Days of fervour were a time of trial for dissidents

Had the Bomb dropped? For years I had the cuttings of those days when the world as I thought I knew it stood still and society lost its apparent mind during His visit. In those few days I had to wonder was it my mind?

I didn't see one car on the road between Blackrock and Ranelagh on that Saturday morning as the faithful - who would soon resume their ways on the one road to God knows where - inundated the Phoenix Park as if pacing out years of lost piety in the dark.

Who passed the regulation allowing that Cross, anyway, in a supposedly nascent non-confessional State? The 1950s' Bray Head one was one thing - though my (Northern) Presbyterian father knew his place enough to stay quiet. The visit of the Pope brought out fundamentalist minority feelings I didn't know I had.

Now we have Muslims and New Age. Then we had Jews and - whoever's god is between us and all harm - atheists, dissenters and socialists. But conservative Catholicism's representative on earth in 1979 didn't even find his way to an inter-church service at St Patrick's Cathedral.

On that morning I was trying to get to a socialist retreat, where compulsive TV coverage of the visit was ON. Analyse it how you liked, this was TELEVISION and the Man Himself was charismatic. I've even grown to like him since.

Every house I passed had a yellow Papal flag - and a Tricolour. Some in those households had seemed perfectly sound people to me. So had colleagues at The Irish Times, but for now the world had gone mad. In 72 point we proclaimed an "outpouring of joy and fervour", as I recall - and there was page after page of uncritical analysis. It was no time for begrudgers.

The children were upset by the visit - or was it the adults' inability to cope with sequestration against what seemed like a counterrevolution outside? A crate of red wine had been laid in for the occasion and, as the devotions went on, we became more and more pissed off at the conservative messages.

"How come we don't have a flag, like everyone else?!" Fiachra, then seven, wailed. Now he only recalls the Popemobile - like a Batmobile with a misplaced big fat man in a frock straight out of a comic. The Cold War nuclear hardball which dominated those years, and which held out no hope for their future, was what worried me. Fiachra tells me now: "I had nightmares about that." The Man brought no Good News we were interested in.

"Young people of Ireland, I love you," but there was no permission or blessing for what growing numbers were at anyway. The rising demand for something other than an Irish solution to contraception and marriage breakdown were the least of it. There was no tincture of the humanity that my father loved about another Holy Father, Pope John XXIII.

This Pope was here as an absolutist antidote to the liberal agenda that already promised to include divorce, the abortion problem, the women's movement, multi-denominational schooling. (One issue we hadn't yet a name for was priestly child sex abuse.)

It was as if Cardinal Tomas O Fiaich had sent a telegram to Rome: "Send reinforcements quick. They're doing it. We'll lose Ireland." Abortion had been legalised in Italy in 1978 and in that year pregnancy counselling had begun at the Dublin Well Woman Centre. As we crouched like James Thurber cartoon characters in our retreat house, the timing of Ireland's most famous visitor since JFK seemed to be no accident.

Nor was there anything but hatred for liberation theology, cohabiting priests and other heroes of Latin America's struggles for justice. Later he would hurt the Sandinistas.

Many had hoped for a difference to the North and personally I hoped for an opening that might somehow warm a chill in relations since 1968 with my Northern family over civil rights for Catholics too. Perhaps he's not to be blamed for travelling north only as far as Dundalk. "Paisley calls Pope a liar", said a headline. For many reasons I was a compulsive viewer over those three threatening days.

Thankfully this last triumphalist hurrah of authoritarian devotion didn't last beyond a few weeks of cutting back on sin. As someone said at the time, his visit had no more effect on the flow away from churches than putting a penny on the pint has ever had on the intake of drink.

Twenty years ago the idea of the likes of Bono and Bob Geldof meeting the Pope would have been ridiculous. That they did meet last week reflects a worthy shift of analysis on all sides. That of John Paul now includes issues of need, greed and Third World debt - even if he still blesses the big poor family.

That meeting shows how times have changed, marking a pragmatic recognition in Rome of the need for strategic alliances and the limits of Papal power on earth.