Kenny's confrontational address to the Irish parliament last month reflected the collective mood and tapped the raw pain and sense of betrayal felt by people across Ireland after the publication of Cloyne the previous week. The state-funded independent report detailed numerous allegations of abuse by priests and a failure to report them in the rural diocese of Cloyne from 1996 to 2009. Pointedly, the local Catholic bishops didn't rate a mention in Kenny's 12-minute speech: the Prime Minister saved his ire for their bosses in Rome. Two other major reports published since 2005 also breached the doughty walls of church silence, but Cloyne is different because it found systematic sexual abuse of children was still a reality as recently as 2008 and the church had been paying lip service to its own 1996 guidelines on child protection, which include the mandatory reporting of suspected abuse to state authorities. Further, it said the Vatican had effectively encouraged bishops to ignore these guidelines by dismissing them as "merely a discussion document". In his landmark speech, Kenny said the revelations of the Cloyne report had brought the government, Irish Catholics and the Vatican to an unprecedented juncture. "It's fair to say that after the Ryan and Murphy reports, Ireland is, perhaps, unshockable when it comes to the abuse of children,'' he said. ''But Cloyne has proved to be of a different order. Because for the first time in Ireland, a report into child sexual abuse exposes an attempt by the Holy See to frustrate an inquiry in a sovereign democratic republic as little as three years ago, not three decades ago.

"And in doing so, the Cloyne Report excavates the dysfunction, disconnection, elitism … the narcissism that dominate the culture of the Vatican to this day.'' Had Kenny delivered this speech at the beginning of his lengthy political career in the mid-1970s, it would have been considered a suicide note, but in the Ireland of 2011 he was preaching to the converted. Most people in Ireland still profess faith in God but church doctrine no longer governs personal spirituality. Indeed, there are now calls to remove the church from every aspect of public life. Some Catholic parents are even doing the unthinkable and choosing not to baptise their children. Most people in Ireland still regard themselves as Catholic but with a small ''c''. Contrary to stereotypes, this is no priest-ridden, theocratic backwater: the church may still supervise the education system and control many hospitals, but for the most part this is a cosmopolitan, urbanised, secular society. University student Siobhan Ferriter, 19, typifies a worldly, well-educated, affluent generation for whom the church is considered largely irrelevant, if it is considered at all. A product of the still largely Catholic education system, she says religious teaching was incidental rather than intrinsic to her upbringing.

"I went to a Catholic school in Dublin but I blocked a lot of it out, I suppose. I don't consider myself a lapsed Catholic because I don't remember believing a word of it in the first place," she says. "None of my friends go to Mass either … I certainly wouldn't get married in a church; that would be hypocritical." Unlike Ferriter, Paul Dunbar, 32, has decided not only to ignore the church but to leave it entirely. Dunbar is a founder of countmeout.ie, a website informing people how they can make a formal exit, an act that is surprisingly difficult and which accounts in part for the misleadingly high numbers of people ostensibly listed as Catholics. "I had been lapsed for a few years, but when the reports on abuse came out I wanted to go a step further by repudiating any involvement with a church responsible for such scandals - being passive was no longer good enough for me," he says. "The church leadership has clearly lost the plot." Although most people will not go as far as Dunbar, in practising terms many are effectively non-Catholic. Recently, Archbishop Diarmuid Martin, the liberal-leaning church leader of the nation's most populous area, estimated only 18 per cent of Catholics in the Dublin archdiocese attended Mass on a weekly basis, stating that in some parts of Dublin the number was closer to 5 per cent. Compare this to the 1.2 million Catholics who attended the papal Mass in Dublin's Phoenix Park in 1979. Increasingly, people confine their church attendance to life's set-piece events - christenings, weddings and funerals. Indeed, churches are more like mausoleums to past glories. These days pews are mostly empty or dotted with a few pensioners. The drift away from Catholicism has been gathering pace for some time, but revelations of the devious deceit and persistent cover-up of child abuse detailed since 2005 in the Ryan, Murphy and Cloyne reports have transformed passive indifference into white-hot rage.

