In Belfast, Catholic Artists Support Palestinians With Transformed Murals
BELFAST, Northern Ireland — The walls that separate the Catholic and Protestant neighborhoods of this Northern Irish city are officially known as the Peace Walls, not so much because they are peaceful places but because they have historically helped keep the peace in a divided city. Muralists have used these walls as a canvas to express political causes both local and international.
With a war raging in Gaza between Israel and Hamas, the Irish have largely taken the side of the Palestinians. They have done this both politically and artistically. One such project is called “Painting for Palestine.” It uses images originally made by Palestinian artists that have been recreated here in Belfast by Irish artists and volunteers.
These images occupy a 160-foot section of a Peace Wall known as the International Wall. To create the project, artists spent about seven weeks painting over several older murals that commemorated the 30-year period of Irish history known as The Troubles. The finished “Painting for Palestine” project was unveiled on March 3.
The project includes 12 murals, each with a different scene. In one, a man in a keffiyeh hugs a child in front of destroyed buildings. In another, fireworks light up over a city. A third mural shows two small children, painted in black and white, sitting in shock.
“Painting for Palestine” was inspired in part by Irish muralist Danny Devenny, who painted the famous Bobby Sands mural on the side of Sinn Fein’s Belfast office.
For months, even before Oct. 7, Devenny had been seeing artwork online by Middle Eastern artists that supported Palestine.
The work of these artists, Devenny said, came “from the heart.”
“These images were so hauntingly beautiful,” he said. “They were dealing with issues of death and destruction.”
Devenny began by sharing the Middle Eastern artists’ work on social media with his followers, but then decided he could have an even bigger impact.
“Instead of just sharing their images on Facebook, why don’t we paint their images on our wall?” he said. “Our wall is photographed daily. There’s thousands of people, tourists come here from all over the world.”
Devenny’s hope was that the tourists would take their photos home and share the images of the wall — along with their support for Palestinians — with their friends and family.
‘Giving Them a Space To Say It’: How ‘Painting for Palestine’ Came Together
While Devenny was figuring out how to make his idea a reality, a Palestinian artist reached out to Bill Rolston, a retired sociology professor at Ulster University and a mural expert, with a similar idea.
The artist, Rana Hammoudeh, first saw the Peace Walls when she visited Belfast in August 2023. She was inspired by the International Wall to create a similar wall in Palestine, with artists from all over the world participating in the project.
“Then Oct. 7 happened,” Rolston said. “Everything went pear-shaped. Her plan was out the window.”
Around December, Devenny decided he wanted to use the artwork of Palestinians specifically, rather than general art that supports Palestine.
“I thought to myself, a lot of these images we’re looking at on the Internet and Facebook, they’re not all by Palestinian artists,” Devenny said. “Wouldn’t it be great if we could get Palestinian stuff and just show their work?”
The Irish people have felt a connection to Palestinians for decades, “because of a collective memory,” Rolston said.
“Palestine and Ireland’s stories weave in and out of each other in various ways,” he added. “[There are] so many similarities between settler colonialism in Elizabethan Ireland and in 1940s to 1960s Palestine, including that the proportion of settlers at the time of partition was almost identical in each case.”
The two groups also had similarities in their resistance. Including that the early Provisional IRA trained alongside the PLO in the early 1970s, Rolston said.
Despite their similarities, Rolston said that doesn’t mean the Irish artists should have been the ones creating their own artwork to support Palestine.
“People who go through similar political struggles in the world, other people’s struggles resonate with them, but it is only a resonance.” Rolston said. “It’s not the same experience.”
“If we do it, who knows what words we’re putting in people’s mouths, as it were,” Rolston added. “Things that were supremely important to us, may not have been supremely important to them… And also, the real risk is that we’d be patronizing in some way or other, even totally inadvertently.”
In order to get Palestinians’ artwork, Rolston reached back out to Hammoudeh, who was back in Palestine, for help.
