A new comparative study of attitudes and values among Catholics and Protestants in Ireland has found an "extraordinary homogeneity in cultures on the island".
Speaking at a press briefing in Dublin yesterday on the ESRI report, Conflict and Consensus: a Study of Values and Attitudes in the Republic and Northern Ireland, Dr Tony Fahey also said that, leaving aside security issues, Catholics in Northern Ireland rated the system of governance there more positively than did people in the UK.
Prof Richard Sinnott noted the strong consensus on family and sexual issues among Catholics and Protestants, North and South, compared to their counterparts in other European countries.
He also described how the left/right divide on the island of Ireland was aligned along liberal/conservative approaches to issues of family and sexual morality rather than along the more traditional economic lines of mainland Europe.
Both conducted research for the study along with Dr Bernadette Hayes, who was abroad yesterday.
On church attendance in Ireland, the study found that, although this was in decline among Catholics and Protestants, North and South, of 31 European countries surveyed, only people in Malta and Poland attended services more regularly.
They study also found that secularisation, which was slow to take hold in Ireland, had intensified in the 1990s and in the early years of this century in both the North and the Republic.
However, at the end of the 20th century, Ireland as a whole had remained among the most Christian parts of Europe and among the most committed to institutionalised religious activity.
The decline which had taken place had been moderate by European standards and had left Ireland with levels of formal religious adherence well above those of other European countries.
Despite church scandals and secularisation in the Republic, allegiance to Catholicism had held up somewhat better than allegiance to Protestantism during the 1990s, although this difference had begun to narrow in the early years of the present decade, the study found.
Generally, it found that formal religious adherence had not suffered any greater decline among Catholics in the Republic than it had among either Protestants or Catholics in Northern Ireland.
On only one indicator - confidence in the church - did Catholics in the Republic return a significantly lower score than Catholics and Protestants in the North. The study found that this was partly a reflection of the spate of church scandals, although an underlying downward trend was detected from the 1970s.
This was thought to have been a result of legal/political conflicts through three decades over contraception, divorce and abortion which generally put Catholic teaching at odds with opinion and practice among a substantial sector of the population of the Republic. However, Catholics in the South had been slow to disavow their Catholic connections entirely and, up to the end of the 1990s, only small minorities had reported never attending religious services.
