Pieties and Resistances

Growing up atheist in a Catholic Ireland

I was born in 1955 into an Ireland very different from the one I now live in and perhaps the biggest difference was in faith. My parents were practising Catholics. My father was quietly and unostentatiously devout – I often came upon him saying his bedtime prayers on his knees – in the way country people often were.

Nevertheless, he had a low opinion of priests and anything but the most basic ritual practices – a regular mass-goer, let’s say but not a rosary in the evening kind of man. There were daily communicants in the village whom he referred to as the ‘holy joes’. I remember him being designated by the local farmers to speak to the Parish priest before Mass on a summer Sunday because in those days Catholics needed permission to harvest on the sabbath. He detested going ‘cap in hand’ and harvesting or not on the whim of a priest. ‘If God didn’t want to us to save the hay on a Sunday he shouldn’t send rain on a Monday.’

My mother, on the other hand, had a more complex relationship with religion and I’m not sure she believed in God at all at the end. Once we went to visit the parish church and saw a young woman standing by the altar and some sort of ceremony taking place. My mother took us out in a fury and nothing my father said would calm her all afternoon. I later learned that the young woman was being ‘churched’, that is to say she had given birth to a baby some weeks previously and was therefore ‘impure’. The ceremony cleansed her.

My mother believed passionately in the rights of women. She supported the availability of contraception at a time when it was illegal in Ireland and argued for divorce. My father, who was more traditional in outlook, loved her deeply and never disagreed with her. I think he came to believe in the same things eventually.

One incident typifies that closed Catholic society. After the birth of my younger sister, my mother haemorrhaged. My aunt who had qualified as a nurse in England recognised that her sister was bleeding to death and demanded to see the gynaecologist. ‘My sister is dying,’ she informed him, ‘she needs a hysterectomy’. The gynaecologist shook his head sadly. ‘My dear lady, a hysterectomy is a form of contraception and these hands were blessed by the Pope. I cannot perform the operation. God willing your sister will survive’. ‘You can call the Pope as witness when I sue you,’ my aunt replied. The gynaecologist performed the hysterectomy and my mother survived.

These pieties and resistances were echoed to a greater or lesser extent, in different ways among our neighbours. There were regular mass-goers and less regular ones and one or two that did not go at all. The occasional attenders and non-mass-goers were a constant target of jibes during sermons, and though that had no effect on people’s social relations it did serve to categorise them in a certain way, a form of othering well understood by writers such as Brinsley MacNamara, Edna O’Brien and John McGahern.

Not everyone was Catholic, of course, but the Protestants we knew were of the same class as ourselves more or less. There were no big houses as part of my childhood, no wealthy Anglo-Irish and we had no particular animus against any of the locals, though historic memory spoke of the old landlords in the usual terms – my Wall ancestors were evicted during the Great Famine, for example.

The society into which I was born was one in which family and neighbourliness trumped religious belief, and this moderate way of life went hand in hand with one in which families cast out unmarried mothers or condemned them to Magdalene laundries, in which young trouble makers were sent to Industrial Schools and in which all sexual freedoms were vigorously repressed. It was, therefore, a society in which the compliant lived lives untroubled by authorities of Church or State, but from which the rebellious or the unfortunate were mercilessly expunged. Many of the memoirs of the time come from the former group (To School Through The Fields is a classic of such nostalgia), but books like Patrick Galvin’s The Raggy Boy Trilogy tell the story of the latter experience.

This is the context to what I have to say about faith. That, like everyone else in the world, I was born into a complex family at a complex time like all times, into a country that resisted and still resists the simplifications that are applied to it.

I fell ill at twelve years of age with a condition that remains with me even now, almost sixty years later, and my teenage years were marked by terrible pain and debilitating physical changes. How, my teenage self enquired, was it possible to love a God who made the beauty of nature and at the same time set these time bombs within it – my illness, the cancer that killed a much-loved cousin and all the other ills that flesh is heir to? This was the time of The Bomb and the possibility that a slip of the tongue in Washington or Moscow could annihilate the human race. I came to the conclusion that a god who could create such humankind was not worth respecting. It was a short step from there to the realisation that the entire fabric of faith, the entire system of threats and promises, the rituals and the literature, the structures that determined who was worthy and who not, was no more than an elaborate discourse of power.

