The Last Straw: I'm sure it wasn't intended as such. But the reported promise by the Small Firms Association that employers would consider facilitating staff who needed a day's annual leave "to reflect on the Pope's life" was perfectly pitched to discourage anyone from asking. No matter how religious you were, you'd need a hard neck and a degree in philosophy to apply for a day off - especially a Friday - to reflect on anything.
Maybe that's just the harassed parent in me talking. The only time I get to engage in deliberate reflection these days is when cycling at night, in luminous clothes. And even then, I've had the occasional debate with gardaí about whether my reflections are meaningful within the terms of the traffic by-laws. However many reflector belts you have, apparently, you need lights on your bike as well.
The fact is that to reflect properly on anything requires concentration, and this is hard work. I once bought a self-help book about how to concentrate, by an author schooled in eastern meditation techniques. In his introduction, which impressed me so much I can clearly remember it 15 years on, he warned that learning to concentrate would take years of practice. And that by the time you mastered it, the things that motivated you to learn in the first place might no longer matter. After that, my mind wondered. I never finished the book.
Anyway, suggesting that schools close yesterday was an easy option for the Government. But the woman from the National Parents Council had a point when she said that whatever slim chance there was of students reflecting would be improved by keeping them in class.
After all, even cardinals - who are trained in this sort of thing - have to be locked up to reflect on the identity of the next Pope. And sometimes that's not enough. In 1268, as we've all probably read by now, authorities took the roof off the building the cardinals were meeting in, and cut their food rations, to help them concentrate better. If it's good enough for princes of the church, it's good enough for school-kids. But instead, parents were expected to organise the reflection themselves yesterday, which for those with small children must have been a challenge.
Dressing my five-year-old son in the morning, I sometimes ask him to reflect on - for example - where his other shoe is. But not if I waited three years, withdrawing his food, and taking the roof off the livingroom, would he come up with information leading to the shoe's recovery. There'd probably be a better chance of him producing white smoke from his ears.
All in all I'd say that in many households, the school closures probably resulted in a net decrease in reflection levels.
Watching coverage of the Pope's Irish visit again, you didn't need to reflect much to realise you were getting old. Like thousands of other teenagers, I was in Galway in 1979. And although none of us there were parents (with the exception, as we later found out, of two lads on the altar), somehow we didn't manage a lot of reflection either.
For me and a group of friends, the event was an excuse for a post-Leaving Cert reunion party, which happened the night before the Pope's mass, and which may have involved some beer. At about 3am, we set out straight from the party for Ballybrit racecourse, where we arrived into the greyest dawn there ever was, before or since. The light conditions mirrored exactly how many of us felt during the several months that we waited for the Pope's helicopter to arrive.
Some of the more committed Irish Catholics were still praying for the conversion of Russia at that time. A year later, as it happened, the chain of events that led to that conversion were under way. I remember being in Bewley's in Dublin one day, reading the newspaper about the crisis in Poland, when an elderly cafe bore who had been lurking at the next table struck. "Those lads," he said, gesturing at the pictures from Gdansk shipyard, "are only troublemakers."
I tried ignoring him, but he was stickier than a Bewley's bun (in more ways than one probably). He went on to suggest that the Pope was a troublemaker too, and he was still generously sharing his opinions when I suddenly remembered I had to be somewhere else in the cafe. I don't know where that man is now - probably annoying customers in the great coffee shop in the sky. But it's staggering to reflect on all the changes since, and to think that a day would ever come when we'd be less worried about the Russians than about the proposed conversion of Bewleys.
