It was, I believe, Max Weber, the German sociologist, who pointedly observed that where Catholics and Protestants live together, the Protestants tend to be richer. Max, so far as I know, never hung out in south Co Dublin. It's a pity, because there he might have gathered some footnotes to his observations. Then again, probably not, because Max died, aged 56, in 1920, the year before the Anglo-Irish Treaty brought the Free State (since 1949 the Republic) into existence. Given our history, of course, Irish Protestants tended to be richer than Irish Catholics eight decades ago. Among the Republic's middle-class, maybe this is still the case, maybe not. But whatever the truth is now, the wealth gap has been significantly reduced.
More interesting than mere loot, however, has been the cultural Protestantisation of a section of the Irish Catholic middleclass, which sends its children to Protestant schools, agrees much more often with Church of Ireland positions on moral issues such as contraception, abortion and divorce and aspires to "genteel" lifestyles. Some of the reasons for cultural Protestantism are obvious. As in all migrations, these include push and pull factors.
Throughout the 1990s, the Catholic Church reeled from one disaster to the next - pushing, in the process, many Catholics away from both the practice and the traditions of their religion. The Bishop Eamonn Casey story was damaging but, followed by those of Father Brendan Smyth and sadistic pederasts in state institutions, the Roman Church lost the respect and allegiance of tens of thousands of nominal adherents. Disillusion with Catholicism had been brewing long before then, anyway, and the 1990s were arguably as catastrophic for Catholic clout as the 1920s had been for Protestant power. Commercial forces overtook all religion, of course, and we live with the consequences - good and bad - of that.
An undoubted pull factor, however, has been the fact that Protestantism retains, for many, a class cachet. Upwardly mobiles detected its lure. Catholicism had, for centuries, been primarily a peasant religion, so there can be little surprise that sections of the consolidating, socially liberal, economically conservative, Catholic middle-class became keen to adopt the mores of their ancestors' political and economic masters. To Catholic diehards, it was heresy; to an ambitious middle-class, it was an ironic liberation, albeit sometimes belittled - and usually unfairly - as being nothing more than a traitorous and "uppity" style choice.
It's a subject which seldom receives an airing. The conflict in the North has maintained the words "Catholic" and "Protestant" as almost indecently sensitive, and hey, well, once you get the executive job and the BMW, you're much too sophisticated for that primitive, sectarian nonsense, aren't you? You live in post-religious Ireland where, as an exemplar of homo consumerensis, you can pick 'n' mix to complement your status and aims. That, at any rate, often appears to be the defining mentality of many economically successful, culturally Protestantised Catholics.
With its stress on individualism and economic success, such a mentality is historically in tune with contemporary market economics. Historians make much of the relationship between the Protestant Reformation of the 16th and 17th centuries and the spread of capitalism in northern Europe during those times. That's fair enough. The economic ethics taught by mediaeval Catholicism certainly presented obstacles to capitalist ideology and development.
"A rich man is either a thief or the son of a thief," said St Jerome, prefiguring Balzac's dictum, which is the opening line in Mario Puzo's The Godfather: "Behind every fortune, there is a crime." St Augustine felt that trade was scurrilous because it turned men (he was commentating pre-feminism) away from God. Indeed, down through the long haul of the Middle Ages, commerce and banking were considered, at best, necessary evils and money-lending was confined to non-Christians.
The Reformation rang the changes and the tills on all that, of course. The Vatican had amassed great wealth, and capitalism had existed in such Catholic cities as Venice, Florence and Antwerp before Martin Luther got stroppy. But, after Martin, worldly asceticism, in the form of hard work, frugality and efficiency in the marketplace, not just the monastery, allowed capitalism to take off and flourish as the world's most powerful ideology.
De Valera's dream of frugality (at least for the mass of us) was in the Augustinian tradition. Theologically, Protestantism is more suited to the Celtic Tiger and its deification of the entrepreneurial urge. In the vacuum left by the collapse of pious old certainties, cultural Protestantism has offered some people a role model. It is, though, rigidly class-based: poorer Catholics may desert their religion, but those who do are more likely to migrate to the culture of Nike, The Spice Girls and Man United.
Ironically perhaps, the relentless collapse of Protestantism in the Republic into social decorum has also added to its attractiveness in this increasingly secular age. More than a century ago, Oscar Wilde provocatively hyperbolised that to be an Irish Protestant was to have no religion at all. The obverse is that to be an Irish Catholic is to have too much religion, and Catholicism remains too dogmatic, authoritarian and ruled-based for many ambitious self-starters.
