Social Catholicism and the Social Question in Independent Ireland: The Challenge to the Fiscal System

Abstract

Within the general configuration of nineteenth-century European developments among Roman Catholics, Irish Catholics did not face the same social, economic or political situation as their continental counterparts. Whereas other continental Catholics built up extensive and often elaborate practical and intellectual frameworks for the Christian organisation of their societies, Irish Catholics did not. In Ireland the political aspirations of the Catholic Church were intimately intertwined with the attainment of Home Rule government by the Irish Parliamentary party at Westminster.1 This union of Church and the proto-state negated any need for a separate Catholic political party. Dominance of the national question in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries ensured that the social question within a Catholic political context did not arise as a topic for discussion in the same way as it had in continental Catholicism. Ireland existed as a predominantly agricultural-producing country with a rural-based social structure in the nineteenth century. By the turn of the century this picture had changed significantly with the growth of urbanisation in Belfast, Dublin and Cork, which brought with it an intensification of modern urban social problems. Housing conditions, sanitation and conditions of employment were considered comparable to similar situations in Britain’s main urban centres by some contemporary policy-makers.2