The End of Catholic Ireland?

You can't end something that never existed.

Well into the 1960s, more than 40 years after Irish independence, Guinness refused to employ Catholics in any managerial capacity and was owned by the dynasty that provided four successive Tory Members of Parliament for Southend, a town a mere 40 miles from the centre of London. The last one, a former Cabinet Minister under Margaret Thatcher, did not retire until 1997 and did not die until 2007.

Everything that you probably think that you know about Ireland is wrong.

There is much emphasis on land reform as having allegedly broken the power of the Ascendancy. But in fact the Anglo-Irish Protestants continued to own everything from the breweries, to the banks, to things such as Merville Dairy, all of which practised frank anti-Catholic discrimination in employment for many decades after independence, as in a different way the great concerns of the present day still do.

No even nominal Catholic was made Editor of The Irish Times until as recently as 1986, 64 years after independence. It is also notable that even in 2015 one of the Governors of The Irish Times Trust has the OBE while another has nothing less than the CBE; such, quite amusingly and very tellingly, is the Irish Republic's newspaper of record.

The Church vigorously, but unsuccessfully, opposed the adoption of the Constitution there under de Valera in 1937. Everything in that last sentence tells you something important.

The country that once discriminated against Catholics in favour of Protestants now discriminates against such practising Catholics as there still are, a far lower proportion of the Catholic population than in England and quite possibly a lower absolute number, in favour of wallowers in each others' published and unpublished, spoken and written misery memoirs of embittered ex-Catholicism.

They know their own to be packs of lies, and sometimes utterly preposterous, such as the supposed persistence of corporal punishment in schools decades after it had been abolished. But they assume everyone else's to be genuine. They therefore see themselves as somehow expressing a broader truth. In any case, it is the only way to get on.

Far from there having been some taboo against criticising the Church until Mary Robinson became President in 1990, this sort of thing goes back at least to George Moore, and it has made the fame and fortune of many a mediocre to downright abysmal writer, with Frank McCourt only the latest in a very long line.

Moreover, being able to produce this drivel to interviewers is now the only way to become any sort of public or responsible figure in the Irish Republic, in the way that being a posh Protestant remained long, long, long after independence.

There was no same-sex marriage in Britain until a couple of years ago, either. Was that the Pope's doing, too?

Every "Catholic" law in Ireland was initially enacted by the Westminster Parliament and applied throughout these Islands into the post-War period, in some cases into the twenty-first century. If not right down to the present day in Northern Ireland. At Unionist insistence.

Same-sex marriage in the Republic means that it will never happen in Northern Ireland.

Unionists, and especially the type that is still dominant despite some loss to the other kind at the General Election, take very little interest in the rest of the United Kingdom. But they know all about the Republic. They have to. In order to guarantee that, on as many points as possible, they are not it, or anything like it.

The voters of the Republic have added same-sex marriage to that list of points of difference, a difference to be preserved at all costs in the Six Counties, with those costs themselves sent to Her Majesty's Treasury.