By Emma Quinn In 1922, the Southern Irish State was born into poverty and a backward economy. The Catholic Church was the perfect crutch for its limp ruling class to prop itself up and assert its power and authority over the working class. It was also the tool to provide needed services like healthcare and education in the absence of ...

Drawn up under the equally conservative Catholic Taoiseach, Éamon de Valera, the Constitution was consciously modelled on Catholic social teaching.

From the 1943 Cavan Fire in which 35 children and one adult perished after nuns refused to let girls escape to avoid them being seen in their night-gowns; to the enslavement of poor women in Magdalene Laundries, the last of which closed only in 1996; to the systemic cover-up of child sexual abuse; to the deplorable and sinister infant and child mortality rates in Mother & Baby Homes - the litany of abuse, degradation and oppression presided over by Church and State in Ireland, is simply confounding.

The huge change of attitudes in Ireland to LGBTQ people which has taken place over the last decades has been clearly shown this year.

Appalling – abhorrent – grotesque – it’s difficult to find words to adequately express the horrors visited upon the poorest and most vulnerable sections of Irish society, particularly women and children, at the hands of Church and State in Ireland.