At that age I was fascinated by philosophy and at some point I came across the concept of Occam’s Razor – Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem, Beings must not be multipliedunnecessarily. I concluded that God was unnecessary in any explanation of the world. He was a surplus entity invented by people who did not have access to the theory of evolution or any knowledge of the life sciences, and the vast belief system necessary to corroborate the invention of such an unlikely being was sustained with great violence throughout two millennia.

However, I wouldn’t like to suggest that my passage from altar boy to atheist was some sort of dialectical transformation. As any good confessor would tell you, such an apostasy is usually occasioned by excess and I was no exception. I formally became an atheist at Christmas Eve Mass in 1972. I had been out drinking with friends and decided to stop in on my way home to issue a tipsy challenge. I stood at the back of the church and demanded that God send me a sign if he wanted me to believe in him. I knew all the theological explanations about God not showing up for such challenges, and I already knew what the result would be. However, in my drunken state, I felt powerful and dangerous and for a minute or two awaited with fortitude the possibility of a lightning bolt. I walked out feeling lighter and clearer-headed despite, or perhaps because of, my elevated blood-alcohol level.

I subsequently taught in a Catholic secondary school for twenty five years beginning in 1978. In those days schools were entitled to ask at interview about your religious beliefs. When asked I responded ‘If you’re a member of a club you should play by the rules.’ They were delighted with my reply, but I was not, of course, a member of their club.

In 1982 news broke of the Eileen Flynn Case. Eileen Flynn was a teacher in the Holy Faith Convent in New Ross, County Wexford. She lived with Richie Roche, a separated man with three children, and they had a child together. After the birth the school informed her that she had contravened the school ethos and sacked her. In 1985 the High Court ruled that the school’s actions did not constitute unfair dismissal on the grounds that she was not dismissed for her pregnancy per se but rather for her non-marital relationship.

During those years I kept my atheism to myself though I never attended school religious events. But after my first novel was published – a book about power and an attack on the Catholic Right – I realised that silence was really a form of collusion. So in an interview for the Irish Times I casually stated that I had been an atheist since childhood. The world did not fall down around my ears. Perhaps I was lucky that Eileen Flynn’s brave stance had somehow changed the discourse. Change was certainly in the air. Unknown to us then, Irish society was setting out on the path that would lead to the divorce, equal marriage and abortion referendums. We were already in the throes of the battle; what in hindsight we can recognise as the Church’s last desperate struggle against modernity seemed to us at the time to be an expression of power rather than weakness.

The headmaster of the school I taught in was an openminded man and never uttered a word of criticism. However there were other forces at work. The Knights of Columbanus and other rightwing Catholic formations, for example, directly threatened my wife (who taught mathematics in the same school) and I. On one occasion we were told by a solicitor who had acted on behalf of the The Knights in court cases, that it was known we were teaching Marxist doctrine in the classroom and we were being watched. We pointed out that our trade union would stand by us. Eileen Flynn, unfortunately was not unionised – had she been she would probably never have been dismissed.

I had come to see the Church and its social policies as an integral part of the superstructure of Irish capitalism. This was the import of my first novel, Alice Falling, in which the abusive priest and the dominant males together shape the power structure that the novel attacks. I would return to the theme for my Booker longlisted 2005 novel This Is The Country.

Ireland is still thought of as a Catholic country despite the resounding defeats suffered by the Church in its political and social capacities. However, at best we can say that the majority of Irish people are still baptised. In census data just under 70% still identify as Catholic, but surveys suggest that only one in three still attend Mass, the majority being older people. Not so long ago the number identifying as Catholic was 90%. The repeated rejection of Church positions on social issues is also a clear indicator.

How has it been to live through this period of turmoil as an atheist?

It has been interesting to observe the politicisation of Irish society that really began with the emergence of Second Wave Feminism expressed through journalists like Mary Maher and Mary Kenny, Nell McCafferty and Elgy Gillespie. On the one side we had a corrupt political class in a symbiotic relationship with the Catholic hierarchy to preserve each other’s power, and on the other we had the eloquent voices of feminism, socialist and intersectionalist avant la lettre, demanding rights that seemed to us self-evidently necessary. Driven by these powerful women, the decades from the 1960s onwards witnessed the decline and collapse of Church power in this country. This decline became terminal as the revelations of priestly sexual abuse became public. The Bishop Casey affair was another nail in the coffin. But the coup de grâce was administered by a quiet-spoken and unpretentious historian called Catherine Corless who revealed what had happened in the Bons Secours Mother and Baby Home in Tuam, County Galway. Epocal research is often initiated upon a very slight impulse. Corless noticed that for many babies who died in the home no place of burial was recorded. From there came the shocking revelation that the very organisation that claimed to be ‘pro-life’ had been consigning the bodies of babies to a disused sewage tank. It seemed to many the perfect metaphor for the Church’s political and social function in Ireland.

