I think, when you look at it globally, that there may very well be an interactive effect between the Catholic Church and local idiosyncrasies.  For example, in another comment to Jake, I noted that, compared to predominantly non-Catholic countries, most Catholic societies, whether its southern Europe, Latin America, New Orleans, or parts of Africa, seem to have a much more open and relaxed -- even scandalously so by Anglo standards -- outlook on sex and alternative sexual behavior than non-Catholic ones. If sex were so repressed in Catholic tradition, how do you explain Carnival in Rio, or La Bachata dancing, for example? Bishops in such areas speak out on such things from the pulpit, of course, but it's almost a playful relationship, with a wink to the limits of mortality, not a dictatorial one like you seem to be describing in Ireland.

Instead, it seems that Church teaching on sexual morality might instead be an aggravating factor, instead of a causal factor.  Anglo culture is known, I think much more than Catholicism, for its sexually repressive character. Bill Clinton's misdeeds barely raised eyebrows in Catholic France, Brazil, and Argentina, for example.  (And, more perversely, although the same abuse scandals in the Church have apparently been occurring in Europe just as in the Anglo world, people are only just getting around to worrying about it now, almost two decades after the story first broke in the US.)

So it also seems plausible that Catholic influence on sexual behavior and the politics around it may have different effects in different societies. And the fact that Anglo culture, due to recent English and American imperial successes, is the dominant one in the world (the Anglo discourse on rights and laws is the default elite discourse in most of the non-Anglo world too), it seems entirely plausible that the cultural contradictions between Catholicism's traditional Roman outlook of law-as-ideals and the Anglo outlook of rule-of-law, or law-as-rules, could be problematic even globally, though whose responsibility it is to change seems unclear.