If you were out in foreign parts, living there for years maybe, what would you like to read if you got a copy of your parish magazine? You'd probably like a bit of gossip to be honest, something heart-stopping about the most unlikely liasion of the decade, an explanation of how someone who had nothing last year, had a Land Rover and a swimming pool this year. The reasons why planning permission was withheld in one place and not in another. An eye-witness account of fisticuffs at a business dinner.
But surely you'd be unlikely to read this kind of thing in a parish magazine. Suppose you don't come from a small community and don't get a parish magazine yourself, what kind of thing to you think that you might find in one?
A list of Sales of Work past and to come? Times of religious services? Votes of thanks to people for trusty service and the use of the hall? Encouragements to contribute to this and that?
Well nowadays you'd be wrong.
And I know because I spent several hours reading some of them this week. The parish magazine in many cases has come out into the sunshine and become what it was always intended to be - a letter to the community by the community.
And for emigrants it is often a letter from home.
There was a pattern in emigration and the way people did or didn't keep in touch with home. I'm talking about old emigration now, not the Celtic Tiger sort moving effortlessly around the globe, keeping in touch by Internet, being trans continental commuters, back before anyone knew they were really gone.
In the old days people kept in touch by letter. The mother wrote weekly to her sons and daughters, the children often kept the family going back home by the emigrants' remittances. There were holidays once a year.
Then the mother died, the sisters who remained at home, who had taken on the torch of letter writing, married and had lives of their own. There was often little time to write to the brother out there in the Bronx, in the western suburbs of Sydney or even nearer home in Cricklewood.
And as the years went on, home became more and more remote, the holidays less and the memories without the back-up of any present day contact became confused and possibly lonely and bitter.
I have met in my travels people who would long to go back to a village, a townland, a parish where they had grown up. But there would be a shrug, they didn't know what was happening there any more, they'd be ridiculous, out of place.
I used to wish that someone would write them a letter and tell them what was going on at home.
The Irish Episcopal Commission for Emigrants thought exactly the same thing, and its director Father Paul Byrne decided to try and sort it out in a very practical way. Try to make your parish magazine take on aspects of a letter to emigrants, he suggested, there isn't a parish in Ireland that doesn't have sons and daughters abroad. Make it something they'd want to read that would give them some link with home, some sense of still belonging.
And because these things need a kick-start and because he knew someone in Aer Rianta there was a great competition organised for parish magazines, with Aer Rianta giving prizes to encourage people like mad.
Yes, well. I've never been bowled over by Aer Rianta's philosophies to be very honest, deeply suspecting that most of them are centred around the business of letting space to sell Duty Free goods.
Let's fill up all the outgoing planes with flammable alcohol, cartons of cigarettes that are going to kill you, perfume and electronics that people only buy because they think they've got a bargain. Forget the lame and the halt dragging themselves through miles of corridors past these emporiums.
But that's all purely personal, I must add cheerfully. And when I heard they were actually doing something half-way decent and actually giving prizes for the most lively and imaginative parish magazines, my natural sense of justice and fair play made me overcome my instinct that they were basically a shabby outfit and so I agreed to judge the finalists in the magazine competition.
It was an eye opener.
A lot of them were exactly what the lonely man in the British midlands who hasn't been home for fifteen years might like to read, or the woman living in the western suburbs of Sydney among people who came from different countries to her own would love to show her neighbours.
This is my place, where I came from, this is a picture of the class of 1961 in primary school, this is the hurling team with my brother on it 20 years ago, this is a small bit of history about the town which I didn't know or wasn't interested in then.
And some of them have bits about the parishioners who travelled, those who have lived long abroad, not just boring success stories of those who made money but more interesting things about the lifestyle they lead and how they can be contacted.
There are lists of events which an emigrant might like to join, addresses, and people to contact, a wealth of detail that would make a person think that it might after all be worth making the journey.
Of course, Aer Rianta hope more and more people will make the journey, that's their business, have millions filing through, filling up on cartons of booze and fags, but to be fair they have done this well. A lovely crystal trophy for the parish that wins, and big prizes of ticket vouchers, like £700 for the first, then £500, then £300.
The parishes can do what they like with these vouchers, raffle them give them to an emigrant to come home, or maybe give them to parents to go out. That's up to the winners.
It will all be announced next Wednesday who has won. It's upsetting to have to chose between winners and those who don't win. And the publications couldn't be judged on whether they had expensive paper or glossy ads or cost a lot or a little.
The main thing I had to look out for was how much they sounded like a proper letter from home. But I do feel that there is a way in which everyone wins in this by having an interest developed in a competition arranged for a lively parish magazine.
The Emigrant Commission, in 57 Parnell Square, Dublin 1, will give you advice if you think you'd like to liven up your particular publication, and use it as one of the most useful links that could be imagined, a hand reached out abroad to give the emigrant a real link with home.