The Horrible History Of The Catholic Church In Ireland

In light of shocking recent revelations about child abuse in Catholic Church run schools we publish here the chapter on the history of the Catholic Church in Ireland taken from James O’Toole’s book “The Irish State And Revolution.”

Staff at St. Mary’s nursing home on Dublin’s Merrion Road got an email from the general manager telling them the home was closing down. Management claimed that funding was insufficient and they couldn’t meet regulatory standards. The staff were Covid-19 heroes, avoiding any case of Covid-19 among the old and disabled residents. By August 2020 there were 19 residents left. They were to be moved out by the Sisters of Charity, who ran the home. Staff were furious.

Why were the Sisters of Charity closing the home? The nuns even claimed they had no money to pay the hard-working staff their redundancy payments. The Sisters of Charity had run Magdalene Laundries in the past and ran the nearby St. Vincent’s Hospital. In 2018 the order had an income of €8 million and St. Vincent’s private hospital had made a lot of money from the state during the Covid-19 crisis - taxpayers were handing over €110 million a month to rent private hospital beds. Something didn’t add up. 

The controversy over Church governance of the new maternity hospital led to the Sisters of Charity stepping down from officially running the hospital in 2017. But the hospital is not being transferred to the Irish state - it’s being transferred to a new holding company called St. Vincent’s Holdings CLG. James Menton, chair of St Vincent’s Healthcare Group, confirmed the site was being sold by the nuns at “commercial rates”.

Between the 31st Dec 2017 and 31st Dec 2018, the gross income at St. Mary’s was €5,975,458 and their costs came to €5,736,031. They got €4,775,768 from the Government and local authorities, while €1,199,690 came from other funding sources. So what’s the problem? Even the HSE complained that the nuns had made no engagement with them about saving the centre. Were they cashing in at the expense of these old and disabled people? What would Jesus, son of a poor carpenter, who smashed up banker’s tables - kicking them out of the temple - think of this callous greed on the part of his ‘brides’, the Sisters? Were they sacrificing the residents and the brave workers for another property deal? They were adept at buying and selling property.

In 2019 they put the Stella Maris convent on Howth Head up for sale at a nice little price of €3.5 million. The Sisters of Charity said they were selling it to fund ongoing ‘charity work’. In 2001 they had gone to war with the National Council for the Blind (NCB) after selling some of the Merrion Road site for £35 million: no surprise at that price for prime real estate in the heart of Dublin 4. These landlords with rosary beads claimed they couldn’t give the NCB a share despite there being a previous agreement to do so. Very Christian - stealing from the blind.

When the Sisters of Charity were asked to part with some of their vast €233 million property portfolio to fund redress to victims of abuse at their hands, they refused. They’d put €3 million into a fund for victims of child abuse and then wouldn’t release the funds. They hired a lawyer to question Dublin City Council plans to zone some of the land owned by religious orders as Z15, which would mean the land was “resource land” - to be used for the benefit of the community. They jumped into action - taking the council to court. They claimed the requirement to build social housing or use the land for public good infringed on their rights as property owners. In the end the nuns won the case in the Commercial Court. God forbid their land was used to build housing for the poor. While they were wheeling and dealing on the property market, their charitable status meant they had put their hand out for €3 million in state funds in 2018. 

The Sisters of Charity weren’t the only property developers in the Catholic Church. An investigation by the Irish Examiner showed the Church had over 1.5 million properties spread over every county in Ireland. From 2001 to 2011 alone they made over €660 million from selling land. 56% of the property in Church hands was in the names of individual priests and 20% of all their properties were houses. By 2017 Church-owned schools, disability services and hospitals were valued at almost €4 billion. That doesn’t even include the 3,000 schools that were run by dioceses or parishes and not directly run by religious orders. One 9-acre site in Drumcondra in Dubin was put on the market for €100 million. These are vast sums of money.

Many of these buildings were built by putting immense pressure on poor people to donate what little they had to the Church and to transfer everything they owned in their will. You would be “ashamed to worship the Great God of their fathers in the poor and primitive chapel over the way”, it was suited only to the “circumstances of a people in chains” said Dr. Thomas Croke, Archbishop of Cashel and Emly, to the starving poor of the area in 1880. Freedom would come by handing over your money to the wealthy clergy so that they could build their chapels and luxurious homes - “poor women rushed forward with their pence, and hats that were sent through the crowd came back overladen.” 

The Church has been a pillar of the capitalist establishment in Ireland since before the formation of the Irish state. Their role increased in the wake of Ireland’s counter revolution. The state deprived workers of welfare and allowed the Church to step in and take control of provision of safety nets for the poor. They gave them the schools, the hospitals and allowed them to persist as some of the biggest and wealthiest landowners in the Irish state. Socialist James Connolly had written about how the Church elite were on the side of the rich, and he explained how the Church had excommunicated Ireland’s heroes and stood against all our rebellions.

At first the British Empire oppressed the Catholic Church - they had outlawed the priests in 1623 but they quickly changed their tune in the 1790s when revolution raised its head. With Wolfe Tone and the United Irishmen rising up and taking inspiration from the French Revolution, the Empire felt threatened and turned to the Bishops to help keep the Irish people down. In return the Empire established a college at Maynooth to educate new priests. The Church condemned the rebels and asked their flock to remain “loyal” to the British government. Those who ran the Empire saw how useful the Catholic Church was. British policy towards the Church was transformed. The Empire recognised a friend of the status quo. They encouraged Church control of the schools. “Give me a child until the age of seven and I will give you the man” as the Jesuits used to say. 

