A Chara, - Perhaps 90 per cent of us went to church on Christmas Day. (If we had a doubling of the normal rate of church-going, which is the norm in the UK, we could be close to 100 per cent). Yet in all the pages and pages and endless radio and TV chats of the "what I do at Christmas" variety I found virtually no reference to church-going.
This raises interesting questions. Are our "celebrities" by and large a bunch of heathen philistines (a real possibility, it seems to me)? Or are they embarrassed to mention church-going in an endeavour to appear whatever is the current word for fashionable? Or are editors and producers living in that new sort of world which ignores the realities of an Ireland in which the vast majority are still religious, and a somewhat less vast majority still choose freely to keep a religious dimension in their lives?
Is a kind of censorious secularism now reciprocating the censorious religious domination of 30 years ago? In a Christmas programme not long ago RTÉ sent Bosco carol-singing. He sang Jingle Bells! - Is mise,
Senator BRENDAN RYAN, Seanad Éireann, Dublin 2.