FOREIGN STUDENTS ARRIVING in Irish universities often imagine that they will find a wide range of courses on religion. Their reasoning is obvious: Ireland is renowned both as a religious country—the island of saints and scholars—and as a country where religion has proved to be highly divisive. Surely, therefore, it will form a major part of the teaching and research in Irish education? The reality, until relatively recently, has been rather surprising. Unlike elsewhere, Irish universities did not as a matter of course offer non-clerical students the opportunity to study religion in depth. It was instead a decidedly marginal subject, with many universities wholly lacking a religious studies or theology department. Even where they had one, it was not a prestigious or sought-after degree: the CAO entry points for a Trinity medical course in 2025 were 739, for Religion 349. There was a similar problem at secondary level in the Republic. It was not till 2005 that Religious Education was, after decades of discussion, finally introduced as Leaving Certificate subject, and even then it was clearly a minority interest – just over 1,000 out of the 60,000 Leaving Cert candidates take it each year. The reasons for this seeming contradiction – the lack of religious studies in a deeply religious country – lie deep in history. Across Europe and North America, universities underwent a long transition: from the medieval and early-modern institutions, where the study of religion meant Christian theology taught by clergy to ordinands in what were essentially church seminaries, to the modern university dedicated to lay education, where religion became one subject among many taught from a variety of disciplinary angles by secular academics to largely secular students. The direction of travel was consistent, but the timing and texture of the transition varied considerably from country to country and culture to culture. Ireland, as we shall see, had its own distinctive story to tell. I am going to tell that story here in two ways. The first is a brief account of how this transition unfolded in Ireland – more slowly, more awkwardly, and more recently than in most comparable countries. The second is an examination of where we are today by means of a close reading of what might be seen as one of the products of this transition: the recently published Oxford Handbook of Religion in Modern Ireland, an ambitious attempt to take stock of where Irish religious studies now stands. It is, as far as I am aware, the first work to offer a comprehensive synthesis of the field – and it is that very novelty which makes it worth examining in some detail. Teaching theology The Reformation and Counter-Reformation of the sixteenth century left Europe divided not only politically, but also intellectually, as each side sought to establish the rectitude of its theological, ecclesiological and historical claims. Rival schools of controversial theology sprang up in Catholic and Protestant universities – controversial in the precise sense, designed to controvert the arguments of the other side. When the fi rst Irish university, Trinity College Dublin, opened its doors in 1594, its prime purpose was to train students for service in the Church of Ireland, and its sole academic subject was the study of theology – the publications of its early academics were works of anti-Catholic polemic. For Catholics, subject to the penal laws, theology had to be studied abroad in the universities of Counter-Reformation Europe. The situation was, as a result, uniquely sensitive – so sensitive, indeed, that the British government itself helped establish a Catholic seminary at Maynooth in 1795, calculating that priests trained in Ireland would be less likely to return infected by the revolutionary ideas then sweeping continental Europe. A similar repatriation of clerical training occurred in the Presbyterian church in the nineteenth century: from 1853, rather than travelling to Scotland for their education, Presbyterian clergy could study at Assembly’s College in Belfast. But any attempt to move beyond vocational education and offer religion as a subject of general lay study ran aground on the sands of Irish sectarianism. Even primary schools were not immune. The innovative state-sponsored non-denominational primary school system introduced in 1831 was opposed by many Catholics and some Protestants on the grounds that it was… well… insufficiently Catholic or Protestant. At secondary level, churches north and south fought determined rearguard actions well into the second half of the twentieth century to preserve a denominational education system. At third level, the issue was equally contentious. Put simply, religion was the reason why that perennial political hot potato, the Irish university question, went unanswered throughout the nineteenth century. In 1845 Sir Robert Peel had sought to meet the demand of the growing Irish middle classes for higher education by founding the Queen’s Colleges in Belfast, Galway, and Cork. By excluding theology from the curriculum he had hoped to attract students from all denominations. It was a fond hope. Though accepted by Presbyterians – whose clergy could take an arts degree at Queen’s before proceeding to Assembly’s College – and largely ignored by the Church of Ireland, safe in its Protestant redoubt of Trinity College, the new colleges were firmly denounced by the Catholic bishops as ‘Godless Colleges’: a threat to the faith, and even the morals, of Catholic students. The hierarchy’s response was to found their own Catholic University of Ireland in Dublin in 1854, with John Henry Newman as its first rector. But it never attracted sufficient funding or students to flourish. It was not until 1908 that the issue was finally resolved by the Irish Universities Act, which created the National University of Ireland, with colleges in Dublin, Galway and Cork, and a separate Queen’s University in Belfast. But it was resolved at the expense of theology. The new universities were prohibited from establishing chairs of theology or funding the teaching of religion for confessional purposes. Though private funding remained possible in principle, in practice the universities focussed upon secular disciplines, leaving theology to the denominational seminaries. This settlement would...
