LET'S face facts here. Faith Of Our Fathers has sold 120,000 copies. Can all those people who bought it be wrong?

Yes, according to cultural commentators who seem far more distressed by the success of this particular album than they are by the fact that a singing turkey also dominated the Irish charts over Christmas. Lord knows how they'll react, when they hear that hawkers will also be selling that old, soft cover, green Catechism "outside the Point during the forthcoming gigs, shouting "Who made the world?" and "Who is God?" Get the answers here, only a tenner a copy.

Of course I'm only joking. (They won't be.) Yet this notion surely would not surprise cynics who seem to think that nostalgia is the only reason the album has sold so well. Rubbish. Three years ago Irish singer songwriter Pierce