“Rana burst into action and within a couple of days, we had a whole pile of stuff,” Rolston said.
That was around Christmas 2023, Rolston said. Devenny and other muralists decided to start the actual painting soon after the new year.
“Within days of us setting up at the corner of the Falls Road, we had dozens of people coming along and volunteering,” Devenny said.
Rolston said the support from the community was “spectacular.”
“I think maybe the best of all was the buy-in from all sorts of groups in the community,” Rolston said.
A man who runs a printing business made copies of the artwork so the painters could have physical prints for templates. A local business catered food for the unveiling. A community center across the street from the wall gave the painters and volunteers full use of their bathrooms and space to warm up when it was cold outside. And the paint shop up the road sold paint at cost price, Rolston said.
“And so on and so on,” Rolston said. “The closeness of the community, that meant that’s the way they reacted.”
In the end, Painting for Palestine included 12 murals, painted by three expert muralists and dozens of volunteers, Rolston said. When it was unveiled, there was a celebration with music and interviews with TV stations.
Rolston said he loved the Painting for Palestine project for two reasons.
“Firstly, this is not what we think of Palestine,” he said. “This is what Palestinians think of Palestine. So we’re just giving them a space to say it. The second is that there were over 30 people involved at some point or other in painting those 12 murals. Only three of them were muralists.”
None of the other people involved were painters, Rolston said.
“And yet, with guidance and support and a bit of clean up afterwards, they got it together,” he said. “To me, it’s a wonderful message to say, look, you can do this. Collectively, you can do this. You don’t need to be experts. What you need is to have an expert or two with you and you can do it. So I love that aspect of it.”
‘Are You With Us?’: Political Murals in Belfast
Despite a light drizzle on a Friday morning in March, tourists still stop by the Bobby Sands mural on Falls Road, right on the corner of Sevastopol Street.
Sands’ face fills the entire side wall of the building, where Sinn Fein has its offices in Belfast.
This mural was painted by Devenny in 1998 to memorialize Sands, a member of the Provisional Irish Republican Army who was elected as a member of parliament in 1981, one month before he died while on hunger strike in a British prison.
Devenny got his start as an artist when he was in prison. He had been arrested for robbing a bank for the IRA in 1973. He started drawing political cartoons that would get smuggled out of the prison to be printed in newspapers.
Later, other artists started recreating his cartoons and drawings on walls around Belfast. The murals became popular. Devenny realized that his work of creating and disseminating artwork would be much easier if he just painted the images on walls.
“What I realized was murals, you get a couple of tins of paint, you get a gabled wall, you paint the image on the wall,” Devenny said. “All the newspapers and all the camera crews, all the television crews come.”
They either take photographs or videos of the murals — and the message the muralist is trying to send — and that message gets disseminated to people all over the world, Devenny said.
So Devenny started to paint murals himself.
Rolston first became interested in political murals in 1981, during the hunger strikes. Before that, Rolston said, there weren’t many murals made by Irish Republicans. The murals were mostly done by Unionists — though he wasn’t aware of them at the time.
“In the spring of ‘81, some young people just up the road from here began painting murals and the whole thing burgeoned,” Rolston said. “Probably 300 murals in that spring and summer of 1981, where there hadn’t been murals before.”
Rolston started photographing the murals.
Even after the hunger strikes were over, Republicans continued to paint murals, so Rolston continued to photograph them. Rolston later learned about the Unionist tradition of murals, so he started photographing them, too.
The earliest murals in Northern Ireland’s history were mostly Protestant, according to the Imperial War Museum. Nationalist, or Republican murals started after the hunger strikes.
Today, there are an estimated 700 murals in Belfast, according to Extramural Activity, a blog documenting murals and street art in Northern Ireland.
But when it comes to political murals, not just street art, Rolston has a rigid definition.
