The Revelation of Ireland: 1995-2020
Diarmaid Perriter (Profile, $47, 552 pages)
Diarmaid Perriter is a professor of Irish history at University College in Dublin and a columnist for the Irish Times and at times his latest history of Ireland – he has written 14 books on Ireland – seems more journalism than history. That is certainly due to fact that this “history” covers relatively recent ground, from 1995 through 2020, a period of rapid change in a country that was once the “most Catholic” of European countries. The story of recent Ireland, in Perriter’s hands, is not told chronologically, but thematically, even though many of those themes overlap: party politics, the 1998 Good Friday Agreement that established peace in Northern Ireland, the country’s impressive economic boom and eventual bust, international relations, the Catholic Church’s declining influence in society, culture wars resulting from that decline including legalizing gay marriage and abortion, and the provision (or not) of public services.
The book is copiously researched (more than 2500 endnotes) and the story is briskly told. Writing such a history so soon after the events happened means the author is lacking the proper distance on which to make judgements on actors and causes. What is undeniable is the role that the Catholic Church played in the rapid transformation of Irish society. Due in large part to reports of the abuse of minors in the care of Catholic institutions (which Perriter points out was seldom committed by priests) and subsequent cover up, Ireland seems to have turned its back on the Church, and in doing so began following the West’s slide into secularism and social liberalism: decriminalizing homosexuality, permitting divorce, a 2010 law permitting same-sex civil relationships, electing an openly gay man as Taoiseach in 2017, a referendum approving abortion passing by a two-to-one margin in 2018. Yet Perriter points out that many commentators and historians have exaggerated the influence of the Catholic Church prior to these scandals and the loss of influence after them. The Catholic Church is still a vital institution in the Emerald Isle. Perriter highlights a striking consistency in many of Ireland’s problems, namely an “obsessive concern with secrecy” that enables the corruption of institutions. What the author reveals is that Ireland has become more like other European countries with mass migration, increased secularization, and embrace of materialism.
