Ireland, Republic of

The prominent role of religion in the social life and structures of the Republic of Ireland has been a salient feature of the state ever since its creation. Ireland historically has had ambivalent relations with England and the United Kingdom, and developments in the 19th and early 20th centuries led to the identification of Irish nationalism with Catholicism. As a result of the partition of the island in 1921, the new state comprised an overwhelming Catholic majority. At that time, 26 counties were granted dominion status as the Irish Free State, while the 6 Protestant-majority ones in Northern Ireland elected to remain within the United Kingdom. Catholicism thus came to be closely associated with the dominant sense of Irish identity and with the state itself, despite the presence of small Protestant minorities. The Catholic influence could be felt most powerfully in the 1937 constitution, which established the state as a largely denominational one, as it granted a “special position” to the Catholic Church and included articles, notably on the family and on the role of women, which were informed by traditional Catholic values.

Although successive amendments have watered down the specifically Catholic dimension of the constitution, with the removal of the reference to the special position of the church in 1972 and the legalization of divorce after the 1995 referendum, the Preamble still explicitly identifies “the people of Éire” as Christian and the State “acknowledges that the homage of public worship is due to Almighty God” in Article 44. The prominent institutional role still played by the Catholic Church (and to a much lesser extent by the Church of Ireland, a province of the Anglican Communion) today in the spheres of health, education, and social services also distinguishes the Republic of Ireland within the European Union. The Church and its congregations own and control the vast majority of schools as well as many of the country's hospitals and social institutions, whether public or private.

Beyond even this very strong institutional presence, the Catholic Church has been described as having a “moral monopoly” in Ireland, at least up to the 1960s. Since then, however, various social developments, spurred on by the opening up of Ireland to international influences, have led to a measure of secularization within Irish society. Many Catholic Irish people have distanced themselves from the moral teachings of the Church, with the development of socalled à la carte Catholicism and forms of individual spiritualities, and there has been a significant rise in the number of people who describe themselves as having no religion (now a larger minority at 6% of the population than the members of the Church of Ireland, according to the 2006 Census).

Since the mid-1990s, the influx of immigrants has led to a diversification of the religious makeup of the population—Muslims are now the third largest religious group, behind Catholics and members of the Church of Ireland, and represent 0.8% of the population; there has also been an influx of Orthodox Christians from eastern Europe. This phenomenon, combined with the relative secularization, is putting into question the overall influence of the Catholic Church in Irish society and loosening the cultural ties between Irish identity and Catholicism, while it still appears too early to describe the Republic as a post-Catholic or even a post-Christian state.

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