ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines the process by which a popular nationalist alliance between fundamentalist Catholicism and ‘republicanism’ gradually crumbled, and suggests that it has been replaced by a general Irish patriotism which does not need to attach itself to religious or tribal identity. A mutual disaffection was growing between the two sides of the nationalist establishment: priests and patriots ceased to see eye to eye. De Valera, the firebrand radical of the twenties, had become the grey-haired leader of a nationalist and republican gerontocracy by 1957. The formally democratic Irish political process was heavily tinged with theocracy, because the people willed it to be so. The Irish experience vividly illustrates a lesson that many political leaders have had to learn in the twentieth century: that there are clear limits and considerable costs attached to any ambitious project of social engineering through political means. Politics and culture intersected in peculiar ways in this small, peripheral, ingrown and post-revolutionary polity.
