IRISH MORALITY.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume IV, Issue 182, 22 September 1876, Page 15

IRISH MORALITY.

■ i f |i That staunch Protestant paper, the ' Scotsman,' makes the following confession in regard to the " modesty and remorse " of women in Ireland, based on the report of the British Registrar-General : — " The proportion of illegitimate births to the total number of births in Ireland is 3.8 per cent. ; in England the proportion is 6.4; in Scotland, 9.9 ; in other words, England is nearly twice, and Scotland nearly thrice worse than Ireland." Something worse has to be added from which no consolation can be derived. The proportion of illegitimacy is very unequally distributed over Ireland, and the inequality rather humbling to us as Protestants, and still more as Presbyterians and Scotchmen, taking Ireland according to the registration divisions, the proportion of illegitimate births varies from 6.2 to 1.3 — the division showing this lowest figure is the western, being substantially the province of Connanght where about nineteen-twentieths of the population are Celtic and Roman Catholic. The division showing the highest proportion of illegitimacy is the northeastern which comprises or almost consists of the Province of Ulster, where the population is almost equally divided between Protestants and Roman Catholics, and where the great majority of Protestants are of Scotch blood (mixed with the blood of Saxon freebooters) and of the Presbyterian Church. The sum of the whole matter is, that semi-Presbyterian and semi-Scotch. Ulster is fully three times more immoral than wholly Popish and wholly Irish Connaught — which corresponds with wonderful accuracy to the more general fact that Scotland, as a whole, is more immoral than Ireland as a whole.