and voices of common sense. Even as the Renaissance brought fresh light, art and thought to Europe, as the Reformation prompted half of the continent to turn away from the medieval mandates of Rome, as the Age of Enlightenment spawned thousands of conversions from belief to reason, the Irish clung to their Roman Catholicism. For the same reason that hurling never died, that the harp became a national symbol, that epic poems were still recited in Gaelic, religion was a way for a conquered nation to remain defiantly Irish.