The Young Irelanders, the rebels of 1847, were condemned from the pulpits at Sunday sermons. During the famine the priests ordered starving peasants to respect their landlords and “pay their rent”. They taught the Irish peasant to endure suffering without complaint in order to harvest a reward after death. The Fenian movement, they preached, deserved “hell fire” for standing up to the British Empire. Bishop Moriarty of Kerry said: “Hell was not hot enough, nor eternity long enough, to punish such miscreants!” Everytime the Irish rose in rebellion the Bishops were to be found defending the powerful.

From the viewpoint of Catholic ‘moral’ teaching the 1916 Rising “couldn’t be regarded as justified”. At the time churchmen were divided over the legitimacy of the Rising. Even bishops well-disposed to the rebels, such as Edward O’Dwyer of Limerick, remained silent in their public pronouncements, although privately he and Bishop Patrick Foley of Kildare and Leighlin disputed the relative merits of the question in their letters. Foley told his priests not to give absolution in the confessional to any rebel who was prepared to kill for his cause. I suppose they wanted the rebels to “turn the other cheek” when confronted with heavy artillery and the bombing of O’Connell Street from a gunship. The role of the Church often wasn’t clear to the rebels though - the Rosary was said a few times in the GPO. Catholic identity was often mixed up with national identity in the liberation movement which gave the Church elite cover to position themselves as a powerful force in post-revolutionary Ireland. While religion was a comfort to the Irish poor, it was a means of controlling the poor for the Irish rich.

Rank and file clergy joined the national liberation movement - 10% of delegates to the first post-Rising Sinn Féin conference were priests. When Thomas Ashe died on hunger strike in September 1917 the Church hierarchy monopolised the national mourning. While the Church condemned violence by the rebels during the War of Independence they were positioning themselves as the “conscience” of the Irish people. When they condemned British violence they did it in a way that made a dig at any socialist elements in the liberation movement.

British behaviour “has a parallel only in the horrors of Turkish atrocities or in the outrages of the Red Army of Bolshevist Russia.” The Black & Tans were more akin to the nasty Tsarist White Army than the socialist Bolsheviks - but the Church were declaring what liberatory tactics were acceptable and which weren’t. “What lies ahead?” said Kevin O’Higgins, “a Social Revolution?” Both the Irish elite and the Church wanted to avoid a further radicalisation of the Irish people. Liberation from the English was one thing - but socialism had to be avoided at all costs. Cumann na nGaedheal leader William Cosgrave was a close friend of members of the Catholic hierarchy. When they were debating the formation of an upper house to the Dáil he proposed a “theological board which would decide if any enactments of the Dáil were contrary to Roman Catholic faith and morals or not.” 

After the War of Independence the Church came in behind the counter revolutionary state and aided its consolidation. The Church was given control over morality and began attacking women. In 1924 the government set up an Inter-Departmental Committee of Inquiry into Venereal Disease - the report indicated non-married people were having sex. The Church was furious - it represented far too much freedom for their tastes. The government began censorship, and free discussion on contraception wasn’t allowed to take place in the Dáil.

The future Blueshirt and chief of police Eoin O’Duffy reported there were already thousands of cases of abuse of children - a consequence of a virulent extreme Catholic morality that saw poor people as spreaders of “sin” and disease. But the Catholic ideology of sinfulness was married to the class fears of the Irish elite - they wanted to brutalise the Irish poor to make sure there was never a rerun of the revolutionary years. Now the irish elite were in the driving seat they worked hand in hand with the Church to make sure nothing would upset their comfort, even if that meant the systematic abuse and torture of thousands of women and children at the hands of the Church. 

In the 1930s, when crisis and unemployment led to a new growth of left wing ideas, Catholic extremists burned down union halls and radicals were chased out of the country. Jimmy Gralton had fought for independence; he’d taken part in the revolution against the Empire. He’d spent some time in the USA, but in the 1930s he set up a socialist group - the Revolutionary Workers Group - in Leitrim. Gralton set up a dance hall where people could socialise and discuss politics. The Church organised violent protests against the dances and in February 1933 Jimmy Gralton was arrested and deported.

His reward for standing up against the Empire and organising working class people was deportation.  He died in New York in December 1945. Censorship and repression became the norm. In 1931 Sinn Féin considered adopting a radical programme written by Peadar O’Donnell but capitulated to the Church when they were denounced by the Bishops. The Bishops and priests could use the Sunday sermon to denounce you and isolate you from the wider community. Any spark of intelligence or resistance to the established order had to be snuffed out as quickly as possible for fear of the flame spreading. They had to keep people in the dark. 

Cumann na nGaedheal had set up a “Committee on Evil Literature” in 1926 - the list of literature they considered evil included mainstream newspapers like the “News of the World”, women’s magazines like “Vogue” and all literature that mentioned birth control. In 1929 they set up the Censorship of Publications board and started banning books. While the fascists in Berlin burned books on bonfires the men in black frocks in Ireland dictated a government policy that removed books from circulation. But they also banned books on sex and marriage, and even banned science fiction.

They were policing the imagination of the Irish people - even our dreams had to be fenced in. Any mention of homosexuality, promiscuity, or prostitution was enough to get your book banned. All these boards, until at least the 1960s, were dominated by Catholic activists, mainly members of the Catholic Truth Society of Ireland and the Knights of Columbanus. The British newspapers with circulation in Ireland were forced to set up “Irish editions” that removed their more salacious reports and any mention of birth control. If they didn’t play ball they’d be banned. 

