Episode 5: The Catholic Church

For decades, Ireland was synonymous with Catholic state control - but the last 30 years have seen a new cultural climate take hold in the country, and a furious backlash has broken out against the legacies of the Church's institutional stranglehold. We'll be looking at how the Church became so powerful in the Irish Republic in the first place, and the reasons behind its dramatic fall from grace in recent times. We'll be talking to the formidable local historian Catherine Corless, who exposed institutional abuse and cover-ups on a massive scale in 2014, and we'll also interview journalists and doctors at the National Maternity Hospital in Dublin, which inspired public outrage when the state almost gave it over to an order of nuns with a very questionable past.