“They have to be articulated as political,” Rolston said. “And secondly, it has to be done as part of a movement, even a putative movement. You know, you’re part of a collective or you’re doing it for the collective and not just to say, ‘Hey, look at how good I am.’”
Globally, political murals have one main purpose, according to Rolston.
“Political murals, throughout the world, are about drawing support,” he said. “They’re about saying to an audience passing by, that this is where we stand. Are you with us?”
On a Friday morning, the Painting for Palestine murals were achieving their purpose.
Across the street, dozens of tourists had stepped out of their black taxis and tour buses. They took photos and chatted with their guides about the paintings. And whenever the tourists went home, their photos and stories went with them — maybe even to be shared with others.
In Northern Ireland, a Long-Awaited Gurdwara Opens with a Wedding
LONDONDERRY, Northern Ireland (RNS) — On a cloudy fall day in 2021, about 100 people were praying in Derry’s only Sikh temple when smoke suddenly choked the prayer hall. Worshippers covered their mouths and noses and ran outdoors as flames consumed each room. Amerjit Singh, the president of the Northern Ireland Sikh Association, made sure that everyone was safely outside before running back inside the burning building to rescue the Sikh Holy Scripture known as the Guru Granth Sahib.
On Thursday (April 11), after years of renovations — completed in the spirit of “sewa,” the Sikh principle of selfless service — the temple, known as a gurdwara, reopened with a joyful wedding celebration, welcoming worshippers of all faiths and backgrounds once again. The multistory beige building, resting on a sloping road near the eastern bank of the River Foyle, bears a long history: An old sign indicates it was constructed in 1915, and a newer one introduces it as the Sikh Cultural Centre established in 1995. Jimmy Singh, a longtime worshipper at the gurdwara, says the reopening feels like “the light at the end of a long, long, tunnel.”
Although everyone, including the Guru Granth Sahib, was physically safe after the gurdwara fire, Sikhs in Derry mourned the loss of their beloved temple. The space where they convened at least once a week to pray, sing, eat and serve each other through sewa had become a shell of a structure. The gurdwara leadership determined at the time that it would stay closed until renovations were completed.
In the meantime, Derry’s Sikhs gathered in each others’ living rooms and kitchens to continue their weekly Sunday prayers and the tradition of “langar,” the free meal gurdwaras offer to any visitor without question. The gurdwara was one of two in Northern Ireland and the primary place of worship for Sikhs all over the country as well as for other minority religions, like Hindus, who don’t have a nearby temple of their own.

In the gurdwara’s absence, families were forced to hold funerals in their homes for elderly relatives who died of COVID-19. Hosting weddings and other communal festivities, too, felt incomplete without the gurdwara. Sitting cross-legged on floral carpets with the Guru Granth Sahib propped on a piece of furniture, the community managed to continue gathering and worshipping, all the while eagerly waiting to return to the new building.
It was like decades ago, some recalled, when only a few Sikh families lived in Derry. In those days, they could easily gather in each other’s homes. But since then, the Sikh population in Northern Ireland has grown from a few dozen to just shy of 400, according to the 2021 Census — a number no one’s living room could fit.
“On my way to work, I always drove past and stopped for 30 seconds outside,” said Jimmy Singh of the gurdwara. The space, he said, always brought him a sense of peace and meaning, even when he couldn’t go in. “I just can’t wait to come here every Sunday,” he said.
“It’s a lifeline for older people,” said Kalbinder Kaur, a trustee of the Sikh Association. The gurdwara’s closure, she said, exacerbated the loneliness and isolation of the elderly, who found comfort in the shared language and culture of the Sikh community.
Although the Sikh community has struggled without the gurdwara, Amerjit Singh says the fire may have been a blessing in disguise. The cause of the incident has not been officially determined, but he suspects it was faulty wiring in a building that’s over a century old. The damage revealed dry rot in the walls and floors of the building that could have compromised its structural integrity. Plus, the fire was an opportunity to rebuild the gurdwara to better accommodate the needs of the community.

