Erin go bragh!
But please, Mr. Bechizza, itâs same-sex marriage. I know it was called âgay marriageâ for a long time. Soon, though, itâll just be called what it is: marriage.
I used same-sex marriage in the copy. Headlines are a special little kingdom 
Ireland hasnât been âdeeply-Catholicâ for a good while now, Census figures are misleading (with lots of people ticking the Catholic box because they were christened and maybe dragged along to mass once a year by their parents at Christmas time, but not only are they not practicing Catholics, a decent amount of them probably donât even believe in god). If the country really was âdeeply-Catholicâ then we wouldnât have seen at 75% Yes vote!
Blame the sub!
Also, yay Ireland!
Remarkable news. Just watched Pride last night, which made it quite a bit less surprising. The way same-sex marriage acceptance has developed seems like a great example of what happens when a tipping point is reached.
I just saw Pride too! Excellent movie (that apparently hews pretty closely to the true story).
Theyâve still got some unfortunate fragments embedded in their constitution; and victory of apathy over something resembling catholicism that actually takes instructions from the mothership was very late by European standards; but it is hard to argue that the church hasnât been pretty seriously hammered of late. Getting the paperwork in order would be nice(and getting rid of their new, shiny, anti-blasphemy law would be cool); but itâs nice to see that people can get on with their lives in the meantime.
Itâs actually a bit curious, Iâd love to know more about why: christianity in general hasnât been so good at keeping up subscriber numbers and audience engagement across much of its traditional range in the first world; but catholicism has had an especially bad time of it. Are the protestants subflavors, in their nearly bacterial speed of schism, mutation, and competition, just turning out more attractive salvation goods? Has catholicism, because of its well developed centralized structure, copped much of the heat for sexual abuse and other abuses of office, where protestant flavors usually just fold individually if a given pastor is too tainted to continue?
They still have a lot of reserve base in assorted heavily proselytized post-colonial areas(though even there, protestant and âcharismaticâ catholic groups have been making some inroads); but something about catholicism seems to be performing worse than I would have expected. If anything, Iâd have expected the catholics to play a brutally effective âmore-or-less-post-christian-by-belief-but-looking-for-cultural-trappingsâ game. They have centuries of experience, loads of cool art history, an arsenal of finely polished ceremonies, an expert level knowledge of smells nâ bells, and a history of (notably unlike the protestants) administering these services with an eye to orthopraxy rather than orthodoxy. Seems like itâd be a win to me, if you swing that way.
I think itâs very simple, religiosity is inversely proportional to prosperity and education. Ireland rapidly developed its education system after the end of the second world war, after the end of the 80s recessions that, in conjunction with investment from the EU, started to pay off and the country rapidly became more prosperous. My generation growing up in the 80s and after have been overwhelmingly irreligious.
It will be interesting to compare our development to whatâs going on in Poland now, they are much more Catholicised country, and have been held back in their development because of Communism, but there is a lot of growth going on there now, so I wouldnât be surprised to see the coming generation growing up there now mirror whatâs happened in Ireland.
Double rainbows over Dublin this morning. Looks like a sign to me!
(not my picture, but Iâve seen it attributed to 3 different people already so I donât know whose it is)
Who knew that the gold at the end was a pair of wedding bands?
âDeeply Catholicâ seems like a relative term. Compared to most of the rest of Europe they still are; surveys of religious belief put Ireland towards the top - in Western Europe, itâs basically just Ireland, Italy and Portugal with a majority of people who believe in âGod,â substantially more than the rest of Western Europe. There seems to be substantial overlap between those who are (some degree of) âreligiousâ in Ireland and favor same-sex marriage, oddly enough.
Officially announced as a yes as of about 2 minutes ago.
Full results:
Yes: 1,201,607 No: 734,300.
Thatâs 62.1% yes to 37.9% no.
Turnout was 60.5%
(edited to add)- Finally, a vote whose results I can be happy about. There have been precious few of those, recently.
a slender majority of self identified Catholics supported marriage equality when polled a couple of years ago.
As to how Catholic Ireland is it depends on whoâs asking and why. It isnât straightforward . We would be quite a bit more atheist than the US though.
[quote=âShuck, post:13, topic:58167â]
âDeeply Catholicâ seems like a relative term. Compared to most of the rest of Europe they still are; surveys of religious belief put Ireland towards the top - in Western Europe, itâs basically just Ireland, Italy and Portugal with a majority of people who believe in âGod,â substantially more than the rest of Western Europe.[/quote]
Belief in god doesnât equate to Catholicism though, and certainly not âdeep-catholicismâ. Even if someone might nominally describe themselves as Catholic, the fact that they donât got to mass and are unlikely to believe a large chunk of church doctrine means you cannot describe them or the country as deeply Catholic.
Itâs rapidly changing as well, in the last census in 2011 84% of people identified as Catholic (and again, a large proportion of these arenât really Catholic by any sensible definition of the term), but there was a study of college students done in 2013 where under 60% identified as Catholic, only 32% of those believed in transubstantiation. Bizarrely only 38% overall said they believed in god, 42% were unsure. Church attendance was a minority affair as well, 61% didnât attend at all, and those who did only turned up a couple of times a year. If you factor those figures into the census results the number of self identifying Catholics would drop significantly, correct for actual belief and observance and those figures plummet even more.
all of which makes the stranglehold the catholic church has on the political system of Ireland all the more perverse.
Itâs great the polls turned out to be correct, only a single constituency voted No, and not by a huge margin (there were only a handful of constituencies where the Yes result was close, one in Donegal by only 33 votes, most had at least a 5-10% swing).
Looks like large numbers of young people voting for the first time and people returning from abroad made sure of the margin of the victory, but also a large number of people from all walks of life across the country voted Yes where you might have assumed they would vote No. Probably a lot of people who might have wanted to vote No but voted Yes because of their kids or other family members.
Actually here in ireland the official, legal, constitutionally defined, by will of the people through plebescite, correct term is : marriage.
There isnât much political control from the church any more, and certainly not in terms of the government (we even shut down our embassy in the Vatican for a few years, our relations with them have been fairly frosty of late due to the child abuse), Labour are explicitly anti-catholic (though their support is pretty low, doubt theyâll have much influence after the next election). They certainly donât have a stranglehold on anything. Rural Ireland still has a strong Catholic influence in terms of their political representation, but the only large scale influence it is having on politics would be with slowing down a few key reforms (and thatâs all theyâll be able to do, slow things down), rather than directing legislation in general.
The main problems left would be with abortion and the churchâs role in education, the current government has improved access to abortion a small amount (though the new law was far from perfect even for what it was trying to allow), and there were claims before they came to power that they would do something about removing the schools from their control, but nothing much happened there unfortunately.
