So very little changes

Speaking at a Confirmation ceremony 60 years ago, then Bishop of Cork, the infamously conservative and hardline Connie Lucey, warned that all “was not well in Ireland”.

His speech, reproduced on this page, spoke of “emigration, unemployment, the emptiness of the public purse”.

However, the old-school cleric also warned of “the spirit of dissatisfaction, if not of disillusionment, with politics that is beginning to manifest itself among us”.