I'm eternally thankful that Almighty God took my grandmother from this earth years before she could see how far her homeland has fallen.
What stuns me is the speed at which Ireland went from an intensely Catholic culture to an utterly hedonistic cesspit on the verge of national ѕυιcιdє (even handing summer homes and spare rooms over to Mohammedan invaders). Of course, what's happened in Ireland has happened all over Europe, but nowhere with such haste from one extreme to the other.
One wonders if this is the fruit of "Irish Jansenism" - essentially the phenomenon being discussed in the "Trads Losing Their Children to the World" thread writ large on a societal scale. Was the Faith practiced, taught, and lived in Ireland in an excessively miserabilist manner, such that at the first taste of the novelties and "freedoms" of the world, a whole generation would sell their birthright for so meagre a mess of pottage? Was the predilection of the Irish for drink an indicator of a weakness in the Irish character - a potential for excess and indulgence - that the Church's enemies were able to exploit?
S. Patricius, ora pro nobis.