Catholic power and the Irish city: modernity, religion, and planning in Galway, 1944-49

This article uses a major town planning dispute concerning the location for a new school - fought in the 1940s between church and state in the city of Galway - to rethink Ireland's distinctive engagement with modernity. Using town planning and urban governance lenses, it argues that existing scholarship on the post-war Irish Catholic Church overstates its hegemonic power. In analysing the dispute, it critiques the undue focus within European town planning studies on the state and on the supposedly'rational' agendas of mid-century planners and shows instead how religious entities forged parallel paths of urban modernity and urban governance. It thus adds an Irish and an urban planning dimension to existing debates within religious history about urbanisation and secularisation, showing how adaptive the Irish Catholic Church was to high modernity. Finally, with its focus on a school building, it brings a built environment angle into studies of education policy in Ireland. In seeking to revisit major historiographical debates within town planning, religious history and studies of urban modernity, it makes extensive use of the recently opened papers of Bishop Michael Browne of Galway, a noted public intellectual within the Irish Catholic Church and aEuropean expert on Canon Law.