The Children of Lir - Part One

Sacred Hearts, St Brigid & John Paul II...

Image credit :Unsplash

This is the first of a series of essays. Some sections can be a bit heavy on historical detail - feel free to skip those- please note these are my personal opinions, I don’t expect everyone to agree…

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¹(I recommend listening to this first).

The Children of Lir is my favourite Irish folk tale; I read it in my early teens in the classic book ‘Old Celtic Romances’ by P.W. Joyce published in 1920. It is a story about the Tuatha dé Danann, the pagan gods and goddesses of pre Christian Ireland (you can read the original story here with lots of details that I will miss out in a brief summary):

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/38041/38041-h/38041-h.htm#ACHAPTER_II

Lir, a pagan king/deity, has four children, the oldest, a girl, Fionnuala, and three boys. The children’s mother died giving birth to the two youngest twin boys and King Lir marries her sister Aoife. All is well at first, but then Aoife becomes jealous of the love between Lir and his children. She takes the children in her chariot to a nearby lake to go swimming, and while they are in the water, takes out a wand and casts a spell over them, turning them into swans but allowing them to keep the ability to speak and to sing. Aoife’s father, on finding out what she has done, turns her into a ‘demon of the air’.

The swans move between different places on the island of Ireland enduring great suffering. At the end of the alloted period they fly to the coast of County Mayo on the Atlantic Coast to spend the last part of the enchantment where they meet a Christian monk who takes pity on them, and with their permission, binds them with silver chains, they sing for him and become famous. Finally a queen hearing of these strange swans and their enchanting songs sends someone to steal them for her. They cry out while they are being seized and turn back into humans, but very old and frail. The monk they have befriended baptises them and they die shortly afterwards; he sees them in a dream ascending to heaven as swans to join their parents singing in joy as they rise.

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Homeward bound…

Dublin airport -image credit Alamy

I was reminded of this recently while wheeling my suitcase past a beautiful depiction of the Children of Lir story which formed part of a series of Irish themed murals lining the walls of the passenger concourse of Dublin airport. Most of the other murals featured popular characters from Irish mythology like Fionn McCool, or Cuchlainn with a couple of nods to saints like St Patrick and St Brigid.

Later whilst weaving my way through the stands of the duty free shop (an Irish invention by the way) I noticed that amongst the usual selection of perfumes/chocolates/alcohols those of Irish origin often used branding from those same stories (for example Lir Chocolates, Coole Swans liqeurs etc). But aside from a few Celtic crosses, there was nothing I could see which referenced Irish saints or Christian symbolism - no Irish equivalent for instance to French Charteuse liqeurs (by the way this is not to say I approve of using Christianity or Christian saints as a way of selling products - it is just to observe that Irish marketing does not seem to use them).

This is of course a personal view and may not be indicative of a wider cultural trend. However it has also been my experience that previously ubiquitious fixtures in Irish homes such as the Sacred Heart picture are now rare (there is a story - possibly apocryphal - that a lit Sacred Heart picture was used by the ESB as a marketing tool to persuade reluctant rural Irish households to accept electricity in the nineteen fifties)². What is certainly true is that formerly common Christian iconography like the Infant of Prague statue (another former staple of Irish homes) or devotional items such as rosary beads are now seldom seen outside of churches. In my view religious artefacts or symbols have gradually faded from the visual landscape over the last twenty years in Ireland and this may indicate an underlying secularisation of Irish society.

Another clue that this may be the case is that a few years ago I attended a concert by the singer Mary Coughlan; afterwards we briefly chatted and she remarked ‘no one is called Mary anymore’. And if you look at the most popular baby names in Ireland in recent years, she is right; very few Irish baby girls are called Mary. Instead Irish babies today include names from pre Christian stories like ‘Fionn’ or ‘Oisin’- or for girls names such as ‘Sadbh’ or ‘Aoife’ but formerly popular saints names like Brigid or Michael are nowhere to be seen in the statistics³. None of this is news to those who live in Ireland where the influence of the Catholic Church has been steadily waning for at least the last twenty years.

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I would like a great lake of beer….

