Have you noticed how Sunday has changed, almost beyond recognition ? There was a time when it began with multitudes attending church services, then perhaps a sporting occasion, usually a GAA match, in the afternoon; and the pubs would do some business in the evening. But above all, it was a quiet day, with commerce and farming suspended, except for essential tasks. Its hallmarks were a communal respect for the Sabbath and a relaxed pace.
It is so different now. The numbers attending church services have declined dramatically, there is traffic congestion in cities and towns, as shops, some of them the major supermarket outlets, remain open. The occasional episcopal warning about Sunday trading, a feature of Irish life in the 1970s and 1980s, is to be heard no more.
"Servile work"
The generations which passed through our schools up to the 1960s were warned by the penny Cathecism about "unnecessary servile work" on the Sabbath. It was a different Ireland, where the power of the Catholic Church held sway, and where the "unnecessary" or "servile" of the modern Sabbath was beyond comprehension.
Catholic Church services and ceremonies took precedence. A GAA match, for instance, might be put back an hour or two if it clashed with the annual Corpus Christi procession, which brought towns and villages to a standstill. Such processions represented Catholic Ireland in all its triumph, with the clergy, Catholic lay groups the locals marching to the sound of traditional prayers and hymns. A man of my acquaintance, who grew to adulthood in the 1950s, is astonished by the transformation of Sunday. He thinks Sundays up to about the mid-1980s were more leisurely, but says that perception could, in part, be due to nostalgia. What he and his generation all agree is that, for those decades, Michael O'Hehir was the unmistakeable voice of Sunday afternoon. First via radio, and then through the new medium of television, O Hehir's dramatic voice captured the excitement of the great GAA games.
On beaches, in sun-drenched summer Sunday afternoons, the family wireless, portable, or car radio, brought O'Hehir's commentaries to those unable to attend the games. More than a broadcaster, he was a national institution, equalled perhaps only by Gay Byrne, who came to prominence in the television age. The Catholic Church's ban on Saturday-night dancing meant that Sunday night was an occasion for a visit to the local (alcohol-free) ballroom of romance in the showband era. A waltz with your partner, followed by a lemonade, constituted a rave in those days. Bingo and the occasional variety show were the entertainment of an older generation in some of the towns and cities.
The pastoral calm of those rural Sundays is vividly captured in John Betjeman's poem, Sunday in Ireland. Some of it reads:
Bells are booming down the bohreens,
White the mist along the grass,
Now the Julias, Maeves and Maureens
Move between the fields to Mass.
Twisted trees of small green apple
Guard the decent white-washed chapel,
Gilded gates and doorways grained,
Pointed windows richly stained
With many-coloured Munich glass.
See the black-shawled congregrations On the broidered vestment gaze,
Murmur past the painted stations
As Thy Sacred Heart displays
Lush Kildare of scented meadows,
Roscommon, thin in ash-tree shadows,
And Westmeath the lake-reflected,
Spreading Leix the hill-protected,
Kneeling all in silver haze.
Uncrowded pubs
Tom Corkery, in his splendid book Tom Corkery's Dublin, evokes the easy-going way of life in the capital in those far-off Sundays. "So we sat and drank inexpensive pints in affable, uncrowded pubs, where the barman had ample time to discuss the match of the weekend, the pint came slowly from the cellar, and the boss was nearly always good for a loan. We had darts, and rings, and question-time contests, and weighty discussions on the state of the nation. "And if any prophet had entered one of our Nirvanas to tell us that most of us would live to see the day when a pound note could not purchase two pints of stout and a barman would not have time to discuss the horses, the dogs or the football with his customers, we would have had him committed as a lunatic, if not indeed prosecuted as a disturber of the peace."
Those leisurely Sundays are gone for ever. You might, if your were lucky, have owned a bicycle then. If you did, it might have been stolen, but certainly not clamped.