The True Origins of Ireland’s 'Modern' Self-destructiveness

I still have a little hope left that, if the opportunity were to arise for an intelligent and spirited person or group to address in some way the bulk of the Irish population with a clear message rooted in sense and reason, it might remain possible to pull our country back from the edge of the abyss. In the main, this putative opportunity relates to conveying the true, profound and historical basis of the present wave of neo-plantation being imposed through abuses of the rule of law and a total absence of democratic input. This is in part because this current wave of re-peopling is born of the same inclinations and intentions as the original (and, in some respects, much lesser) initiative, but this understanding has been lost due to the weaponisation of a series of semantic tricks which break into the otherwise totally mummified religious conscience of the Irish race, ringing long-silent bells of Christian ‘compassion’ in a way that bypasses intellect and reason, and operating chiefly on the decidedly non-Christian instruments of neurolinguistic programming and mass hypnosis.

An irony of this is that it is driven by a generation of politicians which has done more to dismantle the collective religious consciousness of Ireland than any other, which is accompanied by the further mordancy that these actors have been aided by a cadre of mentally-defective bishops, themselves operating from instincts of guilt and self-protection, whose interpretations of Catholic teaching in the matter of migration are causing Thomas Aquinas to revolve in his ‘resting’ place in Toulouse.

Thus it is that the overwhelming majority of the present population has been bullied into giving away something that does not belong to them: ‘their’ country. And there’s an irony that puts all the others in the shade.

Look at this: Irish people today have become persuaded that their country does not really belong to them, and therefore that they ought to give it away to the first beggar with a long face who happens along, because Jesus apparently said so. The strange thing is that they are correct in believing that — in a certain sense — Ireland does not ‘belong’ to them: solely in that it belongs also to the dead generations and to generations of Irish people as yet unborn. In this sense, the current generations, while having rights of temporary ownership and occupation, have no rights of disposal which entitle them to give ‘their’ country away. Ireland is ‘theirs’ — ‘ours’ — solely in the sense that they/we are its caretakers, that they/we hold it in trust for future generations, and that we should continue to understand at all times that this duty-of-care is sacrosanct and imprescriptible.

It would help to break the current spell of stupidity if we could find ways of placing these facts in their proper historical context. One of the problems is that history is being twisted by the national gaslighters to make it seem that it speaks in the opposite direction — that because our people were forced out before, then our children’s children ought to be forced out in their turn, by way of somehow balancing the scales. This is utterly garbage thinking. I refer here to the scandalous trope claiming that because ‘we travelled all over the world’, the world has now an entitlement to displace our children and send strangers to take their places. Another absurd fallacy is that, because our country once ‘supported’ eight million people (my scare-quotes) it should now again support at least a commensurate number of total foreigners.

This is perhaps the most obscene of all the disgusting lies being peddled in this latest attempt to remove the Irish from their homeland, for it was the potato that enabled the population of this island to rise, in the early 1800s, to above eight million, this explosion becoming, in short order, a tool of genocide, the ensuing blight and the nature of Ireland’s capture and pillaging ensuring the destruction of the weak and the driving out of the strong. If this had been the story of a different race — one primed, let us say, for maximum self-protection, the words ‘eight million’ would now be a sacred incantation; for us poor Paddies they have become an instrument of shaming and blackmail.

It is beyond disgraceful that this fact (that Ireland’s population remains smaller than it was then) is being used by the birds of carrion hovering above the sickening body of our beloved country to argue for the right of foreigners to claim her sweet land and light. But the most incredible development in a long while is the the recent announcement that the European Court of Justice (ECJ) has issued an ‘opinion’ to the effect that the Government of Ireland cannot cite responsibility for the needs of its own citizens to excuse any failure to house outsiders claiming ‘asylum’ — even though senior members of the Irish ‘government’ have acknowledged that the vast majority of these ‘asylum seekers’ are nothing of the kind, but are ‘economic refugees’, i.e. opportunist moochers, many of them released from prisons or mental hospitals in foreign countries ruled over by administrations that might be described as the most corrupt governments in the world had the Irish government not claimed that title in perpetuity and taken the trophy ‘home’ to keep.

