I don't know how frequently the traditional Mass was celebrated in Ireland between 1971 and 1984. Not very frequently, but I would be surprised if it had totally disappeared. My father was aware of an Augustinian priest who continued to say it privately in the early 1970s, probably in the Novitiate in Orlagh which was close to where we lived.
There was some attachment to Latin and the Ordinary Form Latin Mass in St Mary's Pro-Cathedral in Dublin was and remains very popular. But the amount of Latin liturgy in Ireland was very low. There was a Latin Mass in St Mary's, Haddington Road for many years, now abandoned; there was also something happening in Sligo Cathedral. I am informed St Brigid's in Belfast still has an every Sunday Ordinary Form Latin Mass at 8.30am, but this is the extent to it. It seems that Latin vanished almost completely from the Irish Church in the 1970s. I know that the seminaries, in particular St Patrick's College, Thurles maintained something, but this was isolated from the world of the lay Irish Catholic.
The only evidence I have found, which I am not entirely convinced about, for a public Extraordinary Form Latin Mass in Ireland between the promulagation of the Pauline Missal and the 1984 indult was the Mass for the re-interment of William Joyce's body in Bohermore, Co Galway. The reference is in A.N. Wilson's biography of Lord Haw Haw. Joyce was a very complex character coming from a mixed marriage, but he identified with Protestantism rather than Catholicism through life. Nevertheless, he did have some knowledge of Catholicism. I once had a line manager whose mother knew Joyce when they were both growing up in Galway at the time the traditional Latin Mass was normative. Joyce could be humourous in interpreting what the Latin meant. However, about 30 years after Joyce's execution, his daughter requested a traditonal Latin Mass on the occasion of his body's reinterment in Galway. And this was, apparently, granted.
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An academic of secular outlook who was an altar boy in Newry in the early 70s once told me that the PP in his parish used to say the TLM on the quiet for parishioners who remained attached to it, and he knew because he served it. This is very Irish, I'm afraid - disregarding measures you don't like without articulating any principled reason for doing so, so that your attitude remains purely reactive and dies off when you do.
The purpose of this blog is to provide a history of the Latin Mass movement in Ireland - insights like this are invaluable.
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