Reporter Michael Finlan was among the estimated 30,000 pilgrims who climbed Croagh Patrick on the last Sunday in July 1976. – JOE JOYCE
FOR THE newly-fledged pilgrim seeking to shrive his sins on the slopes of Croagh Patrick, it makes it easier to set out up the steep sugged path if he cannot see the mountain from below.
Yesterday the mountain was lost in the mist, not even the faintest outline of its cone-shaped mass discernible on the approach from Murrisk. A newcomer could not see the kind of ordeal that lay ahead and so could face up the mountain in good heart.
But the old ones who have been making the climb since childhood and who come back every year know well the severities and hardships of the ascent. The experience has been cut into their hearts and – those of them who make the climb barefooted – blistered onto the soles of their feet.
There were still many who climbed the precipitous path to the summit in their naked feet yesterday. Most of them were old women, some well into their seventies, serenely unmindful of the pain they were inflicting upon themselves, if indeed they felt it at all.
While, generally, the Reek climb is a spectacle of fervid faith that can unman the most hardened sceptic, there is still a mercenary and distasteful side to it.
In the canvas stalls at the base of the mountain, side-by-side with the rosary beads, blessed pictures and other religious objects, are the trashy plastic gew-gaws that seem to be the main industrial output of Hong Kong and which are hardly calculated to elevate one’s soul to higher places.
They were there again yesterday – the plastic gorillas and skeletons and toy whistles and bubble pipes and I think a good day’s work would be done if we could find a parish priest of the old school and set him loose with an ash plant among those peddlers.
On the way up, too, you run the gauntlet of a breed I call the religious spiv. These attempt to affix pictures of assorted saints to your lapel for which, yesterday at least, they were expecting as much as 50p.
In a new variation, two of them this year were trying to stick Tricolours on to people – enough to make you renounce your citizenship.
On the summit, onto which you crawl almost in extremis, with a furnace of thirst in your mouth, relief is to be found – but at a price. Yesterday they were selling bottles of orange and coke for 50p each. You could, of course, always settle for a plain glass of water – 30p, and it wasn’t even holy water.
As usual, there were some, perhaps the wise ones, who took the easy way up. This way, you approach the mountain from the southern side. It is much shorter and much less steep and brings you threequarters way up the mountain to the level from where you make the assault on the final hazardous stretch. Who knows, maybe this was the way St. Patrick, nobody’s fool, made the climb.
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