Priests and People in Ireland

Four chapters from Priests and People in Ireland, published in 1902 by Michael J. F. McCarthy, a Catholic layman and author of Five Years in Ireland, 1895–1900. The book is a strongly critical account of the influence of the Catholic clergy on Irish life, and the chapters reproduced here are those that deal with Dublin. It is openly polemical and is presented as a historical document of its time.

McCarthy describes a Sunday in the Phoenix Park in September 1901 and the condition of the city's poorest districts, counts the secular and regular clergy of the city and county using the Irish Catholic Directory for 1902, and surveys the work of the religious orders, among them the Augustinians, Carmelites, Dominicans, Jesuits and Oblates. The final chapter deals with the Christian Brothers and their schools, including the Artane Industrial School. Throughout, he quotes sermons, reports and letters from Dublin newspapers of 1901–02.

The chapters are reproduced as they appeared in print. Readers wanting a fuller picture of church life in Dublin at the time can set McCarthy's account beside the parish histories in Short Histories of Dublin Parishes by N. Donnelly, and the descriptions of churches and religious houses in the other books in this library.