The register of banned books included ten Nobel laureates in literature: Anatole France, Sinclair Lewis, George Bernard Shaw, Thomas Mann, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, Mikhail Sholokhov, Henrich Böll, and Samuel Beckett. Shaw and Beckett were part of a very long list of Irish writers who were also targeted; it included James Joyce, Sean O’Casey, Liam O’Flaherty, Sean Ó Faoláin, Frank O’Connor, Francis Stuart, Austin Clarke, George Moore, Kate O’Brien, Maura Laverty, Walter Macken, Edna O’Brien, Brendan Behan, Benedict Kiely, Brian Moore and John McGahern. They were ‘the best banned in the land’, Brendan Behan joked, after he joined the list in 1958 following the prohibition on his book Borstal Boy.

By the 1950s Patrick Kavanagh could describe living in Ireland as like ‘living at a wake’ where no one wanted to disturb the mourners with a single thought. What were we mourning? For our failed revolution and the counter revolutionary oppression that was heaped on us by the Irish elite - with help from the Bishops. In 1967 the banning of books was limited to 12 years, a relaxation of the censorship laws that saw 5,000 previously banned books enter circulation. 

Archbishop McQuaid wrote the constitution with Eamonn DeValera in the late 1930s and that represented the culmination of the counter revolution in Ireland. By 1949 the Vatican could describe Ireland as the “most Catholic country in the world”. In 1951 Irish unions told the Pope they were “humbly prostrate at the feet of his Holiness!”  The Labour Party wasn’t much better. When Doctor Noel Browne proposed healthcare for mothers and children he was hammered by the Church and faced opposition from Labour. Browne was a socialist who had seen childhood poverty first hand growing up and wanted to bring in health reforms like the newly launched NHS in Britain. 

Archbishop McQuaid argued that public health measures would lead to ‘socialism’ and feared that access to healthcare might include information about birth control. The Church preferred working class children dying of poverty and preventable disease over basic healthcare provision. They also didn’t want to lose their monopoly over the hospitals, orphanages, charities and schools. They used that monopoly to torture and abuse. 

On a Summer’s night in 1945 14 year old Gerard Fogarty arrived at his parent’s door dripping with his own blood and barely standing. He’d been incarcerated in St Joseph’s Industrial School in County Limerick for skipping regular school. He never could have imagined the horrors that awaited him in the Church-run Industrial schools. One day after he was caught trying to run away, he was beaten with a leather whip until his back was covered in open wounds. He was forced to stand naked in the saltwater of the Shannon Estuary, the salt burning into the open wounds.

He ran away that night, making his way across 32 miles of countryside until he reached his mother. “By the time I got home, the bleeding on my back had stopped and the blood had dried into my shirt. I must have been a terrible sight. My mother nearly tore the hair out of her head when she saw me.” 100 ordinary people marched on the offices of a local politician demanding justice. The demand for an inquiry was deemed “unnecessary” by the government and the Christian Brother who flogged Gerard was transferred to another industrial school in Salthill, Co Galway at the end of 1946. This was standard procedure - the abusers were just moved around. 

Children of the poor were brutalised in a network of child prisons across the state. This system of abuse of children was part of a wider system of control of women and the whole working class. 105,000 kids were committed to the ‘industrial schools’ from 1868 to 1969, with 8,000 imprisoned at any one time. The system had first been set up by the British, who took revenge on the children of the poor through networks of workhouses and industrial schools. By the 1920s the British system was being reformed, but in Ireland the counter revolutionary state wanted to maintain this system of brutalisation.

They wanted to break the back of the poor, and the religious orders would provide the rod. By 1924 there were more children locked up in Ireland than in the whole of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland put together. The horrific Catholic attitude to women and girls saw huge numbers of girls enter the Irish system - there were 1,123 in the whole British system in 1933, compared to 3,628 in Ireland. There was a clear class system in this child prison network - the children of the middle classes were treated very differently to children of the working classes. Wealthier children were sent to better institutions - they were still bad places to be, but less so than the hell the poor kids were sent to. 

Children of ‘fallen women’ were sent to these prison-like institutions - the children of “first offenders” (who had only had one child outside of marriage) were treated less severely than the children of “recidivists” (those women who had had more than one child outside of marriage). The Church was obsessed with sexuality and controlling Irish women. Children of those guilty of these sexual ‘crimes’ were monitored for a year to make sure the “poor genes” of the mothers hadn’t caused “abnormalities” in the children.

The philosophy behind this cruelty directed against women and children was a mix of sadist Catholicism mixed with the eugenics popular with the far right of the time. But children could end up in this monstrous system for skipping school, for “wandering”, or if they were pointed out to the “cruelty men” working for the Irish Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. Priests and Guards could get a kid shipped off. The threat of losing your children was used to discipline poor families. 25,000 children in these institutions were “poor law children” - they’d been born in workhouses and industrial schools and knew no other life. 

And it was barely life. Children were stripped naked and beaten. There was endemic child sexual abuse. The children were in a constant state of terror and starvation. In 1945 a report noted the “grave situation which has arisen regarding the feeding and clothing” of the kids. Even in the 1950s when funding was increased, the majority of children were still malnourished. They went to bed every night with hunger pains in their little bellies, and in fear of night-time visits by a rapist Christian Brother or a sadist nun. Many of the industrial schools were run as for-profit institutions, with profitable farms connected to the school. In the 1950s, at St. Conleth’s in Daingean, County Offaly, the cows on the profitable farm were better fed than the children.

