“What happened?”
In my opinion, several factors are at play.
(1) Ireland is a very conformist country. In the 1950s, being a conformist in their culture meant being a respectable, law-abiding, church-going person. In the 2020s, being a conformist in their culture means being a woke, LGBT-friendly political leftist.
(2) Ireland has a national inferiority complex. They are ashamed to have been once seen as this kind of church-dominated backwater. As such, they’re always desperately trying to prove that they’re “with it.”
(3) Ireland has no tradition of intellectual conservatism. Bill Buckley may have been Irish, but Ireland has no Bill Buckleys of its own. The talking points of the international left are treated in Ireland as “received wisdom,” with no voices saying, “Hey, this is crap.”
All the smart, entrepreneurial Irish left that god forsaken, green rock a century ago.
Great points and well said!
There is also this. The standard of living there has improved substantially and I wonder if the average irish gives their turn to the left credit for that.
The reality, though, is that their increased economic well-being is due mostly to a very conservative policy - slashing their corporate taxes to the lowest in Europe and thus attracting a bunch of multinationals to set up shop there.