What if I were to tell the people of Ireland that they have been seeing their history in entirely the wrong frame? What if I were to tell them that they have been fooled by the notion of their much-vaunted ‘modernity’ into drawing a line across the path of the past which divides the ‘modern’ from the ‘pre-modern’ and therefore disrupts any true understanding of that history? What if I were to explain how, far from belonging to a past which places on the Irish some kind of historical liability to others, that history needs urgently to be understood as part of a continuum of pathology and malfunction that remains in place and manifests parasitically in the present in ways suggestive of ‘progress’, when really it is the same history erupting in a new form?

What if I were to suggest that what is happening now — the neo-plantation, the re-peopling, the orchestrated invasion, the coercive pressing on our nation of unwanted alien proxies of occupation — is intimately connected to what happened 180 years ago, to the point of being the same event in another form?

Back in 1954, the year before I was born, a book called The Vanishing Irish was published by leading lights of the Irish diaspora in the United States. It contained 18 essays by 15 contributors, all describing the demographic catastrophe even then seen to be threatening the very survival of the Irish people, the main factors being late marriages and emigration, as though tics programmed into the very DNA of the Irish race by poverty and desperation. Among the contributors were two welll-known novelists and essayists, Seán Ó Faoláin and John D. Sheridan. In a contribution entitled ‘We’re Not Dead Yet’, the latter wrote of the ‘racial despair’ then afflicting Ireland, a despond he traced back to the (so-called) ‘Great Famines’ of the 1840s, which he believed had instilled in the Irish a belief that ‘the race could not survive’. He had in mind the mid-19th century Irish Holocaust, which we now know to have been a studied programme of extermination designed to purge Ireland of its indigenous people — a programme that in virtually any other contest would be referred to straightforwardly as ‘ethnic cleansing’ or ’genocide’. In Ireland, we have been reared not to breathe these words in self-reference.

‘Despair of this kind is deeper and more lasting than any personal despair,’ Sheridan wrote, and it had ‘left a stain of pessimism on the Irish character.’ Even a century after the famines, he observed, his people had not recovered from the shock of near obliteration. ‘The memory of it is still somewhere in the whorls of our minds. Without being conscious of it many Irish people are afraid to marry and have children without an assurance of material prosperity which more buoyant peoples do not require.’

It is strange to discover that Irish writers were writing such things back then, in the years just before I was born, and their successors in 2025 are not — or at least not many of us anyway, and certainly not from the same impulse or direction — even though things, statistically speaking, are actually much, much worse now than they were then. Think about this: records indicate that Ireland’s fertility at that time was 3.4 — 2.5 times what it is now, even ignoring the distortion caused by the contribution of foreigners residing here, in a time when collectively we appear not even to consider the possibility that we may be facing a crisis of demographic obliteration with, at most, a handful of decades to run its full course. 

In The Vanishing Irish also, the playwright, Seán O’Casey, was quoted on his fear that Ireland in 1953 was ‘withering’: ‘We’ve spread ourselves over the wide world, and left our own sweet land thin.’ In those days, artists and literary types were not afraid of rocking the boat of public complacency by saying unpopular or politically ‘incorrect' things.

The warnings on that occasion were heeded, if only for a moment, and within two decades the fertility rate had climbed to nearly 4, but the underlying issue remained unaddressed, probably for want of full and accurate articulation in the home territory.

Today, these descriptions have a resonance in our contemporary affairs that they ought not to have. In other words, traces of the conditions that O’Casey, Ó Faoláin, Sheridan and the others adverted to may still be with us, albeit manifesting in a different, more lethal fashion. The recent zeal for abortion must surely be regarded as one such manifestation, but also the general condition of mutism that has met the inundation of Ireland over the past several decades with what are insultingly termed ‘the New Irish’ — alleged refugees, bogus asylum seekers, unnecessary foreign workers, and others, who have come to Ireland as part of a wave of displacement now threatening the existence of the entire continents of Europe and America, and clearly being orchestrated by powerful interests. It is a strange thing — is it not? — that a government nowadays must advertise in multiple languages to attract people allegedly fleeing war and oppression in order to persuade them to leave their ‘war-torn’ countries.

The Vanishing Irish amounts to a remarkable document concerning the underlying mentality of the Irish nation in the post-1845 period, when our country haemorrhaged population at a rate suggestive of some deep psychic malaise. The ostensible reasons for the population decline — too few and too-late marriages and mass outward migration — were as chicken and egg, defying analysis as to which was the original and primary factor. This is to say: it was difficult to discern whether people left because their marriage prospects at home were dismal, or that they decided against marriage because their departure, or that of their beloved, was inevitable.

