One of Ireland’s leading journalists said he was ‘Catholic shamed’ by anti-religious ‘bigots’ after he received a torrent of criticism on social media for having worn ashes on his forehead while appearing on TV on Ash Wednesday last week.

Fionnán Sheahan, Ireland Editor of The Irish Independent, was a guest panellist on Virgin Media’s The Tonight Show last week discussing the day’s political events while bearing the unmistakeable sign of the ritual that marks the beginning of Lent. And viewers noticed and proceeded to comment and criticise him on platforms such as X.

Writing in The Sunday Independent, he said that thoughtless critics mattered little to him, but what did surprise him were those who said he “should have expected to be subjected to negativity”.

Why, he asked, “in liberal, secular Ireland, it is now normal that someone should be ridiculed for identifying as a Catholic?”

Speaking on Newstalk Breakfast this week, he added: ““I went down the [social media] rabbit hole and was looking at some of the comments and it was people who look back to their other posts and go, ‘Okay, you’re claiming to be kind of a person of liberal and open-minded thought – but when it comes to this, you become a bigot’”.

He asked rhetorically if Irish people are “not as open-minded as we claim to be?”

A recent Amarach poll commissioned by The Iona Institute found that a quarter of Irish people would be happy to see the Catholic Church vanish from Irish society completely.