The End of Catholic Ireland?

Only in the Republic. Where it was always weaker.

The Pope first gave the Kings of England the Lordship of Ireland. That he was English is neither here nor there. He was the Pope. A Papal Blessing was sent to William III when he set out for Ireland, and there hangs at Stormont a painting depicting his crossing of the Boyne with, in the sky, a vignette of the Pope with his hand raised in blessing. The Lateran Palace was illuminated for a fortnight when news of the Battle of the Boyne reached Rome.

During the 1798 Rebellion, the staff and students of Maynooth sent a Declaration of Loyalty to the King. That Royal College of Saint Patrick would not have existed without the patronage to which its name bore witness, the only means whereby the formation of Catholic priests was possible on Irish soil. The tiny number of priests who adhered to that Rebellion were excommunicated, the bishops calling them “the very faeces of the Church”.

Into the nineteenth century, Catholic priests participated in the annual prayer service at the Walls of Derry, an ecumenical gesture with few or no parallels at the time. Jacobite and Hanoverian were always united in supporting the closest possible ties among the historic Kingdom of England (including the Principality of Wales), the historic Kingdom of Scotland and the historic Kingdom of Ireland.

Prominent Belfast Catholic laymen chaired rallies against Home Rule, with prominent Catholic priests on the platforms. There were numerous Catholic pulpit denunciations of Fenianism, which is unlike any of the three principal British political traditions in being a product of the French Revolution. Hence its tricolour flag. And hence its strong anticlerical streak, always identifying Catholicism as one of Ireland’s two biggest problems.

The Orange Lodges opposed the Act of Union of 1800, the best thing that ever happened to Ireland, which incorporated one of the most backward countries in Europe into what became in the nineteenth century the most advanced country in the world, an advance not least by the efforts of Irish Catholic labourers throughout the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.

The consequent improvements in Ireland’s agriculture, industry, education, infrastructure, welfare provision, honest and responsible administration, and so on, were almost incalculable, and enjoyed the strongest possible support of the Catholic Church, without which many, most or even all of them could not have happened, especially at local level.

There may very well be a Protestant work ethic, but there is at least as much of a Catholic one, forming and defining half of the Germans, more than half of the West Germans during their post-War economic miracle, half of the Swiss, half of the Dutch, and great tracts of the working classes of the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand during those countries’ industrial heydays.

What about the Potato Famine? Well, what about it? It was a natural disaster, which would have happened anyway. It was not as if Queen Victoria had poisoned the potatoes. But trying to make that point can be like trying to explain to the blight-wavers that they must be descended from survivors rather than exclusively from victims, a point which it can be almost as difficult to make in relation to the Holocaust, suggesting that that will be just as difficult when the 1940s are as distant as the 1840s are today.

Furthermore, what does anyone imagine to have been the conditions of the rural poor in England, Scotland or Wales in the 1840s? That is the context in which it is necessary to assess the enormous efforts made by Westminster, in partnership with the Church, to relieve the Famine, efforts of which an Ireland outside the Union could not have dreamt. And it must be repeated that an Ireland outside the Union would still have had to have dealt with exactly the same situation.

But to the Orangemen, the Union meant Catholic Emancipation, and indeed the necessary Unionist majority in the former Irish Parliament was secured on that very basis, by Protestant Emancipationists who secured the votes of the Catholic commercial class by promising to deliver the Union that would deliver to those voters the right to sit in Parliament.

Those voters delivered that majority, that majority delivered the Union, and the Union delivered Catholic Emancipation, which the old Irish Parliament would simply never have countenanced. Protestant pioneers are sometimes produced by Republicans as a sort of trump card. But those believed their own Protestant, “Saxon” nation to be the only nation, as such and with all national rights accordingly, on the Irish island.

They had no more interest in or regard for Gaels or Catholics than their contemporary, Thomas Jefferson, had either for the “Indians not taxed” (in a context of “no taxation without representation”, and therefore also of the reverse) or for his own slaves. They viewed those other inhabitants of Ireland as anti-monarchist opinion has regarded the Australian Aborigines from the Victorian Period to the present day, as Hendrik Verwoerd regarded the non-white peoples of South Africa, as Ian Smith regarded the Mashona and the Matabele, and as Golda Meir regarded the Palestinians when she denied that they existed at all, a view still widely and deeply held.

Such notions have been ridiculous when viewed from east of the Irish Sea at least since Dr Johnson asked, “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?” But when the Stormont Parliament and its supporters opposed integration because integration meant Civil Rights, then they were in no way out of keeping with the anti-Unionist thinking of their ancestors.

In the meantime, separatist leaders as late as the 1870s had seized on the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland, with all its implications for the system of tithes, as a nullifying breach of the Act of Union. However, that the only Established Church in Ireland’s history was an Anglican one, however few people might have been in it, is an important example of what is still the utter Englishness of numerous Irish institutions, created by or as a result of the Act of Union. Ireland is an English-speaking country with a Common Law system, the most English place in the world outside England herself.

The only way to maintain the Catholic school system in Northern Ireland is to keep Northern Ireland within the Union. For each of this Kingdom’s parts contains a Catholic intelligentsia, whereas the Irish Republic’s is the most tribally anti-Catholic in the world. The Republic’s Catholic schools, among much else, are doomed.

As would be Northern Ireland’s, if Sinn Féin had its way. Under the pretext that they teach through the medium of Irish, wholly and militantly secular Sinn Féin schools are being set up at public expense, in direct opposition to the Catholic system, by that party’s Education Minister. Her exclusion of Anglican, Presbyterian and Methodist clergy from their historic role in the government of schools is the dry run for her party’s openly desired exclusion of the Catholic Church from schools throughout Ireland.

That red saltire on the Union Flag was, and is, no word of lie. The Irish were vigorous participants in British imperialism, and especially in its military aspects. It was under that Flag, and by those means, that they propagated the Faith to the ends of the earth. When he visited Ireland, Blessed John Paul the Great condemned “the use of force by Irishmen, overwhelmingly Catholic Irishmen, against the continuing British presence”.

Princely absolutism was incompatible with the building up of the Social Reign of Christ. Likewise, ethnically exclusive nation-states deriving uncritically from the Revolution do not provide adequate means to that end. By contrast, the absence of any significant Marxist influence in this country has been due to the universal and comprehensive Welfare State, and the strong statutory protection of workers and consumers, the former paid for by progressive taxation, and all underwritten by full employment. These are very largely the fruits of Catholic Social Teaching.

Such fruits have been of disproportionate benefit to ethnically Gaelic-Irish Catholics throughout the United Kingdom. Even in the 1940s, Sinn Féin worried that they were eroding its support. She who led the assault on these things remains a Unionist hate figure. The Civil Rights Movement was explicitly for equal British citizenship. Even the old Nationalist Party, never mind Sinn Féin, was permitted no part in it. And it was classically British Labour in identifying education, healthcare, decent homes and proper wages as the rights of citizens, who are demeaned precisely as citizens when they are denied those rights. The fruits of Catholic Social Teaching, indeed.