I would like a great lake of beer for the King of Kings.
I would like to be watching Heaven's family drinking it through all eternity. (St Brigid’s Prayer)⁴

St Brigid’s Mural, Bridge Street Dundal : image credit Newry.ie

⁵A more subtle sign that Ireland’s Christian heritage may be fading is when in 2022 the Government of Ireland declared a new bank holiday to honor Ireland’s most famous female saint St Brigid - stating on their website:

Like many of other feast days of the Irish calendar, Brigid predates Christianity – her roots lie in the Celtic festival of Imbolc, the feast of the goddess Brigid, celebrated at least five millennia ago.⁶

While this may be true; this seemed to me that here official Ireland is leaning more into its pre Christian history than might have previously been the case.

All of this might just straws in the wind - but the concept of social imaginary recently outlined by the academic Charles Taylor in his 2003 book ‘Modern Social Imaginaries’ points to deeper implications for Irish society if there has been indeed an underlying shift in the core assumptions which underpin Irish society. Taylor says when talking of a social imaginary as follows:

I mean something much broader and deeper than the intellectual schemes people may entertain when they think about social reality in a disengaged mode. I am thinking, rather, on the way people imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others, how things go on between them and their fellows, the expectations that are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expectations… the way people “imagine” their social surroundings, and this is not expressed in theoretical terms, but carried in images, stories and legends… the social imaginary is that it is shared by large groups of people, if not a guides our collective and individual actions and values.⁷

This is explained in detail in the 2020 article by Cuberio and Pasin available here:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/369511560_The_social_imaginaries_the_beginning_of_a_needed_conceptual_clarification

Examples of social imaginarys might be religious beliefs, beliefs in the rule of law, equality, the belief that only the state has the right to resort to violence, that children and the vulnerable deserve protection. Different societies may vary in their social imaginaries, for example in the UK the widespread belief that it is the state’s role to provide free healthcare to all - something not true in the US.

The social imaginary may contain different levels, both conscious and subconscious beliefs. For example conscious beliefs may surface in political debates, but subconscious/mythic beliefs may also structure a society in more subtle ways for example consumerism. Social imaginaries are in my view, to use a term borrowed from computer science, the operating systems of society, key sources for these beliefs which form them come from religion, politics, culture and education⁸.

So where are the sources for the current social imaginary of Irish society, and how might they be changing?

First it might help to set some background with a brief whistle stop tour of Irish church history - I’m not claiming to be unbiased - feel free to skip this and go on to the next essay on human rights here. There are plenty of books and academic articles referenced in the footnotes which give a more nuanced and thoroughly evidenced history if you are interested (‘Impure Thoughts’ by Michael Cronin in 2012 being one of the best) .

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‘Tis for the glory of our holy faith….

St Colman’s Catheral Cobh, consecrated 1919, image credit Alamy

If public and official interest in Catholicism in Ireland is declining in recent years then this is a steep descent from its formerly enormously powerful position in Irish society.⁹ The rise of this power probably began when the demographic catastrophe of the Irish Great Famine in 1847-1851 produced a drastic shift in Irish attitudes to marriage and sexuality - post Famine marriages became later and fewer (and remained so until the latter years of the twentieth century). This meant far more policing of the social norms around courtship and sexuality than before; often done by the local parish priest.

Thus in post Famine Ireland the Catholic Church accrued to itself increasing amounts of social and cultural power ¹⁰-this was not completely unopposed and had many critics - but mass emigration post Famine which continued throughout the following century meant that the most vociferous ones like the writer James Joyce often made make their critiques of Irish society from abroad and were ignored at home¹¹.

Emigration also meant that much of the normal societal tensions and energies got siphoned off elsewhere leaving Irish society with a set of often stulifying social norms around sexuality which were sometimes flexed to punishing effect on numerous unfortunate victims¹². This power did not always go unchallenged within Irish society, Mary Jane -the wife of O’Donovan Rossa the Irish Fenian leader - once asked furiously in an 1868 poem:

Who said 'twas willed our race should be, Live monuments of misery? To spread the faith throughout the world? Who spoke such blasphemy, and why?Who dared the generous God belie? And yet thy bishops-Cullen-saith,'Tis for the glory of Thy Faith.¹³

The Cullen she was talking about in this poem was Cardinal Paul Cullen, probably the single most influential individual in the history of the Irish Catholic Church since St Patrick. He was an arch conservative and ardent promoter of Roman influence over the Irish Catholic Church post Famine. Cullen, the first ever Irish cardinal, embarked on a major project to both centralise and Romanise the Irish Catholic Church in the late nineteenth century¹⁴. The vestiges of his influence are still apparent in the architectural legacy of the remaining late nineteen or early twentieth century church buildings; for example the beautiful St Colman’s Cathedral in Cobh; a high Gothic marble and stained glass palace¹⁵ (many years ago when visiting St Peter’s in Rome I felt as though I had stepped into a funhouse mirror version of a Victorian Irish church) .

