Is Ireland Still Ireland? | Hacker News Reader

Is Ireland Still Ireland?

eriugenareview.com

28 pointshunglee232 comments

Ireland grew up. I’m immensely proud of what my country has achieved in so few years. We’ve transferred ourselves from an impoverished theocracy to a thriving secular and increasingly liberal European peer.

Many people my age (and younger) who left Ireland during the Great Recession are now returning and they being so much with them.

Many people of my generation were educated in schools dominated by the Catholic Church. There was no better way to show these kids the reasons why the church has no place in running our society and I’m happy to see their influence in education weakening every year.

We still have many problems here but they are the problems of a modern country that many other developed nations face. We’ve grown up.

Being off-topic: I plan to travel to Ireland the spring (from Switzerland). Do you have suggestions?

I was just there over the summer and only got as far as Dun Laoghaire (Covid got me) and even just walking around Dun Laoghaire for a day was enjoyable. I was surprised that such a small place had so much to offer.

It’s relatively affordable to hire a car here. Public transport isn’t great. The west is particularly picturesque, as said Galway is great. Kerry and West Cork are very touristy but beautiful.

What would you like to do?

Thanks, then Galway it is. Kerry and West Cork, too. Are the Skellig islands worth it?

The Skelligs are a must see in my opinion but be aware that visits are seasonal and quite restricted. If memory serves they don't start until about May.

Then you roll the dice, if you get a booking (most boats leave from Ballinskelligs, Co. Kerry) be prepared to be thwarted by the weather, sea conditions can make for a hectic swell all the way out there and it's not uncommon for sailings to get cancelled as a result. I think I got out there on my third attempt.

Worth trying though, it's a magical place.

Galway for sure!

Surely the abuse scandals played a role in the de-Catholicization

The linked site appears to be run mostly by American Catholic activists in their early 20s. I doubt they know anything about the reality of Catholicism in Ireland. I'm Irish and I've never heard of the author either. If he thinks Ireland is still mainly Catholic or that the Church is still widely respected or influential he must be living in another reality.

A funny thing about American Catholic converts I've met is that they seem to decide they're more Catholic than the Pope on day 2. You can't take the Protestant out of a Protestant apparently, even if they want to do everything in Latin.

I grew up Catholic and I'm always suspicious of converts. Inevitably they're all reactionaries more interested in opposing abortion and "RETVRNING" to pre-Vatican II, as opposed to be drawn to helping the poor, providing quality education, abolishing the death penalty, or anything else encompassed by Catholic Social Teaching.

Roman Catholicism is not a perfect denomination -- or religion for that matter -- but what is? It is however a lot more nuanced and encompassing than the the facile understanding often promoted online.

Most converts are related to marriage and don't have strong opinions and may have done it for bookkeeping rather than true belief.

Literally zero interdenominational marriages at my parents’ church have a convert, including my mom.

There’s not really a point unless you really want communion for some reason.

Also, I think it’s pretty obvious I wasn’t talking about people drug to to church by their spouse.

This is a common phenomenon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeal_of_the_convert (Or at least the perception is common.)

There is that, but I meant literally: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sedevacantism. As in they think they are Catholic and the pope is not Catholic. And so seem to have missed the point that listening to that guy is basically the point of joining up.

> And so seem to have missed the point that listening to that guy is basically the point of joining up.

That would be news to a lot of Catholics, myself included.

> If he thinks Ireland is still mainly Catholic or that the Church is still widely respected or influential he must be living in another reality.

90% of primary schools in Ireland are Catholic [1] [2]. That doesn't sound like a country where the Catholic Church has lost widespread influence.

[1] https://www.irishtimes.com/news/education/are-we-failing-non...

[2] https://www.state.gov/reports/2020-report-on-international-r...

Their influence has dropped significantly. Historically a Catholic priest would be principle or have unfettered access to children. They would often just arrive into classrooms and throw their weight around or physically assault children.

That has almost entirely stopped. There are now strict child protection laws. Parents can generally opt their kids out of religious instruction. Church attendance in Ireland has collapsed. The patronage of schools by the churches is mostly now a vestige of the past and will eventually be phased out, then the religious orders now accept that.

That is very misleading since it is purely because of historical reasons .i.e. a naive struggling newly-born state handing education to religious institutions.

The school system is very different to other countries. Schools can have a religious "ethos" but it means very little nowadays and many children opt out of the single religious education lesson a week. The curriculum is set by the state, funding is from the state, management boards are no longer dominated by religious orders and all teachers are in one of two secular unions.

For the most part, schools are really only Catholic in name only. If the church pushed anti-LGBT propaganda in schools like other countries it would cause uproar. That power has simply gone. The school system is archaic and over due for massive reform. One of the main things blocking it is historical land and building ownership.

Luke Kelly of the Dubliners wrote a poem with the same question, but focused more on the globalization and foreign investments that made Ireland what it is today.

https://genius.com/Luke-kelly-for-what-died-the-sons-of-rois...

As an outsider, I had a tough time getting through the article, but what's interesting to me is how modernization and the decline of Catholicism in the Republic seems to be dovetailing with the (especially acute) fiasco of Brexit in the North. Will this be the tipping point toward Irish reunification?

