Religious society in Gaelic Ireland, say in the 16th century, you are talking about the pre-Reformation period and then the immediate post-Reformation period, and what became in Ireland the counter-Reformation, and that became a period of change as well.

In late medieval Ireland, the Friars, the Franciscans, were enormously influential. The secular clergy seem to have been rather, quite secular indeed, largely married, very much involved in secular affairs - some of them were also political leaders. For example, Cathal Óg Mac Maghnusce, the compiler of the Annals of Ulster who died in 1498, wore 3 hats simultaneously; he was chieftain of the McManus family or sept or clan; he was Vicar General of the Diocese of Clogher; and he was also virtually a fulltime scholar. So I think the church probably suffered in that sense. So therefore a lot of the duties and responsibilities of promoting religion and keeping religion going was devolved on the Franciscan Friars.

Then, of course, after the Reformation and when the counter-Reformation began towards the end of the 16th century, you began to have clergy coming in from the Continent, or continental-trained clergy, particularly the Jesuits, and they were of course very involved in political matters and involved in a political struggle and egging-on various chieftains who wouldn’t have been known themselves for their religiosity - Hugh O’Neill, for example, who was married probably three to four times, and in very many irregular unions, and yet he was fighting for faith and fatherland.

So you got some rather contradictory situations like that, that certainly would not have sat very well with the new Tridentine Catholicism that was coming to the fore, but it has been said that Tridentine Catholicism didn’t really triumph in Ireland until the change of language: that it was a three-century struggle and that it was only in the latter half of the 19th century under Cardinal Cullen, when English had become the language of the people and certainly became the language of the church, that eventually the counter-Reformation triumphed, but before that it was fighting a losing battle both against Protestantism and against traditional Gaelic Catholicism.