Holy Smoke: Goodbye to Catholic Ireland

Best of the Spectator

The Spectator

News Commentary, News, Daily News, Society & Culture

4.4 • 785 Ratings

🗓️ 4 January 2021

⏱️ 46 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Damian's guest, the celebrated Irish journalist, broadcaster and playwright Mary Kenny, offers a nuanced analysis of the powerful and paradoxical world in which she grew up: one in which Catholic clergy and lay people could be simultaneously fervently pious, warm-hearted and yet paralysed by petty snobbery. She talks about how the Irish Free State handed far too much power to bishops and priests. In effect, they replaced the disappearing Anglo-Irish nobility as the new aristocracy of rural Ireland, exercising an authority over people's lives that could be generous or malevolent and sometimes a mixture of both.

Holy Smoke is a series of podcasts where Damian Thompson dissects the most important and controversial topics in world religion, with a range of high profile guests. Click here to find previous episodes.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	The Spectator magazine combines incisive political analysis with books and arts reviews of unrivaled authority.
0:07.6	Subscribe today for just £12 and receive a 12-week subscription, in print and online, plus a £20 £20,000, Amazon gift voucher, absolutely free.
0:17.4	Go to spectator.com.uk forward slash voucher.
0:26.3	Welcome to Holy Smoke, the Spectator's Religion podcast. I'm Damien Thompson. This week, a wonderful yet
0:35.2	poignant slice of social history.
0:38.3	Goodbye to Catholic Ireland was the title of a very good book published back in the 90s
0:43.6	by my guest Mary Kenny, one of Ireland's and Britain's best-known and best-loved journalists,
0:51.5	who's also a social historian and a playwright.
0:55.6	To coincide with the centenary of the Irish Free State in 2022, she's writing another book, The Way We Were,
1:01.9	which will look back using lots of unpublished original material at a world which seems
1:06.9	even now more irretrievably lost, that of the Irish Catholic Church, which was so powerful
1:14.3	in Irish society until the 1980s. For many people, Irish Catholicism has become synonymous with
1:20.7	scandal, repression, and cruelty. Mary offers a more nuanced picture, but a fascinating one which highlights the aspirations,
1:30.3	the petty snobberies and the fervent faith of a church that, until fairly recently,
1:36.3	seemed indestructible.
1:38.3	I've known you for many years, Mary, and I think it was back in the 90s that you were writing a book called Goodbye to Catholic Ireland, which is an absolutely terrific read.
1:52.4	And you're now writing another book about Ireland.
1:56.6	Well, it's kind of revisiting Catholic Ireland in a way which has disappeared even more now, and seems to be very much in the past.
2:07.3	So I suppose it's a sort of another farewell, but also I'm calling it the way we were so that it's also a sort of panoramic view, but with a lot of emphasis now on biography,
2:20.8	on people, on individual people and on characters. The Irish state came into being in
2:29.2	1922 after the Anglo-Irish Treaty. It was called the Irish Free State. It was still a dominion at the time. It
2:37.8	wasn't a republic till 1949. So 2022 is in a way the 100th anniversary of the Irish state, of an Irish
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from The Spectator, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of The Spectator and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.