"There is no doubt at all there is far more hostility since Cloyne and the previous reports," says Tony Flannery, 64, a priest based in rural Athenry, County Galway. "There is new anti-church feeling combined with a lot of suppressed anger going back generations and these reports have brought that into the open. I have not been verbally abused but I know plenty of priests who have." And it isn't just the reports detailing child abuse. In many ways the Catholic Church in Ireland is being devastated by a tsunami of its own making. Its abuse of power also extended to its role in the so-called industrial schools and Magdalene laundries, places of institutionalised slavery where children and young women were routinely physically, sexually and emotionally assaulted. The Magdalene laundries, which operated before the formation of the state in 1922 until 1996, were effectively church businesses where women and girls were imprisoned and forced to work in appalling conditions for little or no pay. Many of them suffered a lifetime of physical and psychological abuse at the hands of the nuns in charge. In many cases their ''crime'' was to be a single mother. Only now are their stories being widely circulated and their campaign for redress gathering pace. Similarly, thousands of boys and adolescents were put into care in the industrial schools over decades, many for missing school or simply because they came from large families where their parents were not able to take care of them. The media has highlighted decades of wanton abuse in these institutions, creating a furore in the process. So far, 18 religious orders have agreed to pay €600 million ($A783 million) in compensation to industrial school victims. The state has agreed to pay €1.3 billion for effectively allowing the church to run riot with its most vulnerable citizens.

Aside from the tear-inducing accounts by survivors of abuse, what is further fuelling public and political anger is the refusal of many in power within the church to take responsibility for their actions. Cloyne appears to have shown past apologies are empty rhetoric. In 2009, for example, only five days before the publication of the Ryan report, which found abuse was "endemic" in schools and orphanages run by Catholic orders in Dublin, the Christian Brothers said it "totally rejects any allegations of systemic abuse … or that boys were inadequately fed or clothed … and vehemently repudiates all unsubstantiated allegations of sexual abuse". Church power may have waned but many older people only now feel able to express their disdain of it. Riona de Faoite, 60, grew up in rural County Kerry at a time when ''priests were gods and everything they said was law''. "Religion was rammed down our throat both at home and at school," she says. "We went to Mass every Sunday, confession every week, said the rosary at home and my parents literally stood over us to make sure we said our prayers."

Perhaps the most obvious manifestation of the church's power during de Faoite's formative years would have been on popular culture, where books and movies were banned if they contravened church teaching, particularly on sexuality. Over the years the banned list ranged from Aldous Huxley's Brave New World in 1932 for alleged references to sexual promiscuity to Monty Python's Life of Brian in 1979 for blasphemy. Certainly, non-conformists paid a heavy price. One of Ireland's best-loved authors, John McGahern, famously lost his job as a schoolteacher during the 1960s following the attempted publication of a novel that fell foul of the omnipotent archbishop of Dublin at the time, John Charles McQuaid, whose concerns appeared to be as much temporal as spiritual. Like many other Irish writers, McGahern was forced to emigrate to find work. Among other things the book dealt with were a priest's inappropriate sexual behaviour towards an adolescent male cousin and sexual abuse by a father on his son. Reflecting on the experience years later, McGahern, who returned to Ireland and died in 2006, said somewhat presciently: "Authority's writ ran from God the father down and could not be questioned. One of the compounds at its base was sexual sickness and frustration, as sex was seen, officially, as unclean and sinful, allowable only when it too was licensed."

At the heart of these sexual abuse scandals is a Vatican afraid to confront the unhealthy attitudes engendered by celibacy, says Father Flannery, who helped form the Association of Catholic Priests in October 2010, a grassroots organisation of clergy across Ireland that has quickly gained a reputation as a thorn in the side of the church authorities. "Celibacy is the issue Rome is trying desperately to keep out of the debate," he says. "The terribly negative teaching on sexuality is a significant component [in sexual abuse cases] but it doesn't want to address the effect it is having." Flannery is particularly scathing of the policies pursued by Pope Benedict XVI and his predecessor, John Paul II, which he says have concentrated power in the hands of an elite with an appetite for turning back the clock. When the globe-trotting John Paul visited Ireland in 1979, an estimated two-thirds of what was then the youngest population in Europe turned out to greet him. The fervour was palpable, with yellow and white papal flags festooning every city street and country village. His trip is regarded as the high point for the Catholic Church in Ireland, but the dizzy decline in church attendance and vocations since shows it was as much theatrical as spiritual.

There is speculation Pope Benedict might pay a visit to Ireland next summer after it hosts the 50th Eucharistic Congress - a church set-piece last held in Ireland in 1932. If this does happen, such is the mood in Ireland that there may be as many angry protesters as fervent believers turning out to greet him. Further Cloyne-like reports are expected, and there is growing resentment at the hundreds of millions of euros a cash-strapped state is paying to uncover abuses perpetrated by the church. Regardless of the Vatican's response to Cloyne, which is expected by the end of his month, the Vatican knows a mea culpa will not be nearly enough to regain its past influence in Ireland. Given what has happened, few people here have any appetite for a trip down memory lane. Douglas Dalby is a Dublin-based journalist.