The application in Cork for a six-hour drinks licence to celebrate some children's first communion sounded rather like an Irish joke on the BBC in the bad old days, or maybe an April's Day wheeze: but it was neither, writes Kevin Myers
The year wasn't 1974, but 2004, and the day was last Friday, not next Thursday.
The details made barely less grisly reading than the application itself. Inside a marquee that was to be erected in the grounds of Castlehyde Hotel there would be a full bar - because, said the manager, many people wanted more than just wine with their lunch. Quite. So the children for whom the party was being held would be in a supervised playpen on the lawn, while in the tent, their parents were getting legless.
No, not legless? Is that right? So what happens when you consume alcohol - not just wine, but beers and spirits - in even moderate amounts for six hours? By that time, the eight-year olds, comatose with boredom, will have run away to join the circus or have clubbed their communion money together to go and buy enough petrol to set fire to the marquee.
That a hotel manager would do anything so daft, so astoundingly stupid, so insensitive, so gross, speaks volumes about our hopeless addiction to alcohol, but it also says something about the meaninglessness of religion as it is practised in Ireland today.
He was presumably responding to the perceived priorities and expectations of the society around him. For Irish people to be drawn anywhere today, it seems, alcohol has to be a companion. No booze, no queues.
Seldom am I moved to commend those who rest their bottoms on the bench, but Judge Michael Patwell got it entirely right when he rejected the application for a drinks licence. If parents are getting drunk to celebrate their children's first communion, then why not on the infants' first day in school also? Why not have drink at children's parties, to enable the parents and perhaps the older siblings dispel the boredom? Why not have lashings of drink at the children's nativity play? And why not open up a pay bar in hospital casualty, so everyone can have a good time while they're waiting to get that eyebrow stitched, the one that was sliced open by a broken bottle during that misunderstanding in the pub? In fact, why not have a bar in maternity wards? So nurses and expectant patients and dads and doctors can have a few scoops, and meanwhile mum squeezes as if she's trying to inflate a lorry tyre, hollering intermittently for more gin and tonic.
Judge Patwell declared that the only sacrament he hadn't seen despoiled by drink was that of ordination. Well, maybe that's because ordinations in modern Ireland are nowadays just about as common as camel-trains. For good or ill, we have largely ceased to be an actively Christian people, and many, if not most, of our religious ceremonies continue because of social habit rather than of authentic piety. It is the religion of a practice rather than of belief, the skip of sheep over a non-existent hedge, which continues because long, long ago, generations before, there had indeed once been a hedge there.
Only a society which had lost contact with the meaning of the Catholic communion could have proposed to celebrate the sacramental re-enactment of the last supper with a six-hour booze-up.
Within the traditions and the teaching of the Catholic Church, the first communion is the greatest moment in a conscious Christian's life, when - as real Catholics believe - children take into their mouths the body and blood of Jesus Christ, the Saviour of Mankind. This deed is now celebrated with the words from Luke, John and, in the New Revised Edition, Arthur: "Alleluia, alleluia. The disciples recognised the Lord Jesus, when he broke bread. Alleluia. My flesh is real food, my blood is real drink: he who eats my flesh and drinks my blood lives continually in me, and I in him. Now let's get hammered. Alleluia."
One of the most depressing revelations in the Brian Murphy case was the liver-ravaging amounts of alcohol consumed by almost all the teenage participants, and the sheer scale of casual violence which resulted. There were three simultaneous fights outside Anabel's that night, and investigating gardaí had difficulty disentangling them and their respective witnesses. In other words, this is standard fare, with death an actuarial certainty biding upon the unfortunate conjunction of boot and skull. Adolescence in Ireland has now been thoroughly alcoholised, so suppressing the natural inhibitions on the male urge for violence, and the appetites of both boys and girls for sex - and with entirely predictable results.
Brian's death is famous because of its particular circumstances. However, on the general principle that it would never have happened without alcohol, it's utterly indistinguishable from those many tragedies which unfailingly fill our weekend news bulletins - all those insane, three-in-the-morning kitchen-knife killings in working class housing estates after 12-hour drinking binges.
A & E in modern Irish hospitals no longer stands for Accident and Emergency but Alcohol and Evisceration.
How long before we have our first first holy communion stabbing? How long before drunken parents fall out over which girl is most prettily dressed, and enraged women grind their stilettos into the face of a rival mother, as their menfolk heroically kick her husband to death?
The way we're going, we surely don't have long to wait.