The Vanishing Triangle

by Claire McGowan

people who took their own lives could not be buried in a Catholic graveyard.

Also during this time, in 1996, it emerged that more than 2,000 Irish babies had been forcibly adopted over the years and given to American couples, often those barred from adopting in their own country, and often for sizeable donations to the Church (the same happened in other Catholic countries, such as Spain).

The Bishop of Galway was exposed in 1992 as having a secret son

Religiously. By the end of the millennium, the damage to the Catholic Church from all the scandals was so extreme that it was being talked of as dead and gone in Ireland.