Beginning with Catholic attitudes to the Act of Union this work traces various elements in the interrelationship between the Catholic Church and the state in Ireland in the 19th century. Catholicism's role in the Protestant state for most of the century was tempered and conditioned by its relationship with the various Protestant churches in the country. In the development of its infrastructure, facilitating as it did along with other factors the 'devotional revolution', the church was in many ways dependent upon Protestant financial help. The ironies and complexities of this situation is a...

What does it mean to be Irish? Are the predicates Catholic and Irish so inextricably linked that it is impossible to have one and not the other? Does the process of secularization in modern times mean that Catholicism is no longer a touchstone of what it means to be Irish? Indeed was such a paradigm ever true? These are among the fundamental issues addressed in this work which examines whether distinct identity formation can be traced over time. The book delineates the course of historical developments which complicated the process of identity formation in the Irish context, when by turns...