WHAT, I ask you, does the English Marxist academic, Prof Terry Eagleton, have in common with the Catholic Archbishop of Cashel, Dr Dermot Clifford?
And the answer is: much more than you might think. For one thing, they are opposed to the modernisation of, Irish society - at least as it has been proceeding to date.
In the professor's eyes, the fault lies with revisionism. To the archbishop, modernisation means movement towards the separation of church and state.
Both sound as if they'd preferred life here to remain as it was over quarter of a century ago. Before we joined the Common Market and, to use Eagleton's term, became Eurocentric.
Life was simple then. Nationalism seemed to have escaped, avoided or ignored the questions raised by the 50th anniversary of the Easter Rising. The Irish Catholic Church had survived the second Vatican Council.
We'd been assured by the familiar leaders of church and State: our small world was safe, at least as long as we resisted the temptation to lift the green curtain that surrounded us.
We were a million miles from the world of the 1990s in which Ireland holds - and capably handles - the presidency of the European Union and the Hierarchy reels from the echoes of fleeing bishops, guilty priests and a lost referendum.
No one would have believed you, a quarter of a century ago, if you'd told them that in the summer of 1996 the Republic would watch with rapt attention the internal struggles of loyalist paramilitaries, knowing that what happened was bound to affect everyone on this island.
Nor would anyone have guessed that changed circumstances would make political bed fellows of a left wing English academic and an ultraconservative Irish archbishop, both prepared to stand by their principles and the memory of King Canute.
Terry Eagleton has a way with words, which is the least that might be expected of a professor of English literature at the University of Oxford. He also has a deep interest in Irish affairs, as he showed by turning up to lecture on "The Ideology of Irish Studies" at the opening session of this, year's Desmond Greaves Summer School.
The professor's theme is revisionism and revisionists. He can't stand them. Deconstructing Irish nationalism, he argues, is fashionable and, with any luck, will get you a job.
What d'ye intend to do with yourself now, son - since you got the five honours in the Leaving Cert?
Oh, I'm going into industry, Da - the deconstruction industry. Mr Eagleton says there's plenty of jobs in it.
"Deconstructing liberal humanism or post modern pluralism will probably not (get you a job), but it's a mite more original," says the professor.
Indeed it is. And I'm sure the archbishop would agree. Some commentators who were on his side in the debate on divorce keep resurfacing to complain that liberals aren't as liberal as they ought to be.
But is Prof Eagleton the man to make the case? It's hard to say, because it's often hard to tell what point he's making. Or whether what he says can be taken for praise or blame.
Of course, revisionists are always grousing about the misconceived nature of the title. And they're right. "It is," he agrees, "too vague, sloppy a term, a kind of generalised swearing which among other faults covers too many things."
Then, having pointed to the elephant trap, off he goes and falls into it, laying about him with every bit of generalised swearing and every slab of jargon he can lay his hands son.
Take this: "The greatest enterprise of historiographical revisionism in Ireland was, surely the nationalist one, which took the official imperial narrative and rewrote it with breathtaking boldness from below, with all of the courageous imagining, false continuism, Manichean ethics, historical truth and triumphalist teleology that that, entailed."
And this: "Liberal human is ... tends to be rather sceptical of the political, as our rulers can often afford to be, whereas post modernism is less sceptical than selective about politics, enthused by gender, ethnicity and post colonialism but distinctly cool about class struggle, material production and the International Monetary Fund."
I offered the professor's script to friends, colleagues, and relatives who, unlike me, had had the benefit of what we used to call higher education. They couldn't make more sense of it.
Of the general drift there seemed to be no doubt: without a Marxist revolution in the wider world, there would be no great change. But most of the professor's message was smothered in thickets of jargon.
He is, however, against abandoning tradition and under this heading includes "a suspicion of the success ethic and respect for a church without which millions of Irishmen and women would never have been nursed, educated and cared for".
"How utterly non pluralist," he commented, "to imagine that one could simply choose [Eagleton's emphasis] here. Why are the liberal pluralists so zealously one sided about these matters?"
The question was naive, almost as naive as it was bizarre to wrap a message about the need for class politics in layers of academic gobbledegook.
That other defender of tradition, Dr Clifford, and his colleague, Father Maurice Dooley, a professor of canon law at St Patrick's College in Thurles, might have told Mr Eagleton a thing or two about the nature of debate in Ireland.
DR Clifford, you may recall, was one of those who argued most forcefully against divorce in last year's referendum - so forcefully indeed that he claimed, among other things, that divorcees were more likely than others to have road accidents.
One of the pieces of legislation introduced to meet the concern of those who worried about the state of marriage generally was the Family Law Act, obliging couples to give three months notice of their intention to marry.
The Act became effective at the beginning of August. Dr Clifford promptly sent a message - with guidelines written by Father Dooley - to priests in his archdiocese.
It said the Act was contrary to canon law and that even where a court exemption had not been obtained the priests should go ahead with the marriage; the couple could seek to the civil validation later.
In a comment reported by Nuala Haughey in this newspaper, Father Dooley said the legal technicalities of the new law made it "entirely purposeless and stupid". When politicians criticised Cashel's approach, Dr Clifford went on radio to explain.
The intention, he said, with the plausible air of someone who'd been asked for advice about the catering, was to help those who came from outside to marry here. Myles Dungan dutifully deferred to the archbishop.
Less than an hour later Father Dooley was on RTE's teatime television news repeating his views and adding that the Family Law Act was unconstitutional.
Eagleton needn't worry: Rome rules in Tipperary.