We went from imperial rule to a Catholic State

The so-called terrible beauty that WB Yeats said was born in 1916 was nothing of the sort. What materialised, in the aftermath of the 1916 Rising, was a Catholic state and the transfer of dominion from an imperial power to an ecclesiastical one, an outcome that Wolfe Tone and the United Irishmen of 1798 would have abhorred.

Faced, as he once was, with the same difficulties that existed here, Thomas Jefferson, and the founding fathers of the US, also saw the need to keep religion out of the affairs of state, and acted accordingly, separating church and state in the constitution.

The soil of Europe, he proclaimed, had, for centuries, been soaked in blood, caused by religious conflict amongst Christians, and he didn’t want that to happen in the US.