ABSTRACT
These startling words-especially in the context of an Irish children’s bookdescribe teenage Shell Talent’s disillusionment with the Catholic Church following the death of her mother and her feeling of abandonment by the institution at the heart of her Cork village in the 1980s in Siobhan Dowd’s A Swift Pure Cry (2006). Later, when a new priest arrives in the parish, Shell restores Jesus to his cross: ‘Jesus Christ had come back to life in the shape of Father Rose’ (12). This rejection of the Christian signifi er of atonement for the secular symbol of a bar is an indicator of changing attitudes in Irish life during the past thirty years; a metaphor for the relationship between Ireland and religion, especially the Catholic Church,1 in recent times.
