I have been listening to some tunes by the rock group "the Script" who are from Dublin Ireland.

I hadn't heard of many LDS missionaries in Ireland, so I googled and first off the pop is this:

http://dialogueireland.wordpress.com/2011/12/10/woman-takes-sex-abuse-case-against-mormons/

So I guess I answered my own question. Yup, the mishies have been there.

Has anyone on the board served a mission to Ireland and is it pretty free of mormons? It seems that most of the early LDS converts from the UK in the 1800's were from England and Scotland.
One of my lines is from Lanarkshire Scotland.
Anyone with Irish roots?

during the IRA bombings many years ago, so I would assume there are members there. I'm half Irish or there abouts and the other half is Scottish. British ales are great too.

There are lots of members in Ireland. I think the Scotland and Ireland missions have just been made into one actually.
My grandfather is from Dublin.

Yes, Stake President Paternoster. Has has an excellent blog.

I sold Mormonism door to door in Ireland during the mid 90's. There were 200+ missionaries there at any given time when I was there. Everything I know about disappointment, frustration, and disillusionment, I learned on my mission in Ireland.

I never baptized anyone while I was there, thankfully. There was a stake with four wards in Dublin, and I think two other districts elsewhere. There were about 140 missionaries. We baptized around 20 people per month as a mission, but one July we hit 44 baptisms and we were on top of the world.

It was during "the troubles" and people used to tell me: "Have you looked around? We have enough problems with the religion we've got, and you've come to bring us more?" Ugh.. what a waste of two years.

Worked with a lovely Irish woman about 5 years ago. She had never heard of TSCC.

I once saw a pair of missionaries apparently tracting in Dublin about 10 years ago. There are branches listed online in Cork, Dublin, Limerick (IIRC) and in the North.

However, in the 2-1/2 years I lived down the country (in Tipperary), I never saw missionaries, a chapel, an announcement or BoM or any other sign of Mormons. Nor did any of my relations -- a big nest of them -- have any knowledge of or interest in anything Mormon-related. Quakers, yes. The town I lived in had an historic connection with Quakers. JWs, yes -- they knocked on my door more than once. But no Mormons at all.

This was from 2007 to 2010.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/23/2012 04:46PM by Lorraine aka síóg.

I drove through County Tipperary once, and I remember it's beautiful. Most of the missionaries stayed in large towns near the east coast.

That makes sense. Though the JWs went door to door, it would have been tough going to tract in the rural areas. Whenever I felt frustrated over the trouble getting things, my husband would remind me: 80,000. That was the total population of South Tipp, roughly half of one of the largest counties in Ireland.

That's a small market, whether you're selling God or lipstick.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/23/2012 05:06PM by Lorraine aka síóg.

When we're re-established in Tipp, some day, we don't know when, you and Liam will have to visit us there. It is beautiful -- the Golden Vale.

I definitely will stop by when I get out there again. I didn't get to see enough of the country.

When I studied in Ireland and Scotland, my entire experience was Mormon-free-- didn't see so much as a chapel or a missionary the whole time. I spent most of my time in Derry, but I was all over the Republic and Northern Ireland.

When I was in Clare in November, I talked with one of my friends about it and she said all anyone knows about the Mormons there is "Big Love" and the creepy Warren Jeffs stuff that's on the news.

that's pretty much true of anywhere outside the US. Missionaries, members and chapels are so few and far between, that you could never even notice them.

When I was a member, a girl in my ward went off as a missionary to the Ireland, Dublin mission. talking to her afterwards, she seems to have more political discussions [this was around the time that the IRA killed a band of Royal Marine Musicians], than missionary ones.

Didn't St. Patrick drive all the Mormons out of Ireland?

Snakes? My mistake.

I'm married to an Irish citizen. The church in Northern Ireland is a bit odd--even after one joins the LDS church, you are often considered a "Protestant Mormon" or a "Catholic Mormon. In the small ward in the republic where my spouse is from, last time we visited and went to church, we were told, "People come and go; the faces change, but our numbers never grow." Ireland, like the rest of Western Europe, is becoming very secularized. My theory is that once the Irish were traumatized by the scandel and hurt of clerical sexual abuse of children, many are gun shy about an even odder religion like Mormonism.

