So Paddy’s day has been and gone, our national and unofficial day of drinking and thanking our patron saint for ridding our isle of snakes. (Regardless of the fact that fossils show Ireland has never had a snake of any kind.)

Recently, I was at the receiving end of a near death experience, now while this has not had any effect on my own personal views of religion, I can now see how some people might drastically change their lives after such an experience.
It has, in one aspect, made me think about life more, about how we are such fragile parts of this world.
The fearful part of this experience for me, though, was that it was a natural force that caused it, the Atlantic Ocean. It proved to me that although humans may think we control the earth and that we are the force to be reckoned with, we are in fact, weak.

Can it all just be a coincidence? That everything all just came together at the right time, the right temperature, the right place, and combined to make this wonderful world. Where we have televisions, iphones and fridge magnets, where we can graph the evolution of man from prehistoric times and yet still be unable to find that missing link when animal became man.
It has to be said here that most Christians’ do not know the full story, that there are thousands if not hundreds of thousands, of books in the Vatican in Rome, containing undisclosed information that has not been deemed ‘suitable’ for the public to hear. Yet why the secrecy?
Wouldn’t it be fairer if our respective schools and teachers told us this? Personally I found out about it by accident, while reading The Da Vinci Code which then made me more interested in finding out about these hidden books.
Just why aren’t we allowed to have the Gospel of Judas proclaimed from the Catholic pulpit every Sunday? If we were given the full story, then it would seem less like we were being manipulated into our beliefs by selective preaching.

So it is St Patrick's Day, the Irish national day of celebration. This is a day which is supposed to be held in honour of the saint who brought Catholicism to Ireland. Indeed this is the man who returned to our island after he escaped from slavery here.
Yet how do the majority of Irish people see this day?
As a day for drinking.
I can honestly say that I have never spent a St Patrick's Day in the pub, indeed I don't think I have even spent that night in the pub either. So I cannot speak from experience about the queues and the hiked prices of alcohol on this day. But just take a look at the parade travelling down O Connell St in Dublin today, the crowds are 10-15 people deep in places at the side of the street.
Just how many of them will leave the parade and head straight into the nearest bar for the evening?
It will be a fairly high percentage I can tell you that much. Just what example is this that we are setting for youth? Its our national day and we spend it half langered in a pub, singing Irish songs and claiming to be patriotic about our country, yet just how many people can tell you what our national colour is.........and no its not green.....

The historian JH Whyte, author of Church and State in Modern Ireland. asked at the start of his book whether the Irish were truly religious or merely adhering to social norms of churchgoing. He concluded that, since people did far more than the church demanded of them, they were obviously genuinely religious. The church said we had to go to confession and communion once a year; most of us went every week, some every day. Whyte was judging behaviour against the demands of church law, not against the social rules by which we were drilled into conformity in a rural country in which there was little other opportunity for meeting all your neighbours in the one place

So where did it all go wrong for Irish religion then? Most people presume that it was the sex and child abuse scandals which led to the Irish public ditching a clergy which failed to meet our standards.

Actually, the decline started in the 1960s, with the urbanisation of Ireland, and it was the women who started it. Around this time the Vatican reaffirmed the 'evils' of sexual deviancy and contraception. This led to questions as to why the church was condemning something which took the risk out of sexual relationships, why were we all following a narrow, strait-laced path when there was other possibilities which could now be chanced?

So perhaps it is the church itself that has led to the present day demise of religion. Certainly it has not helped them to remain so old fashioned in the modern world.

While I am not normally one that likes to eat my own words so to speak, I have to say that I was surprised last Wednesday to see so many people in Dublin City Centre with ashes on their foreheads. Being the not-so-devout Catholic that I am, I had also happened to forget that it was Ash Wednesday, cue the look of dawning realisation which appeared on my face in the middle of Grafton St. What interested me about the day was the fact that so many people were oblivious to the crosses that they were displaying. 

The cross is used on our foreheads as a sign that we repent and are 'carrying our cross' out of the church and into the world. Yet everyone I seen on the streets that day looked like they had totally forgotten that it was the beginning of a forty day diet which Catholics undertake, both in preparation for Easter and as a way of spiritually “joining” Jesus with the fasting and meditation he did in the wilderness. Yet it was quite strange to see different nationalities partaking of this ritual also as I observed both Asians and Africans bearing the ashes. While I have no idea as to their nationality, they could be born and reared in any of the counties around Ireland, it was nice to see how Ireland has become an extended community and that religion does not pay any heed to race or origins.

But it was very obvious that the majority of people in Dublin did not attend the traditional Ash Wednesday mass, 30 or 40 years ago the ratio would look the opposite way. There would be a higher number of people with the ashes than without. Indeed, I even over heard one child whispering to her mother "Look at the man with the dirty face, Mammy." Innocence maybe, but it tragically reflects the steep slope Ireland is facing regarding religion.

Religion as it currently stands

Like the famous movie quote, religion in Ireland is currently as varied as 'a box of chocolates'. When you go out socialising on a Saturday night you are just as likely to see a Jew or Muslim as a Catholic. Although, thats if you can even tell them apart, which is an achievement in itself.

Yes, the Irish have come a long way in regards to religion and now that our opinions are starting to change, do you think we will ever see religion having the same control over the population as it once had?

There has not been such a bleak outlook for the Irish Catholic faith since the plantation times, where even then, masses were said regularly at certain designated 'holy sites' or mass rocks'. The Irish were renowned for their devoutness and we even earned the title of 'The Island of Saints and Scholars'. But what has happened to that Ireland? How have we managed to lose our faith in so short a period of time?

Only the older people and the devout attend weekly mass any more. Many now simply 'don't have the time' or see it as a yearly pilgrimage to be made at Christmas. Bishops and priests have their work cut out for them if they want to reach out to the young people.

The generation before me, the older middle-aged lets say, are still clinging on with all their might to their religion. They don't want to give up on it as a lost cause. Yet they are fighting a losing battle. How many young people go to mass on a regular basis? I can guarantee that it is not a high percentage.

Despite being raised a Roman Catholic myself, I personally have no time for religion. Its' simply boring to me. And I am not usually one to have a short attention span. Yet, if given the choice of staying in bed or going to mass on a Sunday morning.......I know which one I would choose.