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Placing Cultural Change in Ireland Since EU Integration
In 1979, Pope John Paul II visited Ireland on a three day trip. His visit was a national affair, and on the day of his arrival over a million people came to see him in Dublin’s Phoenix Park – about 30% of the country’s entire population.
At that time homosexuality, abortion, condoms and divorce were all illegal in the country. Famously, a spike in births followed the Pope’s visit, but within a year the baby boom had ended, and the birth rate returned to the average levels found throughout Europe, where it would remain.
Much has changed since that papal visit, and the contrast was made particularly stark in 2018, when Pope Francis visited the country. Declining mass attendance, the legalization of abortion a few months previously and an openly gay Taoiseach (Prime Minister) caught the attention of the worldwide media. The revelations of a history of sexual abuse by the clergy had shocked the country in the 1990’s, and what was once a bastion of Catholicism in a secularizing Europe was by 2018 a very different place.
While the historical association between Catholicism and Irishness has made this transformation headline news, it is in fact only one of the many ways Irish life has fundamentally changed in the last half century...
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