The Last Priests in Ireland: How moral guardians in Darth Vader cassocks suffocated the country

Ardal O’Hanlon played one of the most famous fictional priests of all time as Father Ted’s lovably dim Dougal McGuire. He was hilarious, but there was always more to Ted than laughs. Dosed with absurdity, salted with satire, the sitcom opened a window into the Irish soul. For that reason, O’Hanlon is the perfect presenter of The Last Priests in Ireland (RTÉ One, Monday, 9.35pm), an absorbing documentary about the decline of what was once one of our most sacred institutions: the Irish clergy.

A few years ago, an overview of the Church and its moral collapse would have been full of anger. Given the abuse scandals and the cover-ups, how could it be anything else? But so thorough and irreversible has been the disintegration of the authority of the Church that the tone throughout is not fury but a sort of shrugging sadness.

The Last Priests in Ireland will be followed on Tuesday by the Last Nuns In Ireland, in which Dearbhail McDonald reports on the fading into twilight of female religious orders. McDonald brings a journalist’s edge to her reporting. O’Hanlon, by contrast, approaches the topic with a shaggy bewilderment: how did the priesthood fall to pieces so quickly and emphatically?

He begins his inquiry into the state of the clergy in contemporary Ireland with a walk through the vast, creaking metaphor that is the abandoned Clonliffe Seminary in Dublin. When O’Hanlon was born in 1965, the vast, forbidding complex was a beating heart of Catholicism. Now, it stands empty and rotting – a husk full of the ghosts of a strident faith that no longer exists.

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The compelling argument at the film’s core is that Irish Catholicism wasn’t all that Irish to begin with. Historically, Irish Christianity was threaded through with holdovers from our pre-Christian heritage. Unlike the medieval church elsewhere, religion belonged not to the pope – but to us.

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“The Roman Church is a global church ... The Celtic tradition is an indigenous tradition,” says Dara Molloy, a former priest who stepped away from the Church to become a Celtic monk. “Celtic Christianity is an integration of the Druidic spirituality into Christianity.”

The story’s villain is the former Cardinal Paul Cullen, the former Archbishop of Armagh and Dublin, who imposed stifling Victorian prudishness on Irish Catholicism at a Synod in Thurles in 1850. He imported 19th-century British morality to Ireland and passed it off as God’s will.

A century later, Ireland was priest-ridden – suffocating under the weight of its moral guardians in Darth Vader cassocks. O’Hanlon quotes Liam O’Flaherty’s description of an overabundance of priests as the “black rash”.

O’Hanlon states at the outset that he is not interested in relitigating the evils of the abuse scandals, And yet they are impossible to avoid. “The real thing that angered people is that [the abuse] was hidden because of the moral weakness of the top brass,” says one contributor. “They were in thrall to the Vatican. The Vatican had been taken over by a very conservative Pope.”

The Papal visit in 1979 was regarded at the time as a high point for Irish Catholics. Perhaps, in hindsight, it was when tide went out, says O’Hanlon, dragged along as a reluctant 14-year-old to see John Paul II in Galway. This, of course, was where the pope gave his famous “Young people of Ireland, I love you” speech.

“We liked being patronised,” says O’Hanlon. “When Bon Jovi tells us we’re the best audience in the world, we lap it up. The Church infantilised us. We weren’t encouraged to think for ourselves. We were given a single catechism and told to learn it off by heart.”

If there is a quibble, it lies with the title. The Last Priests in Ireland suggests an overview of the Church today and its dwindling clergy. O’Hanlon indeed interviews a number of priests, including a missionary to Ireland from abroad who speaks of the loneliness of his calling.

But the documentary has the broader objective of placing the priesthood in the context of the long history of Irish spirituality. The conclusion is that the hegemony of priests was but a passing phase – a dark chapter closed and soon to pass out of living memory.

The fatal error, says Limerick-based Fr Roy O’Donovan, was to put up barriers between the clergy and their flock. “This separation of people and priests is so embedded,” he laments. “Imposing these deviations ... was foreign to us. They killed Catholicism here in Ireland over a couple of centuries.”