'Ireland saw its gross national product grow by 49 per cent between 1995 and 2000.

 https://www.ft.com/content/90830b70-533c-4a6c-a30d-630598

d29a8b

'Ireland saw its gross national product grow by 49 per cent between 1995 and 2000.

'An unemployment rate that had started the decade at above 15 per cent was down to 4.5 per cent by the end of 1990s.

'By 2006 some 36 per cent of the population of Gort in County Galway were Brazilian.

'The authority of the once all-powerful Catholic hierarchy was eviscerated by the laying bare of the sexual abuse and physical cruelty visited by priests and nuns on children in the Church’s care.

'Censorious moralism made way for a wave of social liberalism that saw Ireland among the first in Europe to vote for single-sex marriage.

'In 2017, voters who had been brought up being instructed that homosexuality was a mortal sin elected Leo Varadkar, a gay man of Indian heritage, as taoiseach.

'The Catholic Church was the author of its own destruction. The terrible crimes committed by the clergy against young boys and girls, exposed first in a series of brave television documentaries and then in several official inquiries, might have been cause for a display of the contrition the bishops had long demanded of their flocks. 

'Instead, the Church greeted the revelations with callous diversions and prevarication. Ferriter tells the story of the young woman who told her priest of the childhood abuse she had suffered. The response was that she was “forgiven”.'