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LAST ORDERS WITH GAY BYRNE

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Gay Byrne was a Synge Street CBS boy. The Christian Brothers educated him and gave him opportunities that changed his life, like those of thousands of other Irish children. But Gay also remembers the climate of daily brutality that surrounded his schooling.

Those personal insights and experiences are the starting point for his moving and insightful exploration of the role the Catholic Church has played in Irish lives for more than 200 years.

From the penal era, when the Church was a courageous champion, educator and nation-builder for a downtrodden and destitute people, to the terrible revelations of abuse, cover-up, corruption and hypocrisy in recent years, Gay charts the Catholic Church’s rise to total social domination and its sudden decline to today’s uncertain state.

Press release

The story of the role and place of the Catholic Church in Irish society has been a complex one, tainted in particular by the child abuse revelations of recent years. Once champions and protectors of the majority of Irish people, living and working in solidarity, providing education and social support in the 17th and 18th centuries, the Church gradually grew in power, becoming a colossus by the latter part of the 19th century.

Today, the glory years are over, vocations are few, congregations are dwindling and the future is uncertain.

Drawing on his personal experience of growing up in Ireland, educated by the Christian Brothers and later witnessing at first hand, as a broadcaster, the dramatic transformation of Irish society since the early 1960s, Gay Byrne explores the history of the Irish Catholic Church from the penal law era right through to the present day.

As he travels around the country, Gay discovers how priests, nuns and brothers strove to liberate the poor through education and to create a strong, confident Catholic society. The Christian Brothers, founded by Edmund Rice, for example, educated over 100,000 boys, many of whom went on to become leading lights in Irish society.

Gay charts the transformation of the Church from Scarlet Pimpernels, often working in secret, saying Mass at hidden Mass rocks and providing education in hedge schools, to a Church that became a de facto state system by the early 20th century, dominating every aspect of Irish life.

Ultimately, in this moving and insightful immersion into 200 years of Irish social, cultural and religious life, Gay Byrne attempts to discover why it all went so terribly wrong; how the reputation of the Church went from proud and positive nation-building to one tainted by abuse of the vulnerable, cover-up, corruption and hypocrisy.

“It’s a sad story, especially when so many of them gave their lives for their ideals, religious belief and faith – and now to be among the most scandalised people in the world,” says Gay, in conclusion, and yet it is one of the most crucial and critical stories of Ireland’s journey to and beyond independence.