We are supposed to be living in a Christian society, yet day by day most of us are hardly aware of the fact. Religion is something we have on Sundays, if at all; in British society the Church is a separate thing, an institution like the Public Schools or the Stock Exchange. The clergyman we pass in the street is a man apart, a slightly curious sort of person, the butt of unsubtle jokes. Yet the Christian beliefs that he stands for influence our lives at a level so deep that we are scarcely conscious of them.
This cannot be a healthy state of affairs, and this is why we had the notion of making a film about a country where religion really matters to people, where the Church is woven into the fabric of national life. We could have chosen Spain or perhaps Italy; in the event we went to the Republic of Ireland (or Eire). This was the idea of Geoffrey Hughes, who directed the film, and I think the choice was an ideal one. There is a case for saying Ireland is the most religious country in the world. Here the Roman Catholic Church penetrates the life of the Irish people at every level and in every possible way. In Ireland 95 per cent of the population are Catholic, and on Sunday mornings virtually everybody in the entire country is in church. Every week there are queues in the churches of Irish men and women and children from the age of seven waiting to confess their sins to a priest; at midday and six o’clock each evening, the hours of the Angelus, most Irish folk will bow their heads for a few seconds in prayer; during the day every time they pass a church or a shrine, they will make the sign of the cross, even if they are on a bus or a bicycle or at the wheel of a car.
These are the visible signs of piety, but the influence of the church goes far beyond the spiritual. The Irish primary school system is controlled almost entirely by the Church, through a system of school managers who are always priests. They employ the teachers and keep an eye on what is taught. In the notorious (but now milder) state censorship of books and films, priests sit on the committees. They sit on all sorts of other committees, and in every Irish community the priest is the man to be reckoned with, without whose blessing little can be accomplished in business or sport or local government. This influence of the priests is very hard to pin down, being often a matter of a casual word or a telephone call, but it extends to the highest quarters of government although, in fact, the Irish church is not established and has no official position in the government.