In the past week polling company MRNI has been publishing a
series of polls in the Irish Times on various aspects of life in Ireland, .jpg)
including religion.
One of the most disappointing figures in the poll from the secular
lobby’s point of view was that some 87 per cent of 18-34-year-olds still believe
in God. The media narrative in recent years has been that only a few elderly
diehards in Ireland still cling to religious belief and that the younger
generations have abandoned this ‘superstitious nonsense’. The MRBI poll shows
that it is the media narrative that is nonsense.
If 87 per cent of the 18-34-age-group state that they
believe in God, it makes it somewhat unlikely that atheism is about to become
the ‘wave of the future’ in Ireland or that religious belief is about to peter
out.
Apart from believing in God, the poll also found a high proportion of Irish Catholics
(no distinction is made between practicing and non-practicing Catholics) still believe
in the tenets of the Catholic religion that relate to Jesus. Some 84 per cent
believe that Jesus was the Son of God and 78 per cent believe that Jesus rose
from the dead. Thus, the great majority of Catholics in Ireland are more than
‘Catholics in name only’, as is often alleged.
The poll also asked about religious practice. Some 37 per cent of Catholics
attend Mass weekly or more. An additional 15 per cent attend monthly or more.
These are extremely high figures by European standards.
In addition to these
regular attenders at Mass (52 per cent), some 32 per cent attend irregularly.
While those 32 per cent attending Mass only at Christmas, Easter, and other
special occasions are certainly less fervent Catholics than the 52 per cent
attending regularly, it doesn’t make them atheists. Although these figures are
lower than was the case historically, they are very similar to figures
published in other polls since the mid-2000s, thus indicating that numbers
attending Mass have now stabilised.
The commentator, Vincent Browne, wrote last year in the Irish Times that
‘hardly anybody goes to Mass these days’. The MRBI poll shows this claim to be
false. Extrapolating the poll results to the whole island of Ireland, two million
people attend Mass in Ireland most weeks, and that this rises to three million
for Christmas, Easter and other special occasions.
It’s true that Irish Catholics are liberal on issues like
women priests and married priests but the overall conclusion from the poll is
that religion in Ireland is very far from finished.