the death of the fetus she was carrying. Ireland conducted at least two separate investigations into Halappanavar's death.

A government-sponsored report condemns the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland for what it describes as the church's “inadequate” response to allegations of sexual abuse of children, and says high-ranking clergy helped conceal the abuse. The report by an independent commission July 13th, 2011 said the rural diocese of Cloyne in southern Ireland and its bishop, John Magee, largely ignored claims of molestation, rape and beating of children by members of the church between 1996 and 2009. It said the victims identified in the investigation were all of the opinion that in their meetings with higher church officials, the sole concern was the protection of the institution rather than the well-being of the children.