So, the ideological link between the current economy, the society it shapes and the shedding of a previously characterising Catholic fatalism is clear. Perhaps it's excessively cynical to suggest that cultural Protestantism is ultimately new money aping old. But, to rural Ireland especially, it often looks like that.
Old money might reasonably argue that, when the banks were under greater Protestant control, there were far fewer dodgy practices, as well as far fewer account holders. This is true, even though it is equally true that the privileges of the old money accrued from a history of slaughter and confiscation. While the infamous ne temere decree couldn't but be offensive to Irish Protestants, centuries of earlier sectarianism, which even today sees Dublin with two magnificent Protestant cathedrals and just one Catholic pro-cathedral - forcibly banished to a back street - also tells a tale.
Cultural Protestantism is primarily, though not exclusively, a Dublin - most notably a south Dublin - thing. In smaller communities, traditional ties and loyalties naturally remain more robust. In the capital, however, the perceived cachet of such former bastions of Protestant culture as "Royal"-retaining institutions (Royal Dublin Society, Royal Irish Academy, Royal College of Surgeons, Royal Institute of Irish Architects) and of Trinity College and The Irish Times exemplifies the symbolic persistence of these institutions as defining of social status.
Consider Trinity, for instance. Though founded in 1592, ironically on the lands of (think Dev!) the Augustinian priory of All Hallows (which had been given to the city at the dissolution of the monasteries), the first Catholic Senior Fellow of the college's board was appointed in 1958. Since then, cultural Protestantism has accelerated to the point where even Trinity's Elizabethan Society attracts nominal Catholics.
To some observers, such a state of affairs is gracious; to others, it is rank sleeveenism; to yet others, it is more post-modern - even a small "c" catholic - mix 'n' match. It is doubtful if such a creature as a Fianna Fail-voting, hurling-playing, Catholic member of the Elizabethan Society yet exists. But given the rate of cultural, albeit class-bound, cross-pollination in contemporary Ireland, almost any hybrid is possible. As the faultline in Irish society shifts to race (natives v immigrants), older fault-lines (Catholics v Protestants) can fuse unpredictably.
AS well as the push-and-pull factors of Catholic decline, the championing of the entrepreneurial spirit and the attractions for some of Protestant culture and social status, the bitter sectarian divisions in the North have had effects. It is difficult to know whether relations between middle-class Catholics in the Republic and nationalists/republicans in the North are more or less antagonistic than relations between Protestants here and unionists/loyalists in the North. Both sets of relationships contain hostility as well as support and both fluctuate in intensity whenever the North erupts.
Certainly, there is a marked difference in Catholic perceptions of a Protestant vicar in Rathdrum and a Protestant march to Portadown's Drumcree church. Both exemplify an old order, but one is accepted, even admired, while the other is generally reviled and feared. Likewise with Protestant perceptions of a Catholic middle-class, increasingly secular and even Protestantising in culture, and a more fundamental Catholic strain which supports the greener pastures of Fianna Fail and Sinn Fein.
It's ironic - even comical, really - that, in the end, vulgar money is so pivotal in determining the tenor of social relationships. This is true even in the North, where economic oppression and political injustice led to The Troubles. Sure, theology and pseudo-theology maintained sectarianism but the real scrap has been for a share of the spoils in this world, whatever about any unknowable next one. That money matters more than ever suggests a growing shift away from the British model of status towards an American one.
The point in relation to cultural Protestantism in the Republic is that it is essentially not a spiritual migration but a social one. William Butler Yeats spoke of "the daily spite" in Irish life, and "begrudgery" has become a simplistic label often used by the Catholic middle-class to dismiss criticisms of their adopted mores. Sure, there is often naked begrudgery but there is equally often a begrudging response to valid condemnations of self-aggrandising behaviour.
Anyway, back to Max Weber's observation. In an Irish context, it seems to require further elaboration. Where Catholics and Protestants live together and some Catholics bridge the wealth gap, the culture gap narrows - albeit primarily in the minds of the Catholics. Today's culturally Protestantised Catholics may not be Castle Catholics anymore (after all, being considered "fit" to be invited to official functions in Dublin Castle nowadays has, given the Tribunals, dramatically lost its cachet) but most maintain expensive, suburban castles all the same.
In the Tiger economy, money talks in both residual Anglified accents and residual Irish brogues. Their intersection is at least partly responsible for the dreadful "Dortspeak", although American films and television series have added their emphases too. The irony of Irish cultural Protestantism suggests that the weakening of a religion can now become a cultural strength as objections to theological fundamentalism give way to consumerist orthodoxy. Whether the drift towards Protestant values represents snobbery, ecumenism or is just a result of the age in which we live, depends on your perspective and, of course, on what your cultural shift is protesting against - even if that is your past.