About a month before the reopening, Amerjit and Jimmy Singh, who are cousins, stepped onto a brand-new elevator platform, clutching the railings. “It’s just been commissioned today,” said Jimmy Singh with excitement. “It’s our first time using it.” He pressed a button, and a soft whirring sound filled the echoing space as the platform smoothly drifted toward the lower level. The elevator for the elderly and disabled is one of the newest additions to Derry’s gurdwara.
Around them, the building buzzed with activity. Sawdust covered the floors, while ladders and tools lay scattered around the building. Volunteers from all walks of life and a number of faiths — Irish Catholic, Irish Protestant, Irish Sikh and Indian Sikh — paced in and out of rooms, scrubbing countertops and drilling into planks of wood. A group of men, some wearing turbans and others with buzz cuts, carried building materials down the staircase and through a doorway as Irish rock music reverberated upstairs. In a city with a long history of religious conflict, the intermingling of cultures and religions in the gurdwara epitomizes Amerjit Singh’s belief that welcoming others is the “single most important part of Sikhism.”
As he strolled around the gurdwara surveying the progress, he listed off the many people, from the architect to the construction workers, who helped rebuild the gurdwara for free or for a discount as an act of sewa. One woman wearing heavy-duty gloves introduced herself as a former employee of his who has volunteered her afternoon to help out at the gurdwara. A carpenter measuring wood in the prayer hall said he has been doing business with the Sikh community for 30 years. Gurdeep Singh and Samser Singh (no relation), two university students from the Punjab region of India who had met for the first time that morning, spent the day at the gurdwara doing sewa, lifting heavy materials side by side as if they’d been working together for years.
Gurdeep Singh, another Sikh man from India who has now lived in Ireland for several years and is not related to the others, said he is looking forward to the prayer, the langar and, of course, the gossip. “We feel very good when we come here,” he said. “We feel relaxed.”
The community is also largely united by their support for the Sikh farmers’ protests in India. Through Khalsa Aid, Derry’s Sikhs send money for food, clothing and medicine for the farmers, who, they believe, are being smeared and targeted by the Indian government. The gurdwara also donates funds to local initiatives. “Sikhs are givers,” said Jimmy Singh. “Baba Guru Nanak, the founder of Sikhism, was a giver, and we want to follow that tradition in our hearts.”
The new building is tech-savvy and accessible. While Sikhs traditionally sit on the floor for langar and prayer, the gurdwara will have benches for the elderly and others who have trouble sitting cross-legged. An expertly planned opening near the kitchen allows volunteers to easily transport groceries inside from a car, reducing the intense prep work for langar, during which volunteers serve hearty meals of daal, roti and prasad to hundreds of people at a time. The building is more insulated and energy-efficient, critical in Northern Ireland’s soggy year-round weather. A guest room with three beds in the basement is built to host Sikh musicians, called ragis, and other visitors.

On March 24, about two weeks before the reopening, a group of Sikh worshippers hoisted the Nishan Sahib, a triangular orange flag with a dark-blue khanda symbol. The crowd stood barefoot around the silk-wrapped flagpole. One woman began a melodic prayer, and others closed their eyes in meditation and joined in.
A wedding seemed the perfect celebration to open the new gurdwara. Amongst traditional Punjabi music and sparkling chandeliers hanging from the newly finished ceiling, over 300 people gathered to celebrate the newlyweds — a non-Sikh Irish bride and a Sikh groom — with music, prayers and a langar of pakora, three different types of curries, gulab jamun and laddoo. Men wore suits and patkas, while women wore a rainbow of elegant salwar kameez.
“It was full of color,” said Amerjit Singh, after the daylong ceremony. “I saw a vision of a much more diverse Northern Ireland in the gurdwara today.”
First published on Religion News Service.