The opening paragraph of the first chapter, ‘The Irish Enigma’, by the book’s Editor, John A. O’Brien, is bracing indeed when read in the light of contemporary Ireland:

Nothing in recent centuries is so puzzling or so challenging as the strange phenomenon being enacted before our eyes: the fading away of the once great and populous nation of Ireland. If the past century's rate of decline continues for another century, the Irish will virtually disappear as a nation and will be found only as an enervated remnant in a land occupied by foreigners.

‘Another century’ would bring us to approximately 2045, now just twenty years up the road, a deadline that some of us might well regard as an optimistic estimate of the final and terminal flowering of the ‘enervated remnant’ of the historic Irish nation.

In an early chapter, The Vanishing Irish reproduces a brief excerpt from an Associated Press article of the early 1950s, outlining the stark nature of the Irish marriage statistics of the time:

Although Ireland once had a reputation as a land of romantic lovers, statistics show that the marriage rate is far below most European countries. The 1946 census showed that only two out of five Irishmen between 30 and 34 years old were married, the lowest proportion in the world.

Every single statistic of the time seems even to ‘modern’ ears to bespeak a race in terminal decline. A study of that 1946 census of Irish population found that, in the age-groups up to 44, 72 per cent of adult males and 59 per cent of adult females were unmarried, contrasting with American figures of 30 per cent for both sexes in the same age bracket. At that point (early 1950s) 64 per cent of Ireland’s adult population was single, six per cent widowed, and only 30 per cent married. The average age for marriage by Irishwomen was 28, and for men 33.1. In the USA, half the men were married by 24.3 years and half the women at 21.6 years. Whether as the cause of this or its consequence, significant numbers of Irish people were continuing to leave, particularly for Britain and the New World.

The book contains a number of irksome miscalculations or misstatements with regard to the pace of Ireland’s population decline, though in the heel of the hunt nothing significant rides on this, as the figures end up as a catastrophe no matter how they’re spliced and diced. In one section, for example, the book rather preapprehendingly claims that the population of Ireland declined by almost half from the 1841 level of 8,177,945 to 4,330,172 at the time of the census of April 1851. My calculations put the 1851 figure at 5,112,000 — still a dramatic decrease of 38 per cent. This figure incorporates the area now known as Northern Ireland, which had declined by approximately 17 per cent to 1.3 million, a figure which maintained into the twentieth century, recovering only from the late 1930s, when it began a climb to its present level of 1.8 million. The population of the territory of the current Republic had declined by the early twentieth century by approximately 54 per cent, from 6,529,000 in 1841 to a little over three million. By 1946, the population had dropped to 2,955,107, the lowest ever recorded.

It would be easy to read The Vanishing Irish and think of it only historically — i.e., describing a problem with its roots in pre-modernity and economic failure. Actually, read in the present moment, the book more or less encourages such a response as a consequence of its harking back to a starting point in the 1840s, speaking repeatedly of a ‘century-long’ decline, but in danger of being read as a tale of long-ago calamity. This mode of thinking has tended to preserve the problem of Irish unviability within an economic frame predominantly. Seen in these terms, the contemporary reader might be inclined to observe that the patterns described were to continue for just another twenty years or so, until the Lemass boom, beginning in the late 1960s, appeared to signal a positive turn, this being the dominant, self-satisfied mindset of the past sixty years. But a careful reading of the undertows and of recent Irish history reveals this as delusional. It is true that, in the 1970s, outward migration slowed to a trickle, and the country’s population began to recover for the first time since the mid-1840s, but it is also the case that mass emigration recommenced with a vengeance in the 1980s, as it was to yet again following the further period of remission afforded by the Celtic Tiger, with this pattern of decline continuing from 2008 to the present. Birth rates in the decades following publication of The Vanishing Irish continued to follow the same patterns: an underlying trend of dramatic decline from 1950, broken only by two blips, in the 1970s and 2000s, declining sharply again from 2008. CSO projections today suggest that birth rates will continue to decline for the remainder of the present century, albeit in a context of muddied statistics likely designed to conceal the true facts of the continuing Irish catastrophe.

The West's Awake

Shocking Irish births data hidden in Q3 2024 CSO Vital Statistics release.

