Book Offer
This will close in 10 seconds
Ireland has changed more in the past fifty years than in the previous five hundred.
For over 1,500 years, Catholicism was not simply Ireland’s dominant religion; it was the country’s moral framework. Christianity, which arrived in the fifth century, shaped Irish education, law, politics, family life and the very language through which people understood virtue and vice.
By 1961, 94.9% of the population identified as Catholic. In the early 1970s, around 90% of Catholics attended Mass every Sunday. Ireland produced thousands of missionaries and one of the highest numbers of priests per capita in the Western world.
That Ireland has largely vanished. According to the 2022 Census, 69% of the population now identify as Catholic, while regular Mass attendance has fallen to little more than a third of Catholics. Priestly vocations have collapsed, seminaries have emptied, and churches that were once the centre of every community increasingly struggle to remain open.
Most people describe this as secularisation. I think that is only partly true. Human beings do not stop believing. They replace one moral framework with another.
Ireland did not become morally neutral after the decline of Catholicism. It exchanged one moral vocabulary for another.
The language of sin, virtue, forgiveness and redemption has increasingly given way to the language of privilege, inclusion, representation, sutainability and social justice. The objects of moral concern have changed, but the human need for a shared moral framework has not.
This is why Diversity, Equality and Inclusion (DEI) often resembles what sociologists call a civil religion. It has no God or theology, but it does distinguish between virtue and vice, rewards conformity, condemns heresy and offers a vision of moral progress. Every society does this in one form or another.
The crucial difference lies elsewhere. Christianity is primarily about conquering oneself. Christ’s teaching constantly turns the believer inward: remove the plank from your own eye before judging your neighbour; forgive those who wrong you; love your enemies; carry your cross; confess your sins before pointing to those of others. The Christian battle is, above all, against pride, greed, lust, envy and the weaknesses of one’s own character.
DEI reverses that emphasis. Its moral energy is directed outward. The central task is to identify oppression in society and to combat it. The enemy is patriarchy, racism, colonialism, homophobia, transphobia, capitalism, white privilege, toxic masculinity, the far right, environment or whichever structure is believed to produce injustice. Moral virtue is demonstrated less by mastering oneself than by challenging and reprimanding others.
This distinction may explain why contemporary politics often feels permanently adversarial and willing to cancel people with different views. If morality is defined by confronting external enemies, then new enemies must continually be found. Every disagreement risks becoming evidence of prejudice, every critic a potential heretic. The struggle never ends because the battlefield is always society rather than oneself.
None of this is to deny that discrimination exists or that injustice should be confronted. Christianity has always insisted that injustice matters. The question is where reform begins. Christianity argues that a better society emerges from better people. Modern identity politics often assumes that better people emerge from better social structures.
The family illustrates the difference. Twentieth-century Ireland often confined women to domestic roles in ways that were unfair and unnecessarily restrictive. Those inequalities deserved correction. Yet today’s culture sometimes risks creating the opposite imbalance.
Motherhood is increasingly presented as something to postpone, minimise or even sacrifice in pursuit of personal fulfilment and professional success. Careers have become a measure of progress; parenthood often appears as an obstacle to it.
This cultural shift coincides with a remarkable demographic collapse. In the mid-1960s, Irish women had just over four children on average. Today they have around 1.5, well below the 2.1 children per woman required for a stable population. The decline has many causes —contraception, housing costs, later marriage, education and changing economic conditions among them— but cultural values also matter. A society that celebrates individual self-realisation more than family formation should not be surprised when fewer families are formed. If current trends continue, around one in four Irish women born in the late 1990s are projected to reach the end of their childbearing years without having children.
Civilisations are ultimately judged not only by their wealth or freedoms, but by whether they endure. No society can survive indefinitely if it consistently fails to replace itself. We speak constantly about environmental, economic and social sustainability, yet there is another form that receives far less attention: demographic sustainability. A society that cannot reproduce itself is, in the most fundamental sense, unsustainable. Demography is not destiny, but it sets limits that no ideology can ignore.
There is another question that deserves to be asked. Christianity spent two thousand years trying to answer the deepest human problems: suffering, forgiveness, guilt, addiction, grief, death and the search for meaning. One need not believe its answers to recognise that they existed. Can DEI offer the same? Can it teach someone how to forgive an enemy rather than defeat one? Can it offer hope to someone facing despair? Can it explain the meaning of life or the point of suffering? What is our origin and destiny? What is our role in the universe? Can it explain sacrifice without reducing it to politics? These are the questions every enduring moral tradition must eventually answer.
None of this is an argument for restoring the Ireland of the 1950s. The Catholic Church accumulated excessive institutional power, and the abuse scandals rightly destroyed much of its moral authority. Those failures were real, devastating and deserved to be exposed.
At the same time, public perception is shaped not only by events themselves but also by the amount of attention they receive. The media has an extraordinary ability to amplify some stories while giving comparatively little attention to others. The clerical abuse scandals generated years of sustained reporting, as they should have.
Yet other controversies—from the treatment of young people at the Tavistock gender clinic (a controversy over the medical treatment of transgender-identifying children and adolescents, and more broadly the debate over gender-affirming care for minors) to the grooming gang scandals involving predominantly British Pakistani perpetrators in parts of England (a series of child sexual exploitation cases that also became part of a wider public debate about immigration, integration, and whether concerns about race or community relations contributed to institutional failures) have, many critics argue, received less sustained or initially more hesitant coverage. Why has the media been so quiet on those issues as opposed to the scandals in the church?
Rejecting one moral framework, however, does not eliminate the need for another. Ireland has not abandoned the search for meaning; it has exchanged one vision of the good life for another. Whether this new moral framework can provide the same social cohesion, sustain the family, inspire self-sacrifice, and endure across generations remains an open question. In my view, it cannot—not because it actively opposes these ideals, but because it simply does not address them as central moral concerns. It is reducing the individual to race, gender and sexual orientation.
One fact, however, is already difficult to ignore: Ireland’s birth rate has fallen well below the replacement level needed to sustain its population. Charles Darwin observed that species which fail to reproduce eventually disappear. Human societies are shaped by culture rather than biology alone, but they are not exempt from demographic reality. A civilisation that consistently fails to replace itself cannot endure indefinitely, regardless of its wealth, technology or ideals.
This raises a difficult question. If the new moral framework is genuinely superior to the one it replaced, why has its rise coincided with one of the sharpest declines in family formation and fertility in Irish history, despite Ireland becoming one of the richest countries in Europe? Material prosperity has increased beyond anything previous generations could have imagined, yet fewer people are marrying, fewer are having children, and many will have none at all. Correlation is not proof of causation, but it does invite a question that deserves serious consideration: should a moral framework be judged not only by the perception people have, but also by whether it is capable of sustaining the civilization that adopts it?
References
This will close in 10 seconds