For Irish Muslims, Eid al-Fitr is a ‘Mixture of Happiness and Sadness,’ As All Eyes on Gaza
DUBLIN (RNS) — The Islamic Cultural Centre of Ireland was decorated with festive lights on the inside and outside as Ali Selim was getting ready for the morning prayers on Wednesday (April 10), to celebrate the Muslim holy day of Eid al-Fitr. In the corners of the center, stations with sweets and tea and coffee were set up. Outside, smoke wafted out of white tents where vendors had gathered to sell food. Muslims from all over Dublin gathered after a night of celebrating Eid, which marks the end of Ramadan’s month of fasting, prayer and charity.
This year, however, the normally festive celebrations of Eid held a bitterness to them — as in Muslim communities around the world, the month of Ramadan had been shaped by the ongoing war in Gaza. It’s been an omnipresent topic in the mosque, said Selim, an Irish theologian and spokesperson for the Islamic Cultural Centre in Dublin.
“Eid is usually a day that is marked with happiness and joy,” Selim said. “But the mind can never be clear from the sadness over what is happening in Gaza.”
For six months, as the war between Israel and Hamas has raged in Gaza, Irish Muslims, some with family in Gaza, have lived in daily fear as the death toll in Gaza has mounted, surpassing 32,000, according to Gaza’s Ministry of Health.
“Every night we had to offer condolences to someone who lost a family member in Gaza,” Selim said. “Tomorrow (the morning after Eid), they will be with us. It will be very unique in the sense that it is sadness and rejoice at the same time.”
Selim had been hopeful as many around the world called for a cease-fire during Ramadan. “Everybody hoped that the crisis would be over,” he said of the war that began in the aftermath of the Hamas attacks on Israel Oct. 7, which left an estimated 1,200 Israelis and foreigners dead and 250 taken hostage in Gaza.

On March 25, the U.N. Security Council passed a resolution that demanded a cease-fire during Ramadan. On the same day, U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres asked for a massive aid supply, with officials estimating that more than half a million people in Gaza are “one step away from famine.” No cease-fire was ever implemented during Ramadan.
Selim said that over the course of Ramadan, the Islamic Centre raised funds for people in Gaza and organized talks every night to heighten awareness of what is happening there. Several members of the congregation traveled to Gaza during Ramadan to deliver medical aid and returned with testimonies of the situation on the ground.
The purpose of Ramadan fasting, Selim said, is to “share the feeling with those who are deprived or marginalized.” This year, the “deprived or marginalized” on everyone’s mind are those in Gaza. Leaders of Muslim countries around the world made references to Gaza in their Ramadan announcements.
“There wasn’t a single day that Gaza was not part of our prayers,” Selim said.
It was not just Selim who focused his prayers on Gaza this Ramadan in Dublin, where just under half of Ireland’s more than 80,000 Muslims live.
“This Ramadan I think is more special than any Ramadan because of what’s happening in Gaza,” Lorraine O’Connor said. “We relate to what is happening to our brothers and sisters there.”

O’Connor is the founder and director of Muslim Sisters of Eire, a nonprofit organization in Dublin. With her organization, she provides a soup kitchen for the homeless of Dublin every week, provides educational training about Islam and aims for more dialogue between different religions. O’Connor was raised as a Catholic but converted to Islam in 2005.
Islam is the third-fastest-growing religion in Ireland, with the number of Muslims in Ireland growing 32% between 2016 and 2022.
Ramadan has been different from the start this year, said O’Connor.
Normally, she said, Ramadan prayers are for personal forgiveness, or for your family and friends. O’Connor said that she had been suffering from a chest problem and prayed for it to be over during the first evening of Ramadan. But doing so, she said that she immediately wanted to shift the focus of her prayer to the people in Gaza. “I felt a little bit selfish,” O’Connor said. “You want to turn your focus on the genocide that’s happening.”
The Muslim Sisters of Eire has organized several evenings this month to raise awareness and funds for people in Gaza, she said.