At that time the religious orders frequently complained that too many kids were getting probation, and their slave labour force was diminishing, leading to less profits. They began an organised system of touting for more children. The Church had a network of loyal social workers who would send them a supply of slave labour. They sent these social workers across the country capturing slave workers for their child labour force. But this was no sinister conspiracy - the Church worked hand in hand with the state and the Gardaí. Rowdy working class people could be disciplined with the threat of taking their children away. 

In Artane 800 boys worked on the 290-acre farm; they repaired shoes, made clothes and fixed bedding. By 1962 there were still 100 boys working in the kitchens, the laundry and the workshops. Discipline over this child labour force was maintained through routine humiliation and regular violent beatings. Even the famous Artane Boys Band was run as a commercial operation, earning money for performances. In the institutions for girls the children were used as workers, the nuns doing little or nothing.

The children cleaned the toilets for the nuns, cleaned the floors and did all the clothing repair work - they were slaves. The boys and girls got little or no real education. They left these effective prisons with severe PTSD and no knowledge of the outside world and so they often ended up homeless. The nuns would place many of the girls as domestic servants with wealthy families, with the threat of being re-institutionalised in a Magdalene Laundry if they disobeyed. The girls took that threat seriously - even talking to a Magdalene woman would see a girl beaten black and blue. 

The Church hierarchy knew about the abuse of these children. The cover-up went all the way to the top. When Father Paul McGennis was on trial in 1997 for his abuse of two young girls it was revealed that Archbishop John Charles McQuaid had known about the case in the 1960s. The priest had sent pornographic images of children for development in a British photo lab. The lab contacted the Gardaí who, instead of investigating, contacted the Archbishop. McQuaid said it was fine, he’d make sure the priest got ‘treatment’. In the 1960s RTE asked for permission to film in the schools.

The Archbishop denied them permission to do so. The Kennedy Report published in 1970 saw the industrial school system begin to be dismantled. Irish capitalism had grown massively during the course of the 1960s and the influx of corporate funds from all over the world, but particularly from the USA, saw the ruling class desire a slight rationalisation of the control mechanisms of the Irish state. They would dismantle some of the most brutal aspects of post-Independence class rule while leaving the Church in control of education and healthcare. It would take another two decades of campaigning by victims to begin to get their voices heard. 

The Magdalene Laundries were part of a whole repressive machinery built to control and oppress women. The 1937 Constitution, written by Archbishop McQuaid, crowned the counter revolution. It was all about protecting the private wealth of the rich and subjugating Irish women in particular. In the North the Orange politicians preached an equally vile set of religious mantras designed to keep the masses down. Northern women would be denied the rights won by women in Britain.

Both states had a vile religious dressing - North and South were mirror images of each other. 10,000 women had been sent to the laundries since Irish independence. In 1993 155 bodies were found in a mass grave on the grounds of one of these laundries in the leafy Dublin suburb of Donnybrook. The Donnybrook laundry had served as a workhouse for “fallen women” from 1837 to 1992.  The mass grave was only discovered because of the property deals of the Sisters of Charity. The nuns had lost money gambliing on the stock exchange and were forced to make up a bit of cash by selling off some land. The developer found the bodies. The women in the graves died in secrecy, hidden in the shadows cast by the alliance between the Church and State. 

They were there to “redeem” themselves. “Redemption might sometimes involve a variety of coercive measures, including shaven heads, institutional uniforms, bread and water diets, restricted visiting, supervised correspondence, solitary confinement and even flogging.” wrote historian Helen J. Self. One survivor, Mary Smith, was imprisoned for being raped. She was to be punished for the “crime” of being a victim of a rapist.

They cut off her hair and made her take a new name. Her “redemption” path included being given some of the hardest manual work, regular beatings and being made to sleep out in the cold. Marina Gambold remembered being forced to eat off the floor because she dropped a cup. She worked in the laundry from 8am to 6pm every day and was given only bread and dripping to eat. “I was starving with the hunger” she told the BBC. But worse was to be revealed about these hellish workhouses.

In 2014 the bodies of at least 796 children were found dumped in a septic tank in Tuam in County Galway. It was the site of the Bon Secours Mother & Baby home. “A great many people are always asking what is the good of keeping these children alive? I quite agree that it would be a great deal kinder to strangle these children at birth than to put them out to nurse.” said Doctor Ella Webb in 1924. The doctor’s comments were published without scandal in the Irish Times.

This was the hell that the counter revolution had created in Ireland. The establishment believed it was better to strangle children born outside of marriage than to let them live. Catherine Corless, whose investigation uncovered the mass grave, explained “The county council knew at the time there were remains there, the local guards knew, the religious knew. And yet it was all nicely covered up and forgotten about.” Corless discovered that ages of the dead ranged from 3 weeks to 3 years old and that many had starved to death.

The discovery of the Donnybrook grave had made the laundries front page news in the 1990s - which led to many survivors coming forward to tell their stories of abuse. Even the UN was forced to demand the Vatican look into the matter. While Enda Kenny apologised to the victims in 2013, the religious orders were allowed to hold back funds meant for redress. In 2020 the Sisters of Charity alone still owed €3 million to the compensation fund - exactly the same amount the nuns were given by the government in 2018.

