As time passes there are fewer of us around who remember the confidence of the Catholic Church

in Ireland before the Second Vatican Council (1962-65). Perhaps it would be helpful to cast our mind back and ask where this confidence came from? Was the Church in Ireland always so sure of herself? Was there another time, analogous to our own, when the Irish Church was struggling in the wilderness, borrowing Joyce, “to forge in the smithy of (her) soul the uncreated conscience of (her) race”? The late Emmet Larkin, one time professor of British and Irish history at the  University of Chicago, wrote The Making of the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland 1850-1860, which was  published in America in 1980.