A couple of years ago, I went to a community meeting called to discuss how the suburb where I live might mark its centenary. A number of themes were suggested for exploration and debate. Among them were family stories, the role of sport, the changing environment and the place of religion.

There seemed to be little or no appetite for discussing religion among those present, who ranged in age from their 20s to their 70s. This was despite the fact that, to judge by the photographic record, public displays of faith had been central to life in the area for its first 60 years or so. Processions, novenas and visits by bishops didn’t just figure large. They predominated.

I am not a Christian, but this willed amnesia seemed faintly chilling. Derek Scally explored it in his book, The Best Catholics in the World, arguing that when the authority of the institutional Catholic Church collapsed, Irish people walked away from it without reckoning with the culture that had given it such power, or with their own place in that culture. What remains, in some quarters at least, is at best an ambivalence or at worst a deep discomfort about public professions of faith, which have all but disappeared from the language of mainstream politicians and civic leaders.

It’s this history which gives modern Irish secularism much of its particular flavour. The British sociologist Grace Davie once described her compatriots as believing without belonging, holding on to a private faith while drifting away from the churches. Irish Catholicism long worked the other way round. It was about belonging far more than believing. So when people left, many walked away from an institution rather than from beliefs they had ever examined closely. What such a culture never cultivated was a language for personal faith, which may be why talk of a relationship........

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