I came across this in another thread.
http://www.independent.ie/opinion/columnists/kevin-myers/kevin-myers-ireland-was-a-strange-and-demented-place-in-1975-2102779.ht
Extract
this was essentially a Catholic State. The institutions of government imposed a Catholic interpretation upon the rule of law. Contraceptives were not lawfully available. Divorce was impossible. Abortion was not remotely discussable in Dail Eireann.

Within the body-politic of this State, there was simply no appetite for a confrontation with the Catholic Church. Our film-censorship laws were essentially a civil application of the then current Catholic teaching. (See Kevin Rockett's wonderful, deeply sobering book 'Irish Film Censorship.')
This was the Ireland that existed then, a strange and demented country, in which a cast of virginal clerics wielded enormous power, with little resistance from the political classes.

In 1973, an attempt by the new coalition government to legalise contraception foundered on the vehement opposition of Fianna Fail and of the then Taoiseach Liam Cosgrove, who actually voted against his own government's bill. The Labour Party -- the voice, such as it was, of secular Ireland -- obediently stayed in government.

The position of the Catholic Church in this island was so sensitive that when a local priest organised the bombing of the town of Claudy in 1972, killing nine people, both the British and Irish governments agreed, with the Catholic hierarchy, to hush the entire affair up.

The priest was posted to a parish where he could be reasonably relied on not to blow any more of his parishioners to pieces.

Politicians then made it their trademark to profess that they were Catholics first and Irish second. A declaration of loyalty to the church was the sine qua non of Irish political life.

As late as 1990, the presidential candidate Mary Robinson was routinely being barracked by mob-Catholics as "the abortionist".

This was a strange, demented country, with strange and demented mores --one in which the IRA army council were allowed to sleep safely in their beds.

Any garda inspector, attorney general or minister for justice who had gone after the child-raping priest Smyth would have seen his (and the word is emphatically "his") career terminated there and then.

And it was in the nature of Irish society to protect the institutions of the Catholic Church, and its members.



kmyers@independent.ie

- Kevin Myers

Irish Independent

It makes me reappraise the concern of people in the North about being subsumed into such a society.
It is fashionable to just regard them as reactionary bigots.
I used to wonder about the importance of statehood to both sides. Just different pictures on stamps and banknotes.

How many of us now, including citizens of modern Ireland, would meekly accept that situation.
Some might even exclaim, "No surrender"?