Catholic Ireland’s Dead and Gone

One hundred years ago today, W. B. Yeats, poet, senator of the Irish Free State, and proud member of the Anglo-Irish Protestant Ascendancy, rose to his feet on the Senate floor and expressed his ringing opposition to legislation that would ban divorce. “I think it is tragic that within three years of this country gaining its independence we should be discussing a measure which a minority of this nation considers to be grossly oppressive. . . . We against whom you have done this thing, are no petty people. We are one of the great stocks of Europe. We are the people of Burke; we are the people of Grattan; we are the people of Swift, the people of Emmet, the people of Parnell. We have created the most of the modern literature of this country. We have created the best of its political intelligence.” He went on to make a historic wager: “[I]f not I, my children will be able to find out whether we have lost our stamina or not. . . . If we have not lost our stamina then your victory will be brief, and your defeat final, and when it comes this nation may be transformed.”

As a member of the other “stock,” I will bite my tongue about the great poet’s outlook on the social and cultural history of Ireland. I am more interested in the accuracy of his prophesy about the ultimate victory of his people’s cause, as crystallized in the matter of divorce and its availability under Irish law. The questions ask themselves: What did Yeats’s children, in the end, “find out”? Did they live to see events that vindicated their father’s wager?

W. B. Yeats had two children, a daughter and a son. Anne was a painter and stage designer. Michael became a barrister, while also following his father into the Senate. They died in 2001 and 2007 respectively. Narrowly rejected in a 1985 referendum, divorce was approved in 1995 and legalized in 1996. Thus Ireland was indeed transformed in the manner Yeats envisaged, and Anne and Michael saw it happen. In other words, W. B. Yeats posthumously won the bet he placed in 1925 (with around five years to spare).

However, rather than pulling up after crossing the finish line that Yeats had spied in the distance, liberalizing Ireland gained new stamina in enormous quantities and accelerated. As Scott Yenor has written in these pages (“Sexual Counter-Revolution”), every society has a “sexual constitution”; what was once Ireland’s—Catholic and traditional—has been energetically replaced. In 2015, a referendum was passed allowing marriage to “be contracted in accordance with law by two persons without distinction as to their sex.” (Gender self-identification has also been possible under Irish law since that year.) And in 2018, another referendum replaced clauses acknowledging “the right to life of the unborn” with a provision for law to be made “for the regulation of termination of pregnancy.” Even when the referendum juggernaut finally ran out of road last year with the defeat of proposed changes to the Constitution concerning the family, the clauses that survived the desired cull have no material effect on Irish life.  

At the same time, the wider culture has been relentlessly signaling the defeat of the old sexual constitution and the triumph of the new. The government pays for St. Patrick to be portrayed as a trans burlesque stripper. A mindfulness expert exalts an Irish winner of the British reality show Love Island for “pulverising into dust” Catholic stereotypes of Irish womanhood. Our Lady of Knock is no longer, as the hymn had it, “Queen of Ireland”: The title has been officially transferred to Panti Bliss, the stage name of Rory O’Neill, a drag artist and gay rights activist, whose documentary The Queen of Ireland was jointly screened in Brussels by the United Nations and the Irish embassy. 

A few years ago, while leaving Shannon Airport in a rental car—I was home from England for a funeral—I passed a billboard ad for a new drama on RTE, the national broadcaster. The scene: a dimly lit hotel bedroom; a mess of bed sheets, abandoned shoes, and underwear; to one side, an ice bucket and an overturned champagne flute. The slogan: “Local drama always leaves its wedding ring at home.” It felt like part of a public relations campaign for adultery.

The examples—legal, political, cultural—of Catholic Ireland’s brief ascent and final collapse multiply exponentially. One can wonder what Yeats would have made of it. He did say in his Senate speech that Ireland would eventually become “an exceedingly tolerant country.” Nonetheless, one hundred years later, his prediction of a transformation feels, if anything, inadequate to the reality. “Evisceration” would be closer.