It has now been confirmed that Pope Francis will visit Ireland – south and north – in August 2018, and already some Dublin politicians are fretting that he might make a “controversial” statement about abortion during the visit. (There will very probably be an abortion referendum at this time.) Who knows? Francis is just as likely to reprimand the Irish for taking relatively few refugees (only 500 so far, from a pledge to take 4,000) and turning down many asylum applications.
But it’s interesting how little disapprobation there has been from Unionists in Northern Ireland to the planned presence of Francis in Armagh, the ecclesiastical Irish capital (which is, of course, within the northern state).
