
© Isopix / Rex FeaturesEnda Kenny, who this week launched an unprecedented attack on the Vatican.
Enda Kenny's criticism of the Vatican this week marks a significant milestone on Ireland's journey away from being a mono-Catholic state into a 21st European republicThere are two parallel revolutions taking place on either side of the Irish Sea that will radically alter the relationship between government and non-state institutions that exercise major temporal power.
In Britain the ongoing revelations of wrongdoing within the Murdoch empire and the public humiliation of a media baron and his son may result in re-alignment in the relationship between politicians and the press, with the former becoming less supplicant to the latter.
One of the most important by-products of the last few incredible weeks has been the end of fear. Specifically, fear of media tycoons who used to boast that some of their newspapers had "won" elections and had left the prime ministerial ambitions of party leaders in ruins. The humbling of Murdoch Senior and Junior this week marked the end of that fear.
Meanwhile, here in Ireland the political classes have also lost their fear, namely of the once almighty Roman Catholic church. The news reports both in the Republic and the UK were not exaggerating on Wednesday.
Enda Kenny's
attack on the Vatican over its handling of yet another clerical child sex abuse scandal in Ireland was indeed truly "unprecedented". Even Kenny's Fine Gael, a party with deep roots in rural Catholic Ireland, had lost its fear of the men (they are always men!) who wear red cabs and wield crosiers.
Since the mid 1990s the Catholic church's reputation has been slowly eroding amid a deluge of damaging revelations about its priests, religious orders and the institutions they run.