It was dawning on us all that we were a modern state struggling to be born and we have become exactly that in both positive and negative senses. Positive in the sense that we now have all those social rights that we demanded, though it has been a long struggle. Negative, in the sense that during the same period our political system, led I believe by The Progressive Democrats, swallowed neoliberalism like a party drug and, as a result, we now have a cruel housing crisis, a medical system that becomes more privatised by the day, and an inadequate public transport service. Such improvements as we have seen are snail-slow and patchy, initiated by the the more left-leaning parties in coalition and choked off by the powerful industrial lobbies that support the Right in power.

Political commentators have a habit of lamenting this social polarisation. It should be observed, however, that a Left/Right division is the natural state of politics all over the world, not obscured by the ‘I’m neither Right nor Left’ crowd, who, of course, are always rightwing. What we had before was a stifling consensus, carefully managed by Church and State in which the Left was ‘the lunatic left’ and the Right was the common sense. In Gramscian terms, the ‘common sense’ is the carefully manufactured norm created by the great weight of approved journalism and subaltern intellectuals.

There is an argument that the people of Ireland are and have always been to the left of their politicians, ‘a left-of-centre country that has never had a left-led government’ as Fintan O’Toole put it recently in The Irish Times^{^[1]}. The occasion of that article was the election of Catherine Connolly as Uachtarán na hÉireann, successor to another leftwing president Michael D. Higgins. Gramsci would say that the people exhibited their ‘good sense’ in opposition to the manufactured ‘common sense’. It may sound strange in an article about faith and atheism, but the fact that a presidential candidate can campaign on a left platform without voters being told that to vote for them is to vote for Godless Communism is a step forward that, as a young man, I thought I would never see in Ireland. Social structures always seem to be made of steel or stone until the moment when they shatter and reveal themselves to be brittle as glass.

Nevertheless, at least the first part of the slogan is coming true. Ireland is becoming more godless and perhaps, in the process, more caring. Catholicism in Ireland, despite tireless work by people such as Sister Stanislaus Kennedy, was much more about othering than loving. Unmarried mothers, ‘bold’ (in both the British sense of brave and the Irish sense of naughty) girls, troublesome boys, gay, lesbian and trans people, divorcees, women who had had abortions or who needed abortions, people who used contraceptives, socialists, anarchists and communists, the poor who didn’t want to accept their poverty as a gift from God, Protestants of every kind, courting couples – the list is long – were all subject to the great anathema. It was a kind of ‘internal confinement’ as practised by Italian fascism, in that all these people lived among us but were placed irrevocably in a form of exclusion that made them like ghosts, their history forbidden, their writings censored, their stories untold. That their history is now freely available is perhaps one of the greatest achievements of the social movements that have reshaped Ireland.

Having been ill all my life political activism has always been beyond me. Instead I have concentrated on writing politics. Each of my novels has a political theme among others, and each of my poetry collections has a direct political content. Part of my practice as a writer has been finding a way to express politics in a narrative form without writing directly about politicians or political structures. I would have preferred it otherwise; I admire activists, particularly writers who combine their art with their activism – the poet Sarah Clancy or the novelist Naoise Dolan, for example. It was never possible for me, to my great regret.

Has politics become a form of religion for me? Have I, as it were, sublimated my atheism in a Marxist faith? Certainly, we Marxists are enjoined to be optimistic for the future and to believe in the inevitable second coming of communism. As a literary counterbalance to historical necessity I cherish Keats ‘negative capability’, the ability to be, as he said, ‘in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason’. Make of that what you will. I’m a writer, not a philosopher, so I consider my contradictions fully licensed.

^{^[1]} Irish Times. Accessed 15/12/2025. https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/2025/10/28/fintan-otoole-theres-a-reason-why-ireland-votes-for-leftist-presidents-and-right-of-centre-governments/

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