The winds of change have blown strongly since 1979

Country Living with Francis Farragher

I’m of an age where I should be able to recollect from the nostalgia reservoir, memories of being in Ballybrit when Pope John Paul II celebrated his historic Youth Mass in Galway and uttered the phrase that seems to have stuck in everyone’s memory: “Young people of Ireland, I love you.”

My decision not to go to Ballybrit was a kind of silent personal protest against all things great and high, as the first couple of years of my 20s had been pock marked by funerals, one after the other, from the old, the not-so-old and the young.

In hindsight, it was probably a ‘bit much’ to start blaming John Paul II, for the run of ill-luck that had descended upon my family around those years, but after having witnessed prayers, Masses and various relics being invoked to try and end the plague of death that had arrived at our door, my pot of faith had been scraped clean and it has taken quite a while to replenish it.

I remember groups of my mates, who would not have been known for their religious zeal, being quite taken with the whole atmosphere and occasion of the pope coming to the racecourse at Ballybrit. Little trips were organised; names were organised for buses; while there was also a certain social aspect to the occasion with ‘the few pints’ organised afterwards to mark the event.

At times, it’s slightly hard to grasp that almost four decades have passed since the visit of John Paul II to Ireland, and even for those of us who didn’t go to see him, television images and atmospherics that surrounded the occasion, will never leave the mind’s eye until either death or senility intervenes.

In our own humble abode back in 1979, ‘the plunge’ hadn’t been made from the old black and white Bush TV to the world of colour, so JP’s Youth Mass in Ballybrit, I watched with my ageing father in glorious black and white, and even at that, the reception wasn’t great, due to apparently unsolvable problems with aerial connections and trappings.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.