Catholic Ireland’s Dead and Gone

However, rather than pulling up after crossing the finish line that Yeats had spied in the distance, liberalizing Ireland gained new stamina in enormous quantities and accelerated. As Scott Yenor has written in these pages (“Sexual Counter-Revolution”), every society has a “sexual constitution”; what was once Ireland’s—Catholic and traditional—has been energetically replaced. In 2015, a referendum was passed allowing marriage to “be contracted in accordance with law by two persons without distinction as to their sex.” (Gender self-identification has also been possible under Irish law since that year.) And in 2018, another referendum replaced clauses acknowledging “the right to life of the unborn” with a provision for law to be made “for the regulation of termination of pregnancy.” Even when the referendum juggernaut finally ran out of road last year with the defeat of proposed changes to the Constitution concerning the family, the clauses that survived the desired cull have no material effect on Irish life.