The historian JH Whyte, author of Church and State in Modern Ireland. asked at the start of his book whether the Irish were truly religious or merely adhering to social norms of churchgoing. He concluded that, since people did far more than the church demanded of them, they were obviously genuinely religious. The church said we had to go to confession and communion once a year; most of us went every week, some every day. Whyte was judging behaviour against the demands of church law, not against the social rules by which we were drilled into conformity in a rural country in which there was little other opportunity for meeting all your neighbours in the one place

So where did it all go wrong for Irish religion then? Most people presume that it was the sex and child abuse scandals which led to the Irish public ditching a clergy which failed to meet our standards.

Actually, the decline started in the 1960s, with the urbanisation of Ireland, and it was the women who started it. Around this time the Vatican reaffirmed the 'evils' of sexual deviancy and contraception. This led to questions as to why the church was condemning something which took the risk out of sexual relationships, why were we all following a narrow, strait-laced path when there was other possibilities which could now be chanced?

So perhaps it is the church itself that has led to the present day demise of religion. Certainly it has not helped them to remain so old fashioned in the modern world.