Author says unanswered questions remain regarding the treatment of women

Best-selling author Sally Rooney says modern Ireland’s secular pivot away from the Catholic era is incomplete, with unfinished business about why society locked up pregnant women they viewed as “undesirable members of Irish society”.

Rooney was asked by Der Spiegel magazine if she had endured pushback against her books from Ireland’s “Catholic milieu” similar to that endured in the past by Sinéad O’Connor.

In 1992 the singer was blacklisted after she tore up picture of Pope John Paul II on live US television in protest at clerical sexual abuse, and Catholic institutional structures she said enabled religious prey on children.

Rooney recalled how, as a result, O’Connor was “ostracised in the cultural and social life of Ireland” in the 1990s.

“She was seen as dangerous, at the same time she was very brave and right!” she told Der Spiegel. “People portrayed her…