Forbidden Ireland Church and State 1951 to present day. Author: TP O’Mahony ISBN-13: 978-1806900565Publisher: Mercier Press Guideline Price: €16.99; 256pp Alongside Patsy McGarry’s Well, Holy God (2024), TP O’Mahony’s Forbidden Ireland will stand the test of time as a journalistic first draft of history for future scholars examining Catholic Ireland’s eclipse. O’Mahony’s seven transforming decades begin not in 1951 in Leinster House with Noel Browne’s defeated Mother and Child Scheme, but in Munster in 1967 when Bishop of Kerry Denis Moynihan cancelled a cabaret concert in a Tralee hotel by American film star Jayne Mansfield: in vain, with a baby son, Mansfield told journalists in Castleisland that she was a good Catholic. O’Mahony contrasts 1967 with the 2018 repeal of the Eighth Amendment outlawing abortion, a landmark highlighting Ireland becoming the most European nation. A distinctive feature of 87-year-old O’Mahony’s book is that he covered most events as Irish Press religious affairs correspondent until its closure in 1995, when he joined the Cork Examiner. He reported on the 1979 welcome for Pope John Paul II, cheered on by Eamonn Casey and Michael Cleary, who were discredited at the dawn of clerical abuse scandals, prefiguring Mary Robinson’s becoming president in 1990. In a robust preface, feminist Rosita Sweetman lauds how O’Mahony, a colleague from their Irish Press days, spent a lifetime shaping today’s Ireland. As a blow-in from Scotland in 1972, succeeding John Horgan, I nicknamed O’Mahony “Cork’s Thomas Aquinas”, a streak Sweetman detects when she writes, “O’Mahony traces with precision and considerable moral seriousness the mechanisms by which that alliance operated and the human cost it exacted”. Endorsing O’Mahony’s warning that women’s rights face global regression, Sweetman thunders: “The revolution that shook off five centuries of colonial rule delivered the country not into the secular, pluralist republic, but into the secure, welcoming, anti-democratic and totalitarian cocoon of Rome Rule.”O’Mahony stresses how Pope Paul VI’s 1968 condom ban created a fault line in Rome’s moral credibility and endorses Mary McAleese’s description of Catholicism as “the premier carrier of the virus of misogyny”. Fittingly, he salutes Tim Pat Coogan for employing him. As the Phoenix noted, O’Mahony is an outstanding member of “the God Squad”. John Cooney is a former Irish Times Religious Affairs Correspondent and biographer of John Charles McQuaid.