Before we begin an analysis of the rapidly changing picture of recorded Irish births in the nation, a revealing point to note. The Central Statistics Office are making it more difficult to ascertain the nationality of mothers giving birth in Ireland each quarter…

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a month ago · 29 likes · 5 comments · The West's Awake

Due to the mendacious disposition of the Irish State, it is likely that Ireland’s indigenous population will have entered its terminal phase before the last survivors become aware of the gravity of the situation, for Ireland is a country in which worrying about threats to foreign nations and indigenous populations is encouraged, but concern about the survival of your own people is described as ‘racist’.

This is not an argument that is often encountered, but it may be more helpful to any search for deeper meanings to perceive the decline of Ireland framed from the 1840s to the present, a 180-year pattern of decline, broken intermittently by seeming shifts in fortune and circumstances, but actually representing an underlying trend of terminal decline. Perhaps a better way of couching this might be to say that what we are observing, then and now, is a form of racial suicide, interrupted occasionally by brief eruptions of hoping. From this perspective, the recent behaviours of Irish governments, and the meek acquiescence of the Irish population, seem to be rooted in a nineteenth century Malthusianism rather than any empathy with the world’s downtrodden.

This mindfset may be inferred from the contributions to The Vanishing Irish, which variously allude to the existential crisis of a nation on ‘a tragic path to near extinction’; ’bleeding to death for a hundred years’; subject to ‘racial haemophilia’, and in various other constructions summoning up profound racial malfunctions and pathology. In general, the writers endorse the sobering views of John D. Sheridan, though all maintain the conceit of ‘Famine’, then seemingly undisputed, although there are strong hints in the book of the causes of this having been anything but accidental, natural, or ‘Acts of God’.

John A. O’Brien, for example, writes:

Famine started the exodus more than a century ago. Is the racial memory of it still continuing it? Has it set up some unfathomed psychosis deep down in the Celtic psyche which fills the heart of the Gael with an insatiable restlessness, a cosmic wanderlust, a sort of wild demiurge that goads him to the waiting ship and the far-distant shore? However the prober into the unconscious motivation of the racial psyche may some day answer these questions, the fact remains that the Gael has presented to the modern world the most amazing spectacle of a wild, frantic, unbroken flight from his native land — a flight which continues strangely undiminished even after he had achieved its long-sought freedom.

This passage contains some pre-echoes of the contemporary scurrilous trope about the Irish ‘travelling all over the world’, the contemporary use of which is not only in conflict with the book’s overall themes and sensibility, but actually amounts to an entirely different perception of the existential crisis facing Ireland then and (perhaps) now: that it arises not from catastrophe but from a thirst for adventuring. This was then, as it remains, palpable nonsense, generally self-interested nonsense spread by exploiters seeking to plunder Ireland’s resources in one way or another.

The truth lies precisely in the recognition of the recurring incidence of such radical interference, plunder and exploitation, conducted in Ireland for centuries by a pernicious and (for once the word is not too strong) racist enemy of old, seeking to maintain Ireland as a bread-basket for the UK, and to enslave its population to keep the ploughs on the move and the loys on the go, but nowadays pursued on the orders of interests seeking the effective ‘vacent possession’ of Ireland for their own purposes.

Contrary to the contemporary smugness, the damage to the psyche of the Irish nation has never properly healed from this centuries-long assault, so that, in virtually every generation — even in the more hopeful economic phases — the Irish population has pursued some form of self-destructive behaviour as though to punish itself for some indeterminate sin or sins. This terminal restlessness is what is being mistaken for wanderlust.

The problems of Ireland, historical and contemporary, have their roots in both the appalling treatment of the Irish population by the longtime occupiers of our country, and also in the ‘remedies’ sometimes applied by ostensibly well-meaning players and interests. The core of this malfunction arose from the combination of engineered ‘famines’ calculated to prevent the population of Ireland growing to levels likely to represent a threat to the hegemony of the occupier, and the fact that the ensuing calamity of death and depopulation enabled the Catholic Church to become the moral government, in which role it inflicted other forms of harm.