At Trinity College Dublin, Ruman Riaz of the Muslim Students Association has tried to raise awareness as well. Riaz is 23 and originally from Kashmir, India, a place where Muslims have had long-standing tensions with the Indian government. Riaz said he finds it frustrating that despite the efforts his organization and others are making, there are few changes.
“There is a sense of helplessness, you know, we can’t really do anything,” Riaz said. At the same time, the solidarity of Muslims for Gaza makes the community grow stronger, he said. “We all pray together for them, fundraise for them, and that just makes us even closer.”
The last 10 nights of Ramadan are believed to carry more reward than any day before, especially Laylat al-Qadr, the “Night of Power,” which this year fell on April 6. Muslims pray and ask for forgiveness the whole night of Laylat al-Qadr. Some do it privately at home and some attend congregations in mosques, Riaz explained.
“In mosques we usually end our prayers with a long supplication of asking God for forgiveness collectively,” Riaz said. “I’m pretty sure that every mosque will pray for Gaza.”
The faithful came to the Islamic Cultural Centre early Wednesday to sing the seven takbirs, or glorifications of God, until the time of the Eid prayer. The prayer was followed by a word from the imam, who began his Eid sermon by congratulating the community on finishing their fast. Then he turned to the continuing suffering in Gaza. Selim called his message “a mixture of happiness and sadness.”
“And it’s a mixture of thinking of those killed and those who are still threatened with death,” Selim said. “It’s a crazy situation.”

The Islamic Centre organized two prayer gatherings for the morning of Eid. Each attracted approximately 3,000 people, according to Selim. Selim added that, despite everything, there was still a festive mood.
“I saw somebody from Gaza this morning. I know he lost extended family members,” Selim said. The man said to Selim that some had managed to go back to where their houses had once been, and though they live in tents now, they have managed to connect water.
“Their message is ‘You can’t finish us, we will rebuild what they have destroyed,’” Selim said.
First published in Religion News Service.
At St. Patrick Pilgrimage, Northern Irish Protestants and Catholics Light Kindling of Unity
SAUL, Northern Ireland — Divisions along religious lines were heavy on the mind of Georgina Magine as she joined about 150 others for a drizzly prayer pilgrimage in County Down on the eve of St. Patrick’s Day.
“We’re all divided in Northern Ireland, but we all claim St. Patrick,” said Magine, a first-timer at the pilgrimage after having learned about it from a friend.
The annual St. Patrick’s Day Prayer Pilgrimage at Down & Dromore, a Church of Ireland diocese, is a two-mile walk from Saul Church, where tradition has it that St. Patrick established his first church when he visited Ireland in the 4th Century. It concludes at Down Cathedral, where the saint’s purported tombstone is located.
According to tradition, Patrick was kidnapped from his home in Britain at 16 and brought to Ireland. After six years of captivity — where he looked to religion for solace — Patrick escaped back to Britain. But upon returning to his homeland, he experienced a revelation where he was told to go back to Ireland and spread Christianity among the people.
While many St. Patrick’s Day parades involve floats, shamrocks and beer, this one is all about prayer and reconciliation.
After leaving Saul Church, marchers stopped at four different spots along Saul Road to pray, led by Pastor David Leggee, a Christian evangelist and preacher.
“We need repentance and we need to intercede for our land,” he said to the group. “We need to be a generation that seeks the Lord.”
At the second stop, Magine huddled in with a small group of strangers outside of a SPAR Supermarket. As she bowed her head and closed her eyes, she lifted her voice and asked God to bring an end to sectarianism in the country.
Although the Good Friday Agreement put an end to sectarian violence in Northern Ireland, deep divisions over the impact of the conflict linger — dozens of “peace-walls” divide Catholic and Protestant neighborhoods, and less than 10 percent of students in the region attend religiously integrated schools, according to The Council on Foreign Relations. But St. Patrick is foundational to both Protestants and Catholics in the country, and the commonality often plays a role in interfaith initiatives, especially in County Down.
