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It's dirt poor, priest-ridden, with a bleak green-grey landscape and low, dim interiors echoing the image of a "backwards village."

She denounced women as “petty, trifling, priest-ridden, gossiping, stupid, inane,” and desperately in need of leadership from a superior being like herself.

James Joyce described the Irish at the beginning of the 20th century as “an unfortunate priest-ridden race,” and Banville’s County Wexford assumes this still held true in the 1950s.

I was brought up in rural Ireland, which in the 1950s was a pretty sober society, priest-ridden and poor – not unlike Poland before the Berlin Wall came down.

This phrase, in its blank and terrible irony, seemed to haunt Ireland for a long time, and even now I can’t hear it without thinking of Simon Dedalus’ dire pronouncement in A Portrait that “We are an unfortunate priest-ridden race and always were and always will be till the end of the chapter.”