From Italy, where I live, I had come to Dublin to visit a friend and found the key under the doormat. To get up to date, I watched the RTE news and read some newspapers that were lying around. There was an interesting interview with Bono by a well-known Dublin journalist.
He was talking to Bono about the new album, a recent chat with President Clinton, Bono's Jubilee 2000 campaign to get World Bank debts to poor countries written off. I read the journalist's comment: "In an age when organised religion is almost a taboo and talk about spirituality is shunned as sex once was among respectable people, Bono's campaigns for the have-nots are regarded with suspicion."
I stopped attending when I got as far as "respectable people". On the television, I had just seen Buddhist women chanting prayers for the dead after an air disaster in Taiwan. An Irishwoman who had survived described her escape as "by the grace of God". When a man was sentenced in a Dublin court to life imprisonment for murdering a prostitute, members of the girl's family shouted: "There's a God, there's a God!"
Agitated by the crass ignorance of what I had just read, I took out a pen, and at the start of the astounding sentence stroked out "In an age when". Instead, on the margin, I wrote "In the cocoon of Dublin 4, Ireland". Dublin 4 was a rough-and-ready way of describing the smug, snobbish bank of preachers and pub-talkers in Dublin and its hinterland who believe the world is as they are.
For heaven's sake, I thought, in La Stampa, the Turin newspaper I buy, I had recently seen a whole page devoted to an essay on the Psalms by Bono! It was to be the preface to the new Italian edition of the Psalms.
That very day, the Feast of All Saints, in La Stampa I read an editorial regretting that spiritualist practices were in part replacing the Italian custom of visiting family members' graves on All Souls' Day. La Stampa, let me clarify, is in its ideological tendency what Italians call laicist, meaning non-religious or secularist.
That same morning it was a major drama for me to get to the airport because All Saints' is a public holiday in Italy and public transport was reduced.
In the Europe I had arrived from, that sentence by the Dublin journalist could simply not be written; neither in La Stampa, nor in Der Spiegel nor in Le Monde - no more than it could be written in the New York Times. It would come across as too absurdly naive.
That it could be written in a Dublin newspaper without causing an outburst of national laughter indicated two things: the self-delusion of the "ban God" brigade in the Dublin media and of their gullible followers, and Provincial Exaggeration rearing its sad head again in Ireland.
It is possible for a class of Irish people, if they want it badly, to delude themselves that "organised religion is almost a taboo" and that "talk about spirituality is shunned by respectable people".
They can close their eyes and ears to the contrary evidence that is all around them and being transmitted to them from elsewhere. They can also, insofar as lies within their power, actively prevent contrary evidence reaching themselves or the Irish public.
The local "public service" television station lies within their power. When tens of thousands of Irish people gather in Knock to honour the Blessed Virgin, they can see to it that the RTE schedule is crammed with British soaps.
Or in this Jubilee year, when many spectacular and beautiful religious celebrations are taking place in Rome - as recently, the gathering of two million young Catholics for the Youth Jubilee - they can limit Irish coverage to an occasional live transmission at 7 a.m. or 8 a.m on a Sunday.
They can ban the weekly Irish Catholic from advertising on radio and refuse a licence for a Christian radio station (making Ireland the only country in the Western world without such a station).
By taking such measures our "ban God" brigade have managed to restrict the visibility of religion and spirituality and thus assisted their self-delusion that they don't exist.
Why the frenzied efforts? Because word has reached them that in some imagined metropolis that rules the age, God and spirituality are out of fashion. And they are the kind of people - provincial, deeply colonised - whose sense of self-worth depends on being in tune with the metropolis, and on working hard to be so.
Sadly, such Provincial Exaggeration is a national characteristic. Back when the mini-skirt appeared and many women in Paris were rejecting it because it didn't suit them or was inelegant, you could drive through Mayo, as I did, and find every female wearing it.
And so on.
A cocoon of imposed make-believe is stifling. I was glad, a week after I arrived, to return to a continent where most people are irreligious, organised religion is not taboo, and respectable people talk freely about spirituality. I like fresh air.