I mean... I stopped reading after the first dozen paragraphs... because I hate the reductionist logic here. I am neither irish, nor and expert in irish history (though I actively listen to a pretty thorough podcast about it), but I am a philosopher by training, and this read like big fat True Scotsman logic.

Perhaps the author misdirects in the opening (I hope so), but they seem to be caught in the reductionist culture=identity trope that much my home country of America suffers from. Examples here include absurdisms like "Obama isn't black enough" as if a black man isn't black if he doesn't act a certain way.

Many cultures are built in opposition to other cultures, yes, and while that is true, the entire of culture is that it's made up of the people within it. When that starts to change, it just changes, it doesn't go away. In my life America went from being known for it's light lagers, now it is know for over hopping all our beers. We went from Safeway to Trader Joe's being the dominate grocery chances. Is America not America? No! Is California more Californian? No!

Culture is the culture that the people in the culture choose to celebrate. There are no True Scotsmans, only Scotsmans, who occasionally disagree.

Ireland is the people in it. If they change their religion, and their national sport and drink, then they will be a different Ireland than they were, but they will still be Ireland so long as people identify as Irish.

I think this argument makes sense when talking about individuals and their culture (like your Obama example) but not necessary the culture itself. The danger with the former is it assumes any time norms change the culture goes away so the only way the culture can exist is if everyone stays a "True Scotsman" and does everything like the average Scotsman. Clearly that's not the case, a regional culture can still exist even when an aspect of it changes and may be very different than it was in the far past. Instead it's defined by what the people are like now which allows for the culture to be both identified/defined and still change. That doesn't really apply to the culture as a whole becoming like other culture(s) though - if everyone in two groups start sharing the same norms, institutions, beliefs, arts, etc it no longer makes sense to define them as separate cultures just because there used to be more than one set of these values. Not because the culture isn't like it was before but because what made them one culture vs another is no longer present - being from a certain square area of land isn't what makes a regional culture. Just as it makes sense new cultures can form by being different in some way it makes sense old cultures can go away by becoming homogenous with others.

I don't necessarily agree with the article as a whole, I think Ireland is still plenty unique even if different than it was in the past because of outside influence. At the same time I don't think "When that starts to change, it just changes, it doesn't go away." is always true in the context of the whole culture becoming like others. Obviously not every regional culture still exists today even though most have living decedents.

I think you're right, that's why I use the term "identity" apart from "culture." I see that when people stop actively identifying is Irish, then yes, Ireland isn't Ireland. My point is precisely to say that "Ireland" is still Ireland insofar as the Irish still identify with their land and their history. Yes, these are all social constructs, but there is a line of reasoning. If the Irish started identifying as EU citizens, then yea, it could die, but it's obviously not dead. This, of course, happens all the time, it's just that nobody really notices because no one is usually speaking for the old, often reprehensible (hence the cultural death) culture. Cultural evolution is evolution. It usually lives on in some form or another, and only occasionally goes extinct.

I would not take the article seriously. The author is an "investment professional" twitter addict who thinks COVID lockdowns are the cause of the NHS collapse in the UK.

Obama is very far from the "median black guy", but it's irrelevant, especially since both median Londoner and Dubliner shifted towards the median NYer...

How does the median relate to the whole? If someone is far from the median Texan do the stop being a Texan? If a Korean person loves and emulates French culture do they stop being Korean? If a white person grows up in a heavily Chinese neighborhood and subscribes to the culture they grew up with are they less white?

The idea that drifting from the median of a given ethnic/cultural group invalidates you as a member of that group is disturbing. Doubly so with race.

the median matters as in most distributions that's what others will see as "representative" of the whole population.

Unfortunately with our amazing engagement-maximizing hate machines like Twitter/Facebook/FoxNews (and their older, but still generally fucked up kin, 0-24 news cycle, MSM, Hollywood) what people think of other people can be very distorted, but there are trends that percolate through.

The original post basically has a claim that "Ireland is more like UK now than it is like old Ireland", which is true, but it doesn't explicitly talk about how "UK is also not like old UK". (Those London inspired bars are themselves inspired by NY bars.) It just mentions how Irish cultural politics is American.

> The idea that drifting from the median of a given ethnic/cultural group invalidates you as a member of that group is disturbing. Doubly so with race.

.. yeah. and ... nobody said that.

Again, my very point is that caring, at all, about median-ness of a person when it comes to identity, is very much a True Scotsman game. It is reversing the directionality between an identity and a cultural norm, and redefining the identity by the norm, instead of the other way around. Lots of people do that, many as a proxy for a completely different argument, but lots of people also do lots of things that aren't sound reasoning.

Yes, indeed.

I think this particular section of the text is okay, because it has a very simple and sane claim that culture shifted, and it's simply comparing Dublin to old Dublin, London to old London, etc.

(I don't want to really go into this, but there are definitely Irish pubs in Dublin that are more old-Dublin-like than modern London bars. But the claim is at least not a fallacy.)

Talking about culture, certain elements of it, behaviors, their prevalence, origin, cross-pollination between cultures, etc. are completely valid. The problem is that many people automatically bring their own value judgments, their nostalgia, and their imprecise colloquial language into these discussions, which then - understandably - cause others to hyperreact to these, as these are hot topics.

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