Daniel O’Connell (see previous essay here) instigated the tendency in Irish politics to mine the spiritual energies of Catholicism as a source of oppositional identity in order to bolster the Repeal movement. ¹⁶It continued to perform this function in the Home Rule/independence struggles of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Many of the leaders of the 1916 rebellion were deeply religious men like Pearse and Joseph Mary Plunkett and they yoked their political beliefs closely to their faiths¹⁷.

But the relationship between the official Catholic Church and its erswhile allies in Irish political movements was always an uneasy one - the Catholic hierarchy often vacillated between support and opposition for the various strands of the Irish Home Rule or independence movements in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, for instance during the Irish Civil War it vehemently opposed the anti Treaty side and threatened some of its supporters with excommunication¹⁸.

The Irish writer Fintan O’Toole wrote the excellent ‘We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Ireland’ in 2021 which looked at the nexus of Church/State power in the Irish State over the course of his lifetime which makes for sometimes chilling reading.¹⁹ . From O’Toole’s account the old Unionist accusation that ‘Home Rule was Rome Rule’ would seem to have been fully justified in the Irish State for much of the twentieth century. One particularly egregrious example of this was in the 1950s where the health minister Sean McBride capitulated to Church interference on the provision of medical services for healthcare for women -the so called Mother and Baby affair. insisting on special provision for its position in Article 44 of the Irish Constitpution (repealed in 1972) and legislation like the Public Dance Hall Act of 1935 which confined dancing to licenced locations only (frequently under the direct supervision of the local parish priest²⁰.

While O’Toole’s book focuses on the many pernicious effects of the Church teaching on sexuality and on its controlling grip over education and health services in the young state, there is in my view far less exploration it of the lacuna that the Church filled, or questions as to why it occupied those roles for so long which in other countries would have been funded by the State. These questions are implied in the difficulty that the education minister Donogh O’Malley had persuading his colleagues in the latter years of the twentieth century to fund free secondary education for all; the opposition to this came from his own colleagues and the Irish civil service, not from the Church²¹. Another example of this in my view is that despite massive budget surpluses for some years - Ireland is now a rich country - the Irish state has yet to provide the equivalent to Britain’s NHS- free healthcare to all its citizens (including its children) - the Church has long since departed from this sector and cannot be blamed²². (Ireland ranked 19th out of 34 European Union country for the provision of health care)²³.

Other examples of this are the scandals around Direct Provision where recent immigrants to the State are housed in inadequate and unsuitable accommodation- exactly the type of service for the vulnerable that would typically have been provided by church agencies in the past (who might have treated the recipients with more compassion and dignity than their present secular counterparts)²⁴. The Irish government has been heavily criticised by NGOs such as Amnesty International and one asylum seekers organisation described Direct Provision as :

state sponsored poverty²⁵

For a country with such a long tradition of emigration; it is particularly egregious in my opinion that those fleeing persecution have received such a poor welcome here in Ireland. If the church in the past could be accused of often having unhealthy preoccupations with sexuality then its secular replacements today might be now be accused of unhealthy preoccupations with cost cutting and managerial status - there is in my view - on the face of it - little evidence here that secular morality is an improvement.

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Young People of Ireland, I love you!

Crowds awaiting the visit of John Paul II - image credit Pacemaker

As O’Toole details in his book the Catholic Church might have reached its apogee in 1979 with the visit of John Paul the Second to the country; he was greeted by vast enthusistic crowds and mass adulation²⁶. But in the years that followed cracks started to appear in the Church’s grip on Irish public consciousness. One of the first and most heartbreaking of these was the media coverage around the death in childbirth of a 15 year old Ann Lovett and her baby in front of the grotto of Our Lady in the town of Granard in County Longford in 1984²⁷. This produced a media storm where Dublin journalists went to the town in attempts to interview the girl’s family and friends but were met by a collective wall of silence.

