Ireland Was Once Pagan. May be Pagan Again

An Irish Catholic writer, who must represent the anguish of many Irish Catholics, sees signs the country is returning to its pre-Catholic roots. There are proposals to turn saint's days into feast days. Men in drag are seen regularly. The writer is aghast.  

It's helpful to remember that five years ago voters legalized abortions in Ireland. If memory serves, that was the first of many events in Europe and the Americas putting a political finger in the eye of forced-birth religious and political operatives. Now, it is on the verge of eliminating the draconian three-day waiting period and extending the weeks available for abortions. No other country in Europe, the writer observed, has done as complete a turn to the secular as has Ireland.

The link author tries to make the same case about Ireland many Christians try to make about Christianity, especially the Protestant version, in the U.S. It is that the current religion also represents the culture of the country. He skips across the well-known Pagan history which is Ireland and starts history when the Catholics took over running the country. It was the deep Catholic worship which separated the Irish from the rest of Europe, he claims, and which eventually led to the independent Republic of Ireland. Apparently, at the ancient times of Paganism people who lived there were not independent and would never have gained the independent status is now has. Dream on.

When Ireland was a deep Catholic country it was a poor country. Now it is prosperous and has dumped the old "I am poor but I am Godly" thing that church preached. It's out with the old, in with the new.

When the link author says the Irish have rejected the church faster and more thoroughly than has the rest of Europe it brings up the kind of Catholic politics and church governance experienced in Ireland. I don't know the answer to this, but could it be the church in government was more corrupt than other European countries? Looking from afar as I am it seems like the level of influence in government and politics and the amount of church corruption was extraordinary. 

If it is extraordinary as it seems, the question is why does the link author fear Paganism? I don't see how it could be worse and might be better.