Ireland’s religiosity was not always of a uniform Catholicism. Before that, it was pagan, and in some respects remains so, and this was followed by an extremely particularised brand of Catholicism, sometimes referred to as ‘Celtic Christianity’ or ‘Folk Catholicism’. Though it had looked to Rome for many centuries, things began to drift in the eighteenth century, as the domestic Church became lax and indulgent in ways that permitted a drifting back into more pagan-seeming ways. This shift introduced into the Irish model of Catholicism different values and a very different cultural outlook, often harking back to the Brehon Laws. There followed roughly a century and a half of escalating dissolution into a form of bespoke Gallicanism, this a French breakaway tendency which minimised the authority of the pope and insisted on a strong separation between Church and State. This was the meaning of Daniel O’Connell’s declaration in 1815 that he was ‘sincerely a Catholic, but not a Papist’. This largely lay-driven version of Catholicism promoted folk religious practices, such as ‘patterns’ (festive outdoor observances of patron saints' feastdays) and pilgrimages to holy wells, which were in some respects indistinguishable from pagan or Celtic religion. This laid-back culture of a la carte religiosity had a particularly strong impact on family life, with many children being born out of wedlock and a relaxed practice of looseness in family structure, with some mothers having children by different fathers, and households being headed/protected in many instances not by a husband but a brother of the mother. Attendance at Mass and other religious services had fallen away, especially in the north and west. In the immediate aftermath of An Gorta Mór (the Great Hunger) of the 1840s, blame began to be placed on the indiscipline and licentiousness arising from this easygoing approach, which were held by some observers to have caused the ballooning of the population in the previous century or so. Cometh the hour, cometh the man who was to ensure that nothing of the kind would happen again — in the form of Archbishop Paul Cullen, (later Paul Cardinal Cullen, the first Irish cardinal) as Archbishop of Armagh and subsequently of Dublin, between 1849 and his death in 1878. Cullen, a native of County Kildare, having spent several decades in Rome, returned as Apostolic Delegate with a special mission to establish a new ecclesiastical discipline in Ireland, a project he began by convening, in 1850, the Synod of Thurles, the first Roman Catholic national synod to be held in Ireland since the Reformation.

Cardinal Cullen was the opposite of a Gallican: an ‘Ultramontane’, and arch-Romanist who regarded papal authority as central to the conduct of the Church and its members, utterly rejecting the Gallicanism that had transformed Irish Catholicism into a undisciplined free-for-all. What followed was a root and branch overhaul of Irish Catholicism, a Great Reset that occurred long before the name was thought of. ‘Patterns’ were stamped out as representing a danger to morals. Wakes and funerals and baptisms, likewise, were brought under stricter control of the clergy. Henceforth, only priests conforming to the Ultramontane outlook on theology and pastoral practice were to be permitted to join seminaries or be ordained. This was to produce what in time became in effect a moral police force, to monitor the new dispensation in which males and females were to be scrupulously segregated in matters relating to religious practice — discrete ‘sodality’ groups for males and females, and the church aisle dividing the sexes from one another. A new and unofficial ‘partnership’ was formulated between the priest and the mother — the ‘Irish Mammy’ — who became the eyes, ears and moral arbiter of the Church within the family home, with the father, in this context at least — though by extension in others also — banished to his fields or the public house. Cardinal Cullen also introduced a special devotion to the Sacred Heart, the daily familial recitation of the rosary, and the concept of Marian worship — the veneration of the Blessed Virgin, who in time came to be known as the Queen of Ireland, with the concept of the Immaculate Conception placed as the highest spiritual value. Cullen also introduced more frequent confession/communion, and special rites such as ’perpetual adoration’ and benediction of the Blessed Sacrament, and the annual ‘Mission’, whereby a group of visiting priests (missioners) would spend a week in the parish berating the locals from the pulpit about their waywardness and the consequent inevitability of Hell. In a somewhat prophetic inversion of the modern Church’s attitude to mass inward migration, it has been noted by historians that these efforts of Cardinal Cullen were greatly facilitated by the reduction of the Irish population to more manageable levels as a result of the famines, which had also had a chastening effect on the moral scruples of many.

Under the terms of what became known as the Devotional Revolution, a still unrecognised form of totalitarianism emerged and set to work in the most intimate zones of Irish life, before Hitler, Stalin or Mao were even born.

