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From Alasdair:

Hey Peg. Your comments are interesting. Ireland itself is quite a conservative country, relative to the rest of Europe anyway. There isn't a lot of ehtnic diversity in Ireland either.

As a side issue, I think that the celtic nations in general held on to hard-line religion for way too long, not necessarily such a great starting-point for tolerance/acceptance of homosexuality.
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Ireland still has limited ethnic diversity and we have seen increasing evidence of racism over the last 5 years.

The position w.r.t. homosexuality is somewhat different. Until the mid-90s, homosexuality was illegal in Ireland. However, for a very long time prior to that the law had been allowed to fall into disuse. Even in the 1980s, homosexuality never captured the imagination of Ireland's "moral indignants" in quite the same way as issues like abortion, contraception and divorce.

An aside on religion: I saw a survey a couple of weeks ago (one of the Irish Sunday papers) which compared attitudes to religion and God in a number of countries. In a number of European countries, including the UK, around 30% of people agreed with the statement "Religion is important in my life". In Ireland, the figure was about 35%. Slightly higher, but not all that different, especially when compared to figures of the order of 60% in the United States.

In 2003, Ireland really isn't any more socially conservative or liberal than anywhere else in Western Europe.