Ireland's Great Movement, often shortened to just the Movement, was a conservative sociopolitical movement in Ireland in the 1940's and 1950's that had lingering aftereffects into the 1970's. The phenomenon was born out of dissatisfaction with the secular, war-mobilized and increasingly corporatized, centralized and urbanized political culture in Dublin and Belfast. The leaders of the Great Movement sought to return Ireland to its decentralized roots, conservative values and strengthen its loosening ties to the Catholic Church, and their main political tool was the Christian Democratic Party. The apex of the Great Movement was between 1948 and 1957, when one of its intellectual leaders, Aidan Bair, served as the President of Ireland and appointed a Cabinet of fiercely conservative legisla