At the risk of repeating myself, this is to state that I am not and never was a religious person. There was nothing religious in my childhood home.  For a few years when I was in primary school, I went to church with my sister. Our school was a country school and going to church on a Sunday was part of the way things worked. My parents did not go. My father would wait for us in the sitting room before Sunday lunch, asking questions about the sermon, ready to ridicule every word, but we never remembered much. The sermon was the boring bit when I had trouble staying awake. At the church door on our way out, the kids all received a little magazine with stories about black babies in Africa and picture puzzles. I liked the picture puzzles, they had to be coloured in just so to reveal the solution. Also, there were these two seemingly identical drawings with ten hidden differences and for a while that was challenging.

Over the years, we all went to the instruction classes for (Lutheran) holy confirmation. Again, this was the way things worked and my mother would show up in church on the day. Mostly, it was all about the dress (black) and the shoes (heeled) and my first make-up and getting money presents. Only, my grandmother insisted I should get silverware for my future dowry. That was a huge disappointment to me as two years earlier, my sister had received enough money to buy a sophisticated reel-to-reel tape recorder/player, which I was not allowed to touch. Lately, I have started to look at the price of silver with the intention of finally selling my incomplete set of 63 or so knives and forks and spoons.

Then there was the youth club on a Friday night, where we would play table tennis and later had a disco, with secret stacks of beer and cigarettes, supervised by a trainee vicar who wanted to be cool and looked away. I remember watching the local male heartthrobs jumping up in the air to "Satisfaction" and also, my first time getting drunk. At midnight, we had to clean up and put everything back as it was for the ladies' coffee morning on Saturdays.

A few years later, I went through a very brief spell of infatuation with the Baptist church but soon lost interest when real adult life beckoned. 

Also, the children of god drifted by, all tambourines and long skirts, for a few weeks outside secondary school. A handful of Hare Krishna's at university. And then I met R's parents. Ardent catholics. I came into their lives shortly after the Polish pope had been to Ireland in 1979,  which was a massive, massive event, and every time I sat in the car of my future father in law, he played the tapes of that mass, watching me in the rear view mirror.

When after three years of unsuccessful attempts of their gentle proselytising I refused to have the first (and much loved and cherished) grandchild baptised, they went on a pilgrimage to Lough Derg which involved three days of fasting and endless hours of kneeling on concrete slabs day and night in the rain. One day, I may write about how I felt when they returned from that dreadful island in Donegal, bleeding and feeling cleansed, as my mother in law assured me.

But basically, I kept well away from all that. And yet, nothing I have since learnt about the catholic church in Ireland and elsewhere has come as a surprise. So when was the first time I had it spelt out that this church was teeming with child abuse? I tell you when, it was when Sinead O'Connor tore up that picture of the pope on US television. And let's not forget, she was/is almost universally treated like a crazy person who had said something bizarre and unforgivable. Did you think she was mad then, too?