Your post brought back a memory of the one TBM I did meet in Dublin. He was a taxi driver, a real Dub by his accent. In the course of conversation about America, he said he had a sister living in Salt Lake City and that he had been there himself. We asked what he thought about it, and . . . well, normally, you’d expect a Dubliner to say something like, ‘It’s a tough place to get a pint.’

That’s not what he said, and it became clear was TBM. He was very enthusiastic about SLC. Anyway, I told him I was a former Mormon.

He annoyed me, frankly, because he had that TBM tendency to ignore boundaries. He pressed to find out exactly when I had left the church, which felt like he was violating my privacy. It was clear from the way he put the questions that he was trying to work out if I had been excommunicated.

In fact, I was excommunicated because I left in the old days before you could resign. When he pressed, I felt he was digging for dirt, so to speak. I was glad to leave the cab.

I can understand how a convert in the North would still be Catholic-Mormon or Protestant-Mormon. It’s about culture and national/tribal identity rather than religion. Becoming Mormon wouldn’t change the identity part as much as you’d think.

I agree that there’s increasing secularisation in Ireland as well as in the rest of Europe.
(Ironically, Austria, where I’m living now, is another country with deep Catholic roots that, along with Ireland, was at the top of a list recently of the countries most like to be non-religious soon.)

However, the trauma over the clergy sex-abuse scandal is relatively recent, and I doubt there was much success for Mormons in the years before. In the country – outside of Dublin and Belfast – Catholicism has been so deeply woven into the warp of life and identity that it would have represented a tremendous break with the culture to convert.

It’s understandable to me that the missionaries and the branches seem to be concentrated in Dublin/Belfast. In some respects, Dubliners probably have more in common Belfast people than they do with people in the country. It’s like Dublin is its own country, so it seems when you’re living down the country. They just don’t get country life, and most real Dubs don’t want to.

Even the JWs who used to come to my door were not local country people. The one man who pressed me the most had an odd kind of Northern accent, though he claimed – falsely I think – to have connections in the neighbourhood.

I suspect too that the Irish who embrace Mormonism are in part seduced by its American associations, interested in immigration and breaking with what some find oppressive in Irish life.

Curious, American married to an Irishman, was your husband TBM in Ireland? And do you now live in the US?



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/24/2012 12:18PM by Lorraine aka síóg.

My MP was a young guy, about the same age then as I am now, which is a disturbing thought.

When I lived in Northern Ireland in a place about 15 miles away from Belfast, there was a local Mormon church within walking distance. It was on the first floor of an old building which also had a flower shop on the ground floor and a women's only gym on the second floor.

I was a member of the gym. We frequently had to use a different exit just to avoid the first floor and being bombarded by mormon recruiters.

They were just another minor irritation and thought of as weird by the local populace. Their main source of new mormons were impressionable teens/young adults and old single men.

I know a girl who became a mormon because she had a crush on the American mormon guy who recruited her. When he went back to the US, that was the end of her association with the mormon church and she doesn't even realise she's never actually left officially.

As others have said, it's more in the North than South. But the Missionaries are rarely visible. Perhaps they have a wee bit more success with the immigrants from Nigeria and Eastern Europe these days, but Irish people aren't terribly interested, luckily

I think it has a slightly larger foothold in the North because of the increasing number of people who don't want to be labled Catholic or Protestant but still want to be defined as Christian and seek a third way. For them, I suppose the Mormon church would be an answer.

Northern Ireland can be a very dismal place to live. Listening to the salesmen pitch of a young American mormon is just slightly more pleasant than listening to the rants of Ian Paisley. :p

People in the north used to call us "eejits" all the time. Of course, they were right.

I didn't know that Ian Paisley was still around. A friend who served his mission in Ireland in the 1960s used to talk about Paisley.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/25/2012 10:12AM by Makurosu.

They do, but instead of fig leaves, their aprons are composed of clovers.

I'm American. My husband was born and raised in Ireland (don't want to say where--need to be anon. for this). We met at BYU and live in the US.