‘Perhaps it is only now, after the collapse of Christian Ireland, that we can begin to recover its history’ (p. vii). Thus does Crawford Gribben open his book in which he ‘describes the slow emergence, long dominance, debilitating division and rapid decline of the communities of faith that for 1,500 years did most to shape and sustain the religious, social and political life of this island and its people and their movements around the world’. He succeeds in presenting a survey of Christianity in Ireland that is readable, accessible and informative. As with all works of synthesis there are some specific details that will irk some specialists, but the author has clearly invested a very great deal of time and effort to master the recent literature on this large subject. It was, he states, ‘in part, a labour of love’ (p. vii) and the author is to be commended for the fruits of his labour. Yet the sheer scope of the book, a survey of fifteen centuries of Irish religious history in only 220 pages of text, thirty-five of them (including photographs) on the twentieth century, means that it reads as a précis rather than a thesis.

Of greatest interest is the conclusion in which the author reflects on the ‘sudden, shocking and decisive’ onset of secularisation from the mid-1990s (p. 200). The initial trigger for that ‘sudden-onset secularization’ was the revelation that Fr Michael Cleary and Bishop Eamonn Casey, two of Ireland's most charismatic and high-profile clergymen, had broken their vows of celibacy and fathered children. However, their contributions to the ‘collapse of Christian Ireland’ were soon superseded by far darker and ever more horrific revelations about the abuse of thousands of children by paedophile priests who were shielded from any consequences for their crimes by church and state authorities. Then in 2012 a local historian, Catherine Corless, revealed that hundreds of dead babies were interred in a decommissioned septic tank at the Bons Secours Mother and Baby Home in Tuam, County Galway. A state commission subsequently exposed evidence of the systematic exploitation, trafficking, malnutrition, sexual abuse and deaths of thousands of individuals entrusted to the care of Catholic Church institutions across the Republic of Ireland (pp. 201–4). The most powerful part of this book is its citation of Taoiseach Enda Kenny's response to the commission's report in 2017: a visceral indictment of the clerical depravity and the collusion of southern Irish society that were responsible for the horrors it catalogued. Tuam simply epitomised the awfulness of it all. Gribben concludes that in the wake of a quarter of a century of ever more shocking revelations, ‘Christian Ireland was dead, and Catholic politicians had buried it’ (p. 205).

Surprisingly, given that he grew up in a Northern Irish family of Plymouth Brethren, in his conclusion Gribben comes very close to identifying ‘Christian Ireland’ with the Catholic Church in the Republic of Ireland and he offers no analysis of secularisation among Protestants. Yet the loss of faith among Protestants has been no less profound. It is a general and growing phenomenon, especially in urban and suburban Ireland, north and south. It's been a long time coming. Back in the early 1980s I was one of only two students who regularly attended the communion service celebrated by the Protestant Church of Ireland chaplain to University College Cork, a saintly minister named Archdeacon Desmond Hutchinson. Once I finished my studies in UCC the services ended. The greatest challenge that confronted the archdeacon and his bishop in those days was trying to rationalise the provision of churches for a Church of Ireland community that was shrinking in numbers and abstaining from services, and yet wanted to hold on to a surfeit of empty buildings. In 2013 a census of the Church of Ireland revealed that an average of 15.5 per cent of its members regularly attended its Sunday services north and south of the border. That signifies that one in 200 people in the Republic attended Church of Ireland services regularly and two in 100 in Northern Ireland. That compared with an estimated 35 per cent of Catholics attending mass regularly at that time. It would have been interesting to have had a comparative study of secularisation among Protestants as against Catholics across Ireland.

Gribben believes that the fundamental problem for Christianity is that the institutional Churches never truly reflected the Gospel of Jesus of Nazareth, even in the age of the Roman Empire. However, one could argue that a far greater problem is that the truth claims of Christianity have come to be seen as inherently implausible and simply fail to resonate with more and more people in the West. Secularisation can be correlated with improved levels of education, the changing roles of women, increasing life expectancy and the development of online social media. The secularisation of Irish society was already well under way before the Catholic Church was overwhelmed by revelations of horror after horror. However, the revelations have caused secularisation in Ireland to be characterised by a righteous fury that no one could have foreseen. Gribben finishes his book by referring to another existential crisis for Christianity, albeit one that was overcome, the fall of the Roman Empire, and he suggests that the current crisis for Christianity in Ireland ‘might actually be a second chance’ (p. 220). However, anyone who has attended a church service in Ireland in recent years and looked around at its depleted and aged congregation and its elderly minister/priest can only regard that as a forlorn hope – and that was before Covid-19 emptied the churches even further.