This was interpreted by these journalists as evidence of a community deeply in thrall to Church dictates (rather than in my view the far more likely explanation of their attempts to shield deeply tramatised individuals from intrusive outsiders)²⁸. But outside of this tragic event there was plenty of contemporary evidence - as detailed in O’Toole’s book of the harsh and intolerant attitudes promoted by the Catholic Church’s teachings on sexuality towards women and girls and the many lives deeply scarred or ruined as a result²⁹. These were also highlighted in the works of novelists like Edna O’Brien or by journalists like Nell McCaffrey. Broadcasters such as Gay Byrne and Gerry Ryan in the nineteen eighties and nineties did much to open up societal discussion on the Ireland’s shame based norms around sexuality and its rampant misogyny as evidenced in the State’s laws around contraception and divorce.

Major cracks in the deference shown to the Catholic Church also came from cultural critiques like the Boomtown Rats 1980 song ‘Banana Republic’ ³⁰and the singer Mary Coughlan’s 1987 ‘Under the Influence’ album containing the song ‘My Land is Too Green’ (which you can listen to here) which starts with the lyrics:

My land is bogged down in religious tradition
We nod our heads in humble submission
One foot in the door, a hand in your pocket
We export our problems for foreign solutions

My land is naive, too scared of the devil
Holier than thou with eyes up to heaven ³¹

Several years later in 1992 the singer Sinead O’Connor famously ripped up a picture of John Paul the Second live on American television - she was booed by a large crowd shortly afterwards at a Bob Dylan tribute concert in Madison Square Gardens and her US career never recovered.³² (Her 2012 album ‘How About I Be Me (And You Be You?)³³’ revisited this theme and was in direct response to the incendiary Murphy report about clerical abuses in 2011).

Since then a steady stream of cultural critiques of the Catholic Church has continued from the early years of the new millenium such as the depiction of forced adoption in films like ‘Philomena³⁴’ starring Judi Dench and Steve Coogan and most recently the 2023 “The Woman in the Wall”³⁵ TV series about the infamous Magdalen laundries. Official Ireland has also pulled back significantly from its previous deferential attitudes to the Catholic Church; in 2011 it closed the Irish embassy to the Vatican - despite dismay from church leaders ³⁶(and then quietly reopened it in 2018 which suggests more of a performative protest³⁷).

Another source of the steady undermining of Christianity on the island must surely have come from the tribal conflict in Northern Ireland during the 1960s, 70s and 80s of ‘The Troubles’ conducted between two groups whose identities were centred on different brands of Christianity: Catholic and Protestant. In a recent 2020 TV series called ‘The Fall’ set in Belfast, the English detective character Stella Gibson (played by Gillian Anderson) brutally summarised the outside perspective on this as:

What, all that "My Jesus is better than your Jesus" stuff? ³⁸

Therefore all of this might indicate to many Irish recently that over the years the various proponents of the Christian message on the island have been shown to be signally lacking in the core teachings of love and compassion which their founder Jesus taught and thus that they are better off without it. (The Irish of course are not alone in this - since the Second World War, churches across the Global North have been emptying and there has been some discussion in recent years that we are now in a post-Christian era).³⁹

Well so what you might ask? Some might now agree with the views of Mary McAleese the former Irish president in 2018 that:

The Catholic Church is one of the last great bastions of misogyny. It's an empire of misogyny⁴⁰

and view its passing from Irish life without much regret. In more recent years cultural and societal critiques of the Catholic Church are starting to lose their potency; it has already been too thoroughly discredited in the eyes of many already as a source of moral or spiritual authority. Instead the Irish, like many others are increasingly looking elsewhere for their sources of moral authority such as the international human rights movements (which I will discuss in the next essay).

One recent victory for this movement was when in 2015 Ireland became the first European country to legalise gay marriage and another was in 2018 with the repeal of the eighth amendment which forbade abortion. After the victory for gay marriage in 2015 the then Taoiseach Leo Vadarkar himself gay and of part Indian heritage said:

It’s a beacon of light… it’s a historical day for Ireland….it’s a social revolution⁴¹.

