IRELAND
Euronews
May 21, 2019
By Eoin Drea
I’m one of the Pope’s Children – a generation of Irish children born in the late 1970s and early 1980s – that have come to symbolise Ireland’s deep relationship with the Catholic Church. Pope John Paul’s II visit to Ireland in 1979 saw over 50% of the Irish population attend his events and reaffirm Ireland’s devotion to the Catholic cause. Ireland was poor then, with high unemployment, rampant emigration, a closed and rather isolated society unworried by the issues of immigration or race (we were all white with an excess of people, not jobs). For us, a ‘Protestant’ was exotic and reaching America (or at least England) was, for many, the ultimate objective. Ireland was, as The Economist noted in 1988, “the poorest of the rich.”
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