In this episode of In Conversation With, Mary Margaret Olohan sits down with Declan Ganley, Irish entrepreneur, political campaigner, and founder of Libertas, to examine the true state of Catholicism in Ireland. Ganley opens as an optimist: the rumours of the Church's death, he argues, are premature. Parts of it are dying, but new roots are forming, particularly among a generation of young men who have tried the alternatives and found them wanting. He traces the arc of Irish Catholic life from the rural west of his childhood, a faith that was, in his phrase, "three miles wide and half an inch deep", through the moment the Church began to go woke, symbolised for him by a school chapel stripped of its pews and a nun leading students through a wind-chime meditation in place of the Mass.
The conversation turns to politics, and Ganley does not spare the Irish establishment. He gives a detailed account of how the 2018 abortion referendum was, in his view, stolen: a ground campaign that was winning, shut down in its final two weeks by a coordinated ban on online advertising, agreed between the Irish government and the major social media platforms on the pretext of foreign funding. He diagnoses the broader strategy as the hacking of empathy, the deliberate use of sympathetic but misleading cases to bypass rational argument, and applies it to the abortion debate on both sides of the Atlantic.
He also addresses what he sees as a profound double standard in how Ireland accounts for its past and present. While excavations continue at historical Church-run sites, 108 children survived failed abortions in Irish hospitals last year and were left to die, a fact that has attracted almost no public attention. Children in state care are going missing with no explanation and little media interest. The institutions that replaced the Church, Ganley argues, are not morally superior. They are simply less scrutinised.
The episode moves through the rigging of Ireland's presidential election, the iconoclasm of a president who stripped Saint Patrick of his title in her first Saint Patrick's Day address, and the complexity of mass migration. Ganley distinguishes sharply between the Catholic families from Nigeria and Kerala filling pews in his local cathedral, and the welfare migrants and fraudulent asylum claimants whose behaviour discredits the system and harms genuine refugees most of all.
It closes on grounds for hope. Ganley describes what he is seeing in his own diocese: young men turning up to adoration, Gregorian chant groups forming, a missionary vigour in parts of the Church that the establishment has not yet found a way to extinguish. Whether it is a fashion or a real revival, he cannot yet say. But he suspects it is real.