The Magdalene Restorative Justice Scheme made awards of €26 million to 700 women. This money didn’t come from the religious orders. The nuns continued to try and excuse themselves: “We did not seek out the women, we provided a shelter when either requested or directed. The laundries were the only means of support for decades.” The McAleese report repeated a lot of these justifications from the religious orders: it was criticised by survivors, by human rights groups and by the UN. Testimony from survivors were “stories” yet the committee took the excuses of the Church at face value. Only one member of the committee, Martin McAleese, even met with any of the survivors. This mass abuse of women was connected to the development of Irish capitalism. 

Socialist Goretti Horgan explains how:

“Before the famine attitudes to sex remained open, were often earthy, and celebrated women’s sexuality as well as men’s.”

Even in old tales St.Brigid had helped a young woman terminate a pregnancy. Big changes in people’s lives came after the Famine. Before the Famine women accounted for half of the non-agricultural workforce, they were engaged in spinning cotton, wool and linen. But as spinning declined the Famine hit farming families. The larger tenant farmers had fared better in the Famine - they married later and didn’t divide the land among all their sons, leaving it to only one. There was an incentive for these people to marry later and to limit the number of children they had - this in turn led to greater control and oppression of women. For the urban poor, Horgan explains, sex was the “poor man’s opera” - an escape from alienation that, combined with the prohibition of contraceptives,  imposed constant pregnancies on poorer working women.

Most priests came from the wealthy tenant class and so the austere values of that class were given a nasty religious slant by their priest sons. As Horgan points out:

“In 1808, of the 205 students in Maynooth seminary, 78 percent were the sons of farmers – and it was only the larger farmers who could afford to send their sons there.”

There was a connection between the changing economic needs of the wealthier tenant farmers and the Catholic doctrine of the “sinfulness” of women. The religious ideas helped give moral justification to their economic needs - they wanted a moral code that protected their land from subdivision and the Catholic religion provided the perfect justifications. 

The desperation caused by the Famine, the lack of job opportunities for women, the change in farming and the recruitment of the priests from that larger tenant farming class - all led to an increase in power for the Church and the imposition of a new extremist morality. The number of nuns in Ireland increased massively  - but they also had to pay the Church a ‘dowry’. They were also drawn from the wealthier classes. There were nuns from working class backgrounds who entered the orders but they were often tasked with manual labour and duties like washing dishes or cleaning clothes.

Sometimes people would join the religious orders with a genuine motivation to do good in the world - but the realities of Irish capitalism and the nature of the Church as an institution would eventually grind those people down. When they discovered what was happening behind closed doors they mostly kept their mouths shut and convinced themselves that somehow the Church was doing more good than bad. Some orders set up soup kitchens or helped the homeless. But ingratiating themselves into the lives of the lower classes would then be used against those classes when, for example, a big strike broke out. The local priest would often condemn the struggle and act as a mediator to bring it to an end. 

When the Irish Revolution was co-opted by the Irish upper classes they consolidated a counter revolutionary state with the help of the Church. During the revolution women had played a role in revolutionary organisations like Cumann na mBan. Women were the eyes and ears of the revolutionary movement - they got arms, provided safe houses and spied for the rebellion. The Irish Free State banned Cumann na mBan in 1923 and jailed many of its members.

The people leading the new Free State were determined to defend their control over the wealth of the nation and bring the “era of social flux to an end” - that meant beating women back into a traditional box. When faced with rising unemployment in the 1930s the ruling class turned on women workers. In 1935 Section 16 of the Conditions of Employment Act allowed Minister for Industry and Commerce, Sean Lemass, to prohibit the employment of women in industry. The Labour Party supported the move and even opposed equal pay for women. But the division in the working class, between men and women, only increased the power of the bosses. 

The capitalist system relies on workers to produce profits for the bosses but it also wants women to produce the next generation of workers “for free” for the capitalists. When women fight for the right to work they are paid less, but are also burdened with the double task of producing profit for the rich while also producing the next generation of workers. The division between men and women in the workforce also helps the bosses to control the working class as a whole. In situations where one section of the working class is oppressed, the entire working class is weakened and gets paid less. By convincing male workers that women were their competition for jobs the Irish government was weakening the women and the men. The Church was happy to see women pushed back into the home in a “traditional” role - the women were disempowered.

That’s not to say that women should be discouraged from having a family - it’s to say that they should be empowered to do whatever they choose and that society should be structured to support them. The raising of the next generation is a social burden that all should contribute to. It’s not the woman’s “job” and it’s sexist to assume that it is. But while ruling class decisions are sometimes governed by political concerns, profit is their God. Their greed eventually led to changes in the Irish economy including the necessity of expanding the workforce to include women. 

The transformation of the Irish economy during the 1960s began to undermine Church control. At the beginning of the 1900s most people in Ireland lived in the countryside. It was predominantly a rural society. The 1950s were miserable years for the Irish working class with 400,000 forced to emigrate. Two fifths of Ireland’s teenagers had left the country by 1961. The Church dominated all debates - from the schools to the parliament. But building the Irish economy up behind tariff walls had reached an impasse and the Irish elite made a decisive turn towards international capitalism in the 1950s. As the Irish economy hitched itself to the international market there was a decade long surge of growth in manufacturing, with a rate of expansion matched by only four other countries in the world.

By 1971 women represented nearly one third of the expanding workforce. Emigration was reversed and there was a net inflow of workers by the 1970s. Working class confidence began to grow with a surge in strike actions. This changing economic and social reality was in conflict with the old methods of controlling the population. Young irish women with a job and money in their pockets weren’t as willing to let the Church dictate how they lived their lives. The Church had long oppressed Irish women in particular - not just because of the idea of original sin but because of the nature of Irish class society. As women began to enter the workforce their newfound independence pushed up against Church control. 