The patron saint of Ireland is believed to have brought Christianity to the country long before the Reformation. And although he wasn’t Irish, his story became closely tied to Irish identity.
Rev. Jackie Breen, an ordained deacon at the Roman Catholic Saul & Ballee Parish, who took part in the day’s festivities, said growing up in County Down around the sites associated with St. Patrick put the saint at the forefront of his own faith journey.
Breen said several members of his own congregation were dispersed among the crowd at the pilgrimage while he stood as a member of the clergy representing Catholics at the ecumenical service following the pilgrimage.
He also noted that Downpatrick is unique to the rest of the country in that there is more harmony between the two faiths. Local churches are accepting of Patrick’s place in both Protestant and Catholic faiths, even throughout The Troubles, he said.
“It was a privilege for me to be there to bear witness of our mutual friendship that has sustained throughout the years, and to give witness to that wider community in Ireland of our acceptance of Patrick’s place in our shared faiths,” said Breen.
Many people make this pilgrimage year after year. Jenny Williams, chief executive of Habitat for Humanity Ireland, is a regular at the prayer walk. “It’s just a really special thing to do on St. Patrick’s Day because Patrick wanted to shine the light of the Gospel in Ireland,” said Williams. “It’s an important thing to do every year to remember that.”
Stephen Rutherdale came to the pilgrimage with his young family. The last time they attended in 2018, it was snowing and his second eldest was only nine months old. Now, they’re a family of six with one more on the way, he said.
“We really enjoy this,” said Rutherdale. “This is a great way to meet up with other people from different churches across the diocese.”
Even as the country has become more secular, with a referendum being signed to end the Catholic Church’s special position in the Constitution in 1975, the St. Patrick’s Day celebrations are still well attended.
The Rev. George Okikiolu said he moved to Northern Ireland from Nigeria 12 years ago to explore cross-cultural ministry. Since then, he’s witnessed a decrease in church attendance, he said. “Faith is being affected with the growing culture and secularism in the community,” said Okikiolu.
In response, this year’s pilgrimage theme was on revival and lighting a fire of the Christian faith in the land of Ireland.
The Rev. Jan Stevenson, community pastor at Ballyholme Parish Church, said the theme parallels a story about St. Patrick who lit a flame on the hill of Tara as an act of defiance against the Druids. She said St. Patrick claimed the fire for God rather than the Druid king, and this fire became a metaphor for Christianity in Ireland.
As people walked out of the service at Down Cathedral, a small bonfire burned to signify the spread of the Christian faith the leaders and believers were longing for.
“We would believe that the fire of Patrick has never been put out,” said Stevenson. “And the Christian faith continues in Ireland.”
Unexpected Defeat of Referendums Shows Growing Power of Ireland’s Traditional Catholics
DUBLIN (RNS) — At a Mass said in Latin on Sunday (March 10), Ireland’s traditional Catholics declared political victory, days after a pair of referendums aimed at secularizing the Irish Constitution were unexpectedly and resoundingly defeated.
On Friday, the Irish government put two measures to a vote that would have extended the rights of unmarried couples in the country’s constitution and removed language defining women’s roles “within the home.” Both had been widely expected to pass despite enjoying little debate in the Dail, or Irish parliament, and after a rubber stamp by all three of the Irish Republic’s main political parties.
Both proposals failed, even in progressive Dublin. When all votes were counted, 67.7% of voters had rejected the family amendment, while 73.9% rejected the measure dealing with women’s roles, referred to as the care amendment. Turnout was 44.4%.
On Sunday, as pundits and reporters struggled to explain the most strongly rejected referendum in the republic’s history, roughly 200 traditional Catholics, many in their 30s and 40s, gathered at St. Kevin’s Church, Harrington Street, one of the few places in the city where the traditional, pre-Vatican II Latin Mass is still celebrated, for a triumphant celebration and a redoubt of conservative Catholics.
