'Religion will go in Ireland," a liberal priest said to me in 1980, "and when it goes, it'll go so fast that nobody will know what is happening."
At that time, the remark seemed more like a provocative soundbite than a studied analysis. Had not the Pope himself electrified people across the island in the previous year? In 1980, every second baby boy seemed to bear the names John Paul.
Yet the comment was prophetic, in the sense of being made by someone who saw so deeply into the underlying trends of the present moment that the shape of the future became discernible.
Far from being an example of the Church Triumphant, the papal visit was a sign of crisis and uncertainty. Never before had a Pope felt the need to visit in order to pin down support. The brutal truth was that priestly vocations had been in sharp decline for more than a decade, from a high of 1,409 in 1966 to just 506 in 1979. Between 1971 and 1991, average family size dropped from four to two children. Church attendance plummeted. By the mid-1990s, scandals seemed to have left Irish Catholicism in free fall.
What all that showed is obvious enough. Far from being attached to sacred traditions, Irish people are more than willing to jettison them when they no longer seem useful. After all, more than a century earlier they had stopped speaking their native language, adopting English with astonishing speed and expressive power, once they decided that Irish was impractical.
Just 19 years after John Paul's visit, they abandoned yet another core value - the territorial claim on the six northern counties. For the sake of peace and neighbourliness with the unionist community, 95 per cent of the electorate in this State voted in 1998 for the Belfast Agreement. This said, in effect, that a county like Antrim could be British or Irish, or possibly both at the same time. That was a repudiation of a claim which most voters had imbibed with their mothers' milk.
Thirty years ago, when I began teaching Irish literature at university, I breezily offered students three keys to Irish identity - the mind-set of the Irish language, the power of religion, and the impact of political nationalism. Nowadays, my students ask which of these centres can hold, given that all three seem to have been abandoned by the most globalised people in Europe.
"We are just honorary Americans," bemoaned one UCD student last week, "all perma-tans and baseball caps."
That isn't true. Nothing ever dies in Ireland - rather it gets translated into a new form. Although Irish evaporated in most parts of early Victorian Ireland, its rhythms, cadences and even syntax animated the brilliant Hiberno-English in which Joyce, Synge and Lady Gregory wrote their masterpieces 50 years later.
The people were saddened and deeply hurt by the loss of their language, but they soon made a home in English; and institutions like the Abbey Theatre helped to fill the cultural vacuum.
On the basis of that precedent, and given the deep spirituality of so many of our people, it may be safe to say that it is not religion which has declined in large sections of Tiger Ireland.
What is dying, rather, is a Victorian ecclesiocracy in its institutional forms. The "underground" church of local saints and popular devotionalism, a church which celebrates ritual and life, may already be re-emerging to displace an autocratic institution based on external rule-keeping and social fear.
The huge sales of books which splice Celtic and Christian tradition are but one indication of this trend. Already, new formations are taking shape whose outline will become fully clear only two or three decades from now.
In similar fashion, that old-style nationalism, which was cashed in with the Belfast Agreement, is being replaced by a civic republicanism, whose leaders are attending commemorations of the dead of the Somme as well as that of Easter 1916. Some day soon, they may commemorate both events at a single ceremony.
Arch-traditionalists may feel scandalised by this national genius for adaptation; and it may well be that many communities are now as traumatised by the loss of religious practice as once they were by the loss of the social codings that went with Irish.
But, if traditions can be translated, at least they don't fossilise. That very flexibility which was painfully achieved over the centuries underpins and explains our current prosperity, but may also give rise to new political and religious institutions.
We may find it hard to ditch long-serving leaders, from Dev to Bertie - unlike the British who ceremoniously dumped Churchill in 1945 - but when it comes to discarding core values, we are the least sentimental people on earth. No wonder that George Bernard Shaw recommended that every English person be sent for a spell of "national service" in Ireland, in order to learn "flexibility of mind".