A St Patrick's Day radio recital yesterday of Paul Durcan's impish poem about making love in the grounds of Eamon de Valera's Aras an Uachtaráin made me nostalgic for the days when sex was still forbidden fruit for the nation's young men and comely maidens. In those Spartan days when sex was in the mind and not in the flesh, we of the West of Scotland Boys Brigade of Ireland's spiritual empire, were doomed to make frequent, and furtive visits to the confessional box -- in anxious reparation for the fertility of our imaginations.
The prevailing moral orthodoxy, even in the mini-skirt era of the swinging sixties, was that to entertain an impure thought, however involuntarily, was as grievous a sin as having it off with your next-door neighbour's wife.
A more worldly-wise friend of mine would regale us with his story of going to confession in Calvinistic Blantyre to our elderly parish priest, an Irishman whose renowned deafness and dimming eyesight did not deter him from delivering long sermons on the evils of Eve from the Sunday pulpit.
Anyway, my sheepish friend mumbled to the cranky pastor that he lusted after Grace. Naturally, the old cleric took this admission of bodily frailty up wrongly, and enthusiastically recommended that my pal should read for his penance the works on grace of that great youthful sinner, St Augustine of Hippo.
Horrified at the prospect of grappling with Augustine's theological tome, my flustered friend explained in a louder tone that the Grace he had on the brain was the local barmaid -- with whom he desired carnal relations. Whereupon, there was a vocal explosion from the parish priest that alerted waiting penitents in the outside pews of the heinous nature of his secret fantasies.
'Observing the open intimacy of lecherous lads and long-legged babes in my local, I felt a whiff of nostalgia for more repressed days'
Disgraced, he fled the confessional, as the aroused parish priest thunderously prescribed him to recite fifteen decades of the Rosary each day for fifteen consecutive days. The whole parish now wanted to meet Grace.
Later, when my friend had plucked up enough courage to invite Grace on a date, and later still when he had married her in a registry office (she was a Protestant), he would boast that the colourful episode had been his last confession. He had escaped what the writer Liam O'Flaherty called "the soutaned bullies of the Lord".
Observing the open intimacy of eternally lecherous lads and receptively nubile, long-legged babes this St Patrick's Day in Brady's bar, my local in Dublin's Terenure, I felt a whiff of nostalgia for those repressed days when that three-lettered word beginning and ending with S was the sole mortal sin.
Nowadays, priests are too embarrassed to remind young people of the official Catholic Church teaching that sex is reserved only for the marriage bed, and that condoms are not permitted.
Even Accord, the Catholic Church's marriage preparation agency, welcomes rather than berates the country's cohabiting couples.
'Father Trendies' are only too happy, meanwhile, to bless single-sex unions. Mixed marriages too are embraced, rather than condemned, by our Mother Church.
The world of the late Oliver J Flanagan, a righteous Dáil deputy who lamented that sex had not existed in Ireland until the coming of the 'Late Late Show', has long since vanished. At some point in the late 1960s, a sense of sin mysteriously disappeared from public consciousness with the rapidity of St Patrick's alleged banishment of snakes from druidical Ireland.
So it came as a shock to our sensitive souls last week to witness the return of a sense of sin. In Pope Benedict's Rome, a bishop heralded a litany of new social sins for the era of globalisation.
And in Maynooth, the Irish bishops admonished parents and young people to pray rather than play sport on their precious Sunday mornings.
In Brady's, the thinking drinkers toasted the return of the Sabbath, and, perhaps fearful of the St Patrick's Day crash on the money-markets, heatedly debated the evils of accumulating excessive wealth, genetic (as opposed to genital) experimentation, environmental destruction and the challenges of global economic injustice.
Earnest converts to virtuous living applauded President Mary McAleese's epistle calling on immigrants to take inspiration from the national saint as "the most influential immigrant of them all".
As you all know, St Patrick was not a Welshman. Nor was he a Frenchman. He was a Scot -- to be precise, from Kilpatrick close to Dumbarton in the West of Scotland. He was a man of the Clyde. He is buried in Ulster at Downpatrick.
With a bit of divine luck, next year St Patrick's Day may also be celebrated as a national holiday in Northern Ireland. This has long been proposed by the North's First Minister, the Rev Ian Paisley, though the Doc is under the illusion that St Patrick was a Protestant who supported Glasgow Rangers!
With the killjoys in Paisley's Democratic Unionist Party against making St Patrick's Day a national holiday, St Patrick will need to work a miracle to convert the dour DUP zealots to his cause.
But it dawned on me that somewhere yesterday in the grounds of Stormont a budding Ulster Paul Durcan was probably writing lyrically about making love in the grounds of Paisley's Castle.
With or without sin, some things don't change.
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