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Much of this has to do with the image of sex and death, which presents hilarity on the one side and melancholia on the other. The confusion has been blamed squarely on the Catholic Church, but a country usually gets the religion that suits it. The Irish attitude to sex goes back a long way. Vivian Mercier, in his indispensable book The Irish Comic Tradition, talks of ubiquitous stone carvings depicting a creature called the Sheela-na-gig, half-whore and half-crone, with enormous sexual parts and withered breasts. This would be the same enchantress of ancient legend who, having seduced her victim, turns successively into scalding water, a beast that eats the poor man's head and a dwarf that fastens his hair to the floor and makes him bald. The Irish have been suspicious of marriage ever since.
The impulse was not particularly puritanical, at least in its early stages. There may have been an ascetic tradition in the monasteries, but Irish behavior at wakes, centuries before they had learned to sublimate with Guinness, was so obscene that the chroniclers (unfortunately) blush to describe it. We do know that at some point, a mock priest with a rosary of potatoes round his neck performed a mock wedding. Death and rebirth were usually celebrated together, until sharp poverty came along in the 17th century to make birth a curse, and sex no laughing matter.
With four-fifths of the country owned by Englishmen or their clients after 1662, a small farmer could not afford even to think about sex. Marriage for him was early death. And he clung to a religion that often tended to confirm his caution. The 18th century priests, trained in the flesh-hating Jansenist seminaries of France, gave him the rationale for what he had to do anyway. It was not a specifically Catholic matter. Protestant churches in Scotland and Wales, countries also under the British thumb, were equally repressive.
Thereafter a war of the sexes set in of unparalleled intensity, out of which came one of the great war poems of all time: Brian Merriman's "Midnight Court," written in the late 18th century. In it, a beautiful young woman complains that the men won't marry her, but only have eyes for the rich old hags. An aging husband lashes back: the young girls are tarts, who will sleep with anyone and beggar a man to boot. Not so, screams the woman. A girl's a poor drudge, looking for a little pleasure between childbirths: the husband is simply too old and loveless to provide it. The court decrees a whipping for all bachelors, and the poet wakes up in a cold sweat. There is a thriving Merriman cult in both this country and Ireland, and small wonder.
Official Ireland, the beloved woman of the old patriotic songs has been a special hag to her poets, chasing them and censoring them like a worn-out scold. But that war is nearly over. A middle class, as conventional and tolerant as anybody's, is now growing up in the cities, and the Charm is being taken over by the Tourist Board. Bogus castles, renovated pubs and professional colorful characters may be all that survive of it, unless the Irish pass a miracle that has defeated other folk people and keep the flower without also keeping the dunghill it grew on.