One of the (at first) more eccentric explanations proffered in The Vanishing Irish for the collapse of Irish marriages and childbirths is the idea that the high levels of esteem for priests and nuns had sparked an exalted respect for celibacy as a state of being in the world. Early 1950s surveys in the Irish community in the United States uncovered that levels of late marriage, celibacy and bachelorhood were exceptionally high in families blessed with priests and nuns. If this seems implausible, it may be on account of its being a rather coy expression of a deeper truth: that the ‘devotional revolution’ initiated by Cardinal Cullen in the late nineteenth century by way of preventing another population explosion like the one that was believed to have caused the ‘famines’ of the 1840s, had installed a repugnance of sex in the Irish popular mind. This hypothesis further maintains that, leveraging the apparitions at Knock in 1879, featuring the Blessed Virgin Mary, Saint Joseph, Saint John the Evangelist, Jesus Christ (the Lamb of God), and several angels, and getting its clampers on the Irish Mammy as a moralistic agent within the family home, the Catholic clergy had succeeded in dramatically reducing births by dint of curtailing the licentiousness that had (allegedly) caused the population to explode between 1700 and 1850. Most of these circumstances are excellently described in Tom Inglis’s 1987 book, Moral Monopoly, in which he dissects the cultural phenomena that shaped Irish culture in the wake of the genocides of the 1840s, though without describing these events in such express terms.

Ireland, then, experienced perhaps the earliest known form of totalitarianism, albeit church-imposed, with the occupier government/state an obvious beneficiary in that it imposed an iron social control in circumstances that might ordinarily be expected to lend themselves to social strife and conflict. This phase of what would now perhaps (and wrongly) be deemed ‘soft’ totalitarianism, continued for more than a hundred years — from the early 1850s to my late childhood, relaxing only in the mid-1960s under the influence of television and exploding popular culture. It had innumerable effects, all of them pernicious as far as Ireland was concerned. Over the course of this dispensation, something in the region of six million people left Ireland, as though voluntarily, fleeing economic stagnation and poverty. In fact, what they fled was an island occupied by an ideological virus, an idolatrous form of religiosity which, ostensibly designed to prevent further explosions in population, amounted to a sustained attack on the very essence of human being and human feeling. In this deliberately constructed culture, men and women were discouraged from mingling or becoming close. Social occasions, having been curtailed by church fiat, were few. The Sunday Mass, which might have provided a pretext for interaction, was subject to an enforced apartheid — women on one side of the church, men on the other. Any would-be couple seeking to defy this regimen were liked to be ‘named’, or ‘read from the altar’ for the crime of ‘company keeping’. The domestic arrangements of most families, with siblings forced to stay on in the home into middle age and beyond, made romancing or courting all but impossible. Under the influence of the priests, the elderly parents held doggedly to the reins of the family farm, often unto death itself, when the eldest son would inherit. Even then, it was necessary to find accommodation for any remaining siblings before he could dream of bringing in a ‘new woman’.

All this was effected by close moral control of the hearts and minds of the population via a symbiotic power relationship operated by the priest via the mother, or perhaps vice versa. The priest was, in a sense, ‘one of the family’, having been handpicked in the first place by the mother, who generally chose the most pious and amenable of her brood to augment the next generation of clerics. For the most part this system operated without visible coercion or menace, though sometimes there were incidents when ‘interventions’ were made to enforce the moral law. What marriages took place were mostly arranged between families on the basis of economic realities, rather than resulting from attraction or affection.

We are talking, in effect, about a possibly unequalled feat of mass hypnosis. Through the manipulation of religious impulses, scripture, the sacraments and fear of divine judgment, the clergy was able to maintain an entire population in a condition of perpetual suspension — always living in the future: delaying, postponing, relinquishing, accepting. What resulted, in a sense, was a population deprived of any capacity for earthly transcendence: planning for the future, the instigation of new families, the healthy regeneration of the national population.

The most devious element of this cultural reconstruction was that the mother was elevated to, in effect, head of the family, with the father reduced to a shadow on the margins of domestic life. The dysfunctional power-partnership of priest and Irish Mammy set to curtailing immorality and policing every potential engagement of a romance or (God forbid!) sexual nature.

Part of the proffered logic was putting a brake on population growth, which had undoubtedly contributed to the severity of the famines in circumstances where most of the country’s food was being forcibly exported to the neighbouring island. Clearly, the idea of imploring the English to stop genociding the Irish did not occur to Cardinal Cullen, who viewed Irish emigration as ‘a special dispensation of God to disperse Irish people over every country of the globe’ through agency of the British Empire ‘in order to lift the standard of the Church’.

Part II of this two-part series, ‘Ireland’s Danceless Death’, will appear in a week or so.

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