Penal Laws (Ireland) - Mentioned Into The 20th Century

Mentioned Into The 20th Century

The memory of the Penal laws remained as a strongly resonant cultural element in Irish Catholicism long after their reform, and they were seen as a social and legal nadir from which the bulk of the Irish population had eventually escaped.

In May 1920 Seán T. O'Kelly sent a memorandum to Pope Benedict XV which included:

The position of Irish Catholics is a cruel one. We are enslaved by a Protestant power. The penal laws against our religion are not yet abolished in full. The injurious social and economic results of these anti-Catholic laws will not be overcome for generations. To the present day we suffer political injury inside and outside of Ireland, simply and solely because we are practicing Catholics. Sons of martyrs, we are known in every Masonic lodge and every anti-Catholic country as 'Papists', and par-excellence, the most devoted of all the children of the Holy See.

In 1971, responding to news of an importation of contraceptive devices from Northern Ireland that could not be sold in the Republic, Thomas Ryan, Bishop of Clonfert, said that "... never before, and certainly not since penal times was the Catholic heritage of Ireland subjected to so many insidious onslaughts on the pretext of conscience, civil rights and women's liberation."