Even as a much smaller crowd arrived for the noon English-language Mass, those who had attended the 10:30 a.m. Latin Mass — men in tweed jackets and women in long skirts and white, floral head coverings — packed into the tight parish hall for tea, still buzzing with delight at the vote.

The Latin Mass was largely done away with by the Second Vatican Council, when bishops meeting in Rome from 1962-1965 instituted Masses in local languages. However, some traditional Catholics remain drawn to the old Latin rite that dates to the 1500s.
That rite, which was allowed to be said more widely under Pope Benedict XVI, has become a flashpoint under Pope Francis, who in 2021 barred priests from saying it without permission from their bishops. Traditionalists have seen it as a symbol of the larger battle in the church over matters such as LGBT inclusion and the roles of women.
This divide was on display at the entrance to St. Kevin’s, in copies of Catholic Voice, a traditionalist newspaper whose latest issue looks forward to St. Patrick’s Day on March 17 while urging Irish Catholics to have the “courage” to declare that “liberalism is a sin” and deriding the “myths created by the homosexualist movement.” In a time when the pope is allowing priests to bless people in LGBTQ unions, the paper maintained that those who do not oppose “disordered sexuality” are “straddling Satan’s fence.”
The message that Catholic values are under threat from within the church has hit home in Ireland, where society was overwhelmingly Catholic a generation ago. As of 2022, Catholics made up just 69% of the population, down sharply from 79% in 2016. Weekly Mass attendance among Catholics hovers around one-third nationally, down from over 90% in the 1970s.
Accompanying this transformation have been referendums in which the Irish have legalized divorce (1995), gay marriage (2015) and abortion (2018).
But references to both marriage as a fundamental societal unit and to the roles of women in the home will now stay in the constitution. “It’s a great result for women, for mothers, for the homes and for marriage,” said Maria Steen, a prominent conservative activist. “And I think it’s a real rejection of the government’s attempt to, you know, delete all of that from the constitution.”
Steen ran a brief campaign that framed the removal of motherhood from the constitution as both sexist and anti-Catholic. She said Friday’s election result was a sign that the Irish had “gratitude” for motherhood.

At St. Kevin’s, Michelle McGrath, a conservatively dressed woman in her 40s, said she was unsurprised by the vote result. She attributed it in part to the vagueness of the proposals, which would have equated marriage with other “durable” relationships. “Most people were confused about what it was, really,” said McGrath. “I don’t know what I’m being asked here.”
Confusion about what would be deemed durable relationships seemed to doom the referendum on marriage. In a televised debate on March 5 between Steen and Ireland’s deputy prime minister, or Tanaiste, Micheál Martin, he suggested that the court would decide what constituted durability, which would determine parental rights and inheritances.
McGrath said deeper frustrations were also at play. Steen and the “No” campaign suggested repeatedly that the broadened relationship laws would have facilitated greater immigration into Ireland, which has become increasingly controversial in the once demographically homogenous republic.
“People are starting to find their courage again in Ireland, and the people who’ve been silenced for a very long time are starting to call out the obvious injustices going on,” McGrath said. “The Irish have been put paddy-last, to use the pun, in their own nation. They have been sent to the back of the queue while minorities get the majority.”
Meanwhile, Shane Duffley, an early-middle-aged man with an intense stare, said the proposal on women’s roles was “messing with Irish mammies.”
“You don’t mess with Irish women,” he said firmly, eliciting strong nods from two friends — one a European immigrant with a small child in tow and the other a tall Irishman who, like many younger traditional Latin Mass Catholics, homeschools his kids.
Maggie, a middle-aged woman who declined to give her last name, said the liberalization of Ireland had “radicalized” the country. “Ireland has changed a lot in my lifetime,” she said. “But that doesn’t mean that everything that the government proposes is something that people accept.”
First published in Religion News Service.