Ireland has taken a leading role in the legal frameworks for human rights in Europe, also for example the present European Commissioner for Human Rights is Michael O’Flaherty, the first Irish person to be appointed to the role in 2024. Micheál Martin, the then Tanaiste said of this appointment at the time:

The office of Commissioner is central to the protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms in Europe. Never have these ideals and principles been more important⁴²

Irish involvement in human rights is not new; Seán McBride - winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1974 (the same health minister involved in the Mother and Baby affair in the nineteen fifties) was one of the most influential human rights lawyers of the twentieth century⁴³; he was a founding member and active participant in many of the institutions of international law such as the European Court of Human Rights.

Continued in Children of Lir - Part Two (human rights) here

1

2. https://www.energyhistory.eu/en/special-issue/electricity-modernity-and-tradition-during-irish-rural-electrification-1940-1970

3. https://www.cso.ie/en/statistics/birthsdeathsandmarriages/irishbabiesnames/

4. https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Brigid_of_Kildare

5. https://www.brigidoffaughart.ie/brigid-of-faughart-mural/

6. https://www.gov.ie/en/press-release/3430b-inaugural-saint-brigids-day-bank-holiday-cultural-programme-launched-to-celebrate-women-in-ireland/

7. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv11hpgvt

8. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/369511560_The_social_imaginaries_the_beginning_of_a_needed_conceptual_clarification

9. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-ecclesiastical-history/article/abs/roman-catholic-church-and-the-nineteenthcentury-irish-diaspora1/3889241123F28792DDAA7E607318E050

10. (for example the unique Irish dancing tradition of keeping your hands down by your side is sometimes attributed to church influence to downplay dancing’s sexual connotations -but Riverdance is an epic fail if this is really the case).

11. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057/978-1-137-58347-5_3

12. https://academic.oup.com/manchester-scholarship-online/book/13617/chapter-abstract/167178649?redirectedFrom=fulltext&login=false

13. https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/Irish_Lyrical_Poems/aABAAAAAYAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1

14. https://www.fourcourtspress.ie/books/archives/cardinal-paul-cullen-and-his-world

15. If you want to catch a chill whiff of Cullen’s austere persona I would recommend going to Maynooth, full of Hogwarth portaits of dead Irish churchmen and possibly the most beautiful high Gothic church in Ireland.

16. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057/978-1-137-59990-2_11

17. ibid.

18. https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/religion-and-politics-in-comparative-perspective/catholicism-politics-and-culture-in-the-republic-of-ireland/C57ED4345C9D7B2CEAF759EBE9E32039

19. One telling vignette from it was O’Toole seeing the imperious Archbishop of Dublin John McQuaid’s feet protrude from the back seat of his Rolls Royce so that his kneeling chaffeur could polish his leather shoes, something that seems entirely at odds with the core Christian teachings of humility

20. https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/religion-and-politics-in-comparative-perspective/catholicism-politics-and-culture-in-the-republic-of-ireland/C57ED4345C9D7B2CEAF759EBE9E32039

21. https://assets.gov.ie/281627/b0f99621-a193-42b5-809d-9a6e20c870a8.pdf

22. https://www.rte.ie/brainstorm/2024/0109/1425519-ireland-healthcare-access-reform-challenges/

23. https://www.gov.ie/en/publication/93e48-national-healthcare-statistics-2024/

24. https://www.amnesty.ie/end-direct-provision/

25. https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/republic-of-ireland/direct-provision-biggest-shame-on-irish-state-since-magdalene-laundries/38565899.html

26. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pope%27s_Children

27. https://www.thejournal.ie/readme/ann-lovett-anniversary-6285412-Jan2024/

28. https://www.irishtimes.com/news/ann-lovett-death-at-the-grotto-1.1304620

29. ibid.

30

31.

32. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sin%C3%A9ad_O%27Connor_on_Saturday_Night_Live

33. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_About_I_Be_Me_(and_You_Be_You)%3F

34. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philomena_(film)

35. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Woman_in_the_Wall

36. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-15582295

37. https://dublindiocese.ie/irish-embassy-to-holy-see-to-re-open/

38. https://subslikescript.com/series/The_Fall-2294189

39. https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2015/04/02/europe/

40. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-43330026

41. https://www.irishtimes.com/news/politics/ireland-becomes-first-country-to-approve-same-sex-marriage-by-popular-vote-1.2223646

42. https://www.irishtimes.com/politics/2024/01/24/irishman-michael-oflaherty-elected-council-of-europes-human-rights-commissioner/

43. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Sean-MacBride