By 1983 there were 389,000 women in the labour force, of whom 128,000 were married. The removal of the marriage bar in 1973 meant more employment opportunities for women. The Church responded to these changes in women’s lives by kicking back. The Women’s Right to Choose Group was set up in February 1980 to campaign for free, legal and safe contraception and abortion on demand. Four months later the Irish Society for the Protection of the Unborn Child (SPUC) was launched, followed in May 1981 by the establishment of the “Pro-Life Amendment Campaign”.

By 1983 the Church backlash and their overwhelming influence over Irish political life meant they had won the insertion of the 8th amendment into the constitution. It read:

“The state acknowledges the right to life of the unborn and, with due regard to the equal right to life of the mother, guarantees in its laws to respect, and as far as practicable, by its laws to defend and vindicate that right.”

Women were now to be of equal legal standing to a bunch of cells. Four months after the 8th amendment campaign had been won by the Church a 15 year old girl gave birth alone in a grotto to the Virgin Mary in Granard in Longford. The teenage Anne Lovett died alone that night, along with the baby she was carrying. The Church understood that a people filled with self hate and shame would never rise up.

By 1996 there were 488,000 women at work – an increase of 213,000 since 1971. There were 804,700 women in the labour market in 2019, resulting in a participation rate of 77.2%, up from 72.5% in the decade since 2009. That’s almost double the amount of working women since 1996. The Church’s ‘morality’ - lecturing working women that they shouldn’t control their own bodies, use contraception or engage in pre-marital sex - began to break down in the face of the realities of working life. The breakdown was also accelerated by the revelation of scandal after scandal in the 1990s.

Sexual abuse had been rampant in the Church since the foundation of the state. As we’ve seen the Church was populated with people from those classes above the working class, who felt threatened by the militancy of the Irish Revolution. When they were called upon by the new Irish elite to help them consolidate Irish capitalism the Church hierarchy leapt to the defence of the rich and took cruel revenge on the working class. The abuse that took place across the working class and poorer parts of the country was fueled by counter revolutionary class hatred coupled with a twisted religious ideology that declared all children were ‘sinners’.

Monsters like Priest Brendan Smyth were allowed to ruin lives with impunity for decades - all with help from the Church hierarchy, the police force and the state. They could only get away with it because the state machine in Ireland was involved in the abuse and cover-up. 

Smyth was from Belfast and joined the Norbertine Catholic religious order in 1945. “Over the years of religious life, it could be that I have sexually abused between 50 and 100 children - that number could even be double or perhaps even more,” he told one doctor. His order knew he was abusing kids in the 1970s but never once thought of contacting the RUC or the Guards. The Norbertine Order shielded him, moving him to new parishes and even to different countries, knowing all along that he was a serial child abuser.

Cardinal Sean Brady admitted that in 1975 he did his “duty” when he asked two victims of Smyth to swear an ‘oath of silence’. Broadcast on Thursday, October 6th 1994, the TV programme, Suffer Little Children, revealed that nine extradition warrants by the authorities in Northern Ireland had been lying in the Irish Attorney General’s office in Dublin unprocessed on the desk of a senior official, Matty Russell, for seven months. The state was in no hurry to arrest rapist priests. The combination of the mass grave discovery in Donnybrook and the flood of testimony from survivors, who were interviewed on TV, saw loyalty to the Catholic Church collapse in the 1990s.

Church attendance had been 91% in 1973 but by 2005, the Autumn of the Celtic Tiger years, it had fallen to 34%. It recovered a little when the economic crash came but mostly among older people and never again rose to the heights of previous decades. The brutality of Church influence over the laws of the land was made clear to everyone in the early 1990s with the so-called “X case”. 

In December 1991 a 14 year-old girl was raped. The poor girl was suicidal, but abortion was banned in Ireland. The family went to the Gardaí to ask for advice about the rape but indicated they were going to travel to Britain for a termination. The Irish state jumped into action - not against the rapist mind you - no, the Attorney General Harry Whelehan used the 8th amendment of the constitution to prevent her from leaving the country. Fine Gael’s Declan Costello granted the injunction in the High Court in February 1992. The family were banned from leaving the country for 9 months.

They were prisoners of the Irish state. Usually the Irish state could act with impunity in cases like this, they could be brushed under the carpet and the immense suffering of Irish women and girls could be hidden. But Ireland had changed in the years since 1983. The decision was met with an explosion of popular protest. Thousands poured onto the streets chanting “let her go!” The protest in Dublin saw over 10,000 take to the streets - many in the crowd were schoolgirls who had marched out of school in protest.

People power forced the establishment to make a U-turn. Abortion was now possible if there was “a real and substantial risk to the life, as distinct from the health, of the mother”. 

Later the same year Bishop Eamonn Casey was revealed to have had a son with Irish American Annie Murphy. More stories emerged of clergy having children with their housekeepers. The crack in Church rule allowed more people to push for change, with homosexuality legalised in 1993, followed in 1995 with the legalisation of divorce. None of these changes would have been possible without the massive opposition shown to the established order on the streets. Almost every working class family in Ireland had a connection to the horrors of Church rule.

In the 1990s my grandfather, Fran O’Toole, went to get his pension when he retired from a lifetime of hard work on building sites. When he applied for his pension he was told there was confusion about who Fran O’Toole was. Fran O’Toole simply didn’t exist. My dad was furious - how could he not exist? He’d paid tax for decades. The state had acknowledged his existence by taxing the man and housing his family in social housing in Fatima Mansions flats. 

Investigation by my father revealed that my grandfather had been adopted and the O’Tooles weren’t his family at all. He was kept in the dark about this until he was in his mid 60s. Who kept him in the dark? The Church. He was one of the many babies that had gone through St.Patrick’s Guild. His real mother was from the small village of Craughwell in Galway and had given him up to the nuns. He was born in 1923 - just as the wave of revolution was defeated. He was then given to the O’Tooles in South Dublin where he was put to work on their land. He never learned to read or write and eventually started working on Dublin building sites. When we were growing up none of us knew any of this and neither did he. When the family brought him to his real mother’s grave he said “I don’t know these people”.

How could it mean anything to him? He died in a house fire in his home in Drimnagh in September 2009. This was one year after the bank guarantee and a round of austerity that included cuts to fire services. Both ends of his life were framed by the gross injustices of Irish capitalism. He wasn’t the only child to pass through Church hands - thousands of irish children were trafficked by the religious orders.  

St. Patrick’s Guild was a Mother and Baby home, set up in 1910 and then later run by the Sisters of Charity under the authority of the Archbishop of Dublin. The nuns ran a decades long child trafficking operation. Many babies ended up being transported to America. Estimates suggest that thousands of babies underwent this fate, growing up in foreign countries with new identities and new lives. Ireland’s Department of Foreign Affairs announced that its archives contained as many as 2,000 files. Archbishop McQuaid was behind the directive governing the adoptions by Americans of Irish Catholic children between 1948 and 1962. He stripped the mothers of all future rights to their children.

In 1996 it was revealed that over 2,000 babies were taken from unmarried mothers in the 1950s and 1960s and exported to the USA. You could be rejected by adoption agencies in the USA but still buy yourself an Irish baby. Adoption was supposed to offer an alternative to the child prison system - but the Church turned it into another money-making racket and ruined so many lives in the process. The Order of Sacred Heart nuns exported 850 babies and admitted it was the most lucrative source of income for their Mother and Baby home. 

There was never anything ‘natural’ about the hold of the Catholic Church over the Irish population. When I was young I was very religious, went to Church, read the Bible - but I always had a taste for the apocalyptic passages in the book of revelations. I suppose even the end of the world sometimes seemed preferable to Fatima Mansions flats. When I got older and started to read more I had my baptism overturned and got the cert back from Archbishop’s House with “cessation of Church membership by formal act of defection recognised” written at the bottom. I was reading a lot of Richard Dawkins at the time until I realised he was a snob who looked down on poor people. Oppressed people often need the crutch of religion - but he was speaking from a position of privilege and power.

“Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.”

Here Karl Marx captures how religion is an opium, but also explains why people feel they need opium - because they are suffering. The problem with Richard Dawkins wasn’t that he was wrong in claiming religion was an illusion - it was that he didn’t understand why social circumstances made such an illusion necessary. He never asked why people needed a crutch and he never cared to ask if they could learn to walk on their own. He had no sympathy for the poor, whereas Marx did. 

When you live in a heartless alienated world you cry out for some connection - sometimes people are so desperate for connection they reach out for imaginary consolation. It’s important that ruthless criticism of religious institutions doesn’t become a lack of sensitivity towards other working class and poor people - people who are suffering, who are oppressed. To this day I carry a St. Christopher medal on my keyring. I don’t believe in God but my grandmother gave it to me a few days before she died of lung cancer.

She said it would ‘protect me on my travels’. She was a solid working class woman with a real sense of working class justice and she had an instinctive sharing attitude. She also had a tough life and was consoled by the idea of there being justice somewhere, somehow. Her generation had made it through the dark times - she was born in Ireland in the 1920s, just as the counter revolution built its stranglehold over the Irish people.

But people like her weren’t stupid. They had a contradictory attitude to religion. It was a comfort but they could also turn on the clergy when there was an injustice. I remember my gran telling me about a nun who had put her foot on the back of my gran’s neck as she was cleaning a floor in a hospital. “Do you think this is clean enough?” said the nun. My gran stood up and decked the nun. She wouldn’t let anyone treat her like a slave. But that led to hard times as standing up would often leave you without work or isolated in the community. It was easier to stand up in the bigger working class areas of Dublin than, say, in the small villages in rural Ireland where the Church could ruin your life. 

The fact that people want justice in Heaven is often because justice is denied to us on Earth. If religion is the flowers with which people decorate their chains then we have to fight to remove the chains - the decorations then become superfluous. As we’ve seen: it took the Famine and changes in the way people farmed to increase the hold of the Church over the Irish people, and the Empire had moved from repression of the Catholic Church to its promotion, when they understood the Church could oppose rebellion. In George Orwell’s ‘Animal Farm’ the Raven ‘Moses’ works as a spy for the farmer: “In Sugarcandy Mountain it was Sunday seven days a week, clover was in season all the year round, and lump sugar and linseed cake grew on the hedges.

The animals hated Moses because he told tales and did no work, but some of them believed in Sugarcandy Mountain, and the pigs had to argue very hard to persuade them that there was no such place.” Moses represented the Church trying to convince workers to give up the fight for change in this world with the promise of a caring community in the sky. In Ireland the Church were often the only social support offered to poor people by our greedy ruling class. Church-run charities delivered food parcels to the poor or ran hostels for the homeless. The Irish state was happy to farm out social supports to the Church and the Church in return offered its control over the people to the Irish elite. 

The Church helped to uphold the very inequality that beat people onto their knees and then benefited from the desperation that was created in people. Oppressed people long for salvation. The Church made sure to deprive people of access to knowledge of real liberation. When economic growth again changed people’s lives and attitudes, the Church began to lose influence. That was combined with grotesque revelations of child abuse and rape, while resistance by women against the conservative consensus helped to break it down. But the fight was far from over when the 1990s ended. The grotesque 8th amendment remained and the Church still controlled the hospitals and schools.

Two things coalesced to bring about the destruction of the 8th amendment - the ruling class couldn’t go on in the old way and Irish women wouldn’t accept being ruled in the old way anymore. The austerity years saw a hollowing out of the political system with votes for the main right wing parties declining. To arrest their collapsing votes the establishment understood they needed to offer some progress to the Irish people - hoping they could let the steam out bit by bit, avoiding confrontation, but also placing themselves at the head of the change. But it was people power and campaigning by women that drove the movement for change forward in spite of the establishment. 

For many the Repeal vote was won in 2012 when Savita Halappanavar died of septicemia in a Galway Hospital. She asked for an abortion but was denied one because of a fetal heartbeat. Thousands came out on the streets in a huge outpouring of grief and rage. There were over 20,000 on the streets of Dublin on the 17th of November 2012, many carrying signs that read “never again!” An RTÉ exit poll after the repeal vote in 2018 showed that 76% of people “didn’t change their mind within the past five years”.

This mass movement came out on the streets again and again. There were massive protests - a 50,000-strong Abortion Rights Campaign march and smaller direct actions like the “Strike for Repeal” blocking of Dublin’s bridges. This blow to conservative Ireland turned many prejudices about the poor on their heads - we weren’t a reactionary mass waiting to be educated by our betters from the more privileged classes - working class people wanted change. But this blow to conservative Ireland shook the right wing base of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael and drove some of them further right. They believed they’d been betrayed by the “liberals” leading their parties. 

Fianna Fáil had always maintained a strong vote among the working class - they’d used nationalist rhetoric and the promise of economic advance to wed workers to their ‘national movement’. In reality they were the main party of Irish capitalism. Fine Gael were always the ‘B team’ for the elite. They could step in when Fianna Fáil were discredited and had to step back. The carousel of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael allowed the media to present them as the two sides of most debates - thereby cutting out any left wing counter to the right wing narrative. This broke down after 2008. In the 2011 election the Fianna Fáil/Green coalition faced a defeat, the worst defeat for any sitting government since the 1920s.

Fianna Fáil lost more than half of their first preference votes, and their vote collapsed in Dublin. But while Fine Gael and Labour benefited, once they started implementing austerity, their vote fell too. In the 2016 election Fine Gael lost 26 seats and Labour fell to just 7 seats. The establishment understood they had to embrace the progressive agenda in order to win back workers who were turning away from them. The massive water movement forced the establishment to retreat. They had to ditch their conservative Catholic base to be seen to be representing some form of progress. 

This didn’t come naturally to the right wing politicians. Leo Varadkar, for example, had spoken against adoption by LGBT couples and represented a socially conservative wing of Fine Gael. The ruling class often present the working class as an unruly ‘mob’ - uneducated and in need of leadership from above. But the ‘Yes’ votes for marriage equality, and the votes for repeal of the 8th amendment, in working class areas, were massive. As one canvasser reported: “Finglas was almost all Yes votes.

Every door that opened, people were saying, ‘No need to give us a leaflet, save them, there are four Yes votes here’. Whereas in Glasnevin, let’s just say it was far more mixed. In places like the inner-city, a very strong Yes, while in places like Stillorgan and south Dublin there’s more resistance.” The working class represented progress, whereas the wealthier areas were more mixed. This is no surprise. There are elements of the business classes who instinctively understand that their ability to police working class morality or the bodies of women are a key element of overall social control.

These people often have employees or even maids and are used to ordering people about. They don’t like any threat to that. The vote to repeal the 8th amendment passed 66.4% to 33.6%. But the figures were much higher in working class areas. The establishment wanted to allow limited progress in return for leaving the underlying inequalities of their tax haven economy untouched.

A significant minority within the bitter Catholic grassroots of the establishment right wing parties, people who were mourning the loss of Church control of the political system, turned to the far right. They had lost control over women’s bodies and so took out their anger by turning on asylum seekers and immigrants.

Many of our disability services, elderly care and palliative care are provided by Church-run charities. The same goes for most of our schools which are still run by religious orders or have boards dominated by religious orders. A Red C poll done in 2012 showed that 75% of parents would send their children to a secular school if they had the choice. 96% of our schools are still run by the Church, while 92% are Church owned. The Church is one of the biggest landowners in the state and still controls much of our health and education systems.

They were able to dominate Irish life for decades because of the aid they gave to the counter revolutionary state in keeping the Irish people on our knees. They made us hate ourselves; they filled us with guilt and doubt. Many families are still dealing with PTSD from generations of abuse. The Catholic Church was a key pillar of Irish capitalism.

It needs to be broken up as part of undermining a rotten system. Worship should be a private affair - it should be completely separated from the state. A socialist revolution would take the land from the Church and use it for public good. The schools and hospitals would be out of Church hands. A free secular education system would help to empower people - who would no longer suffer from alienation and want – and could begin to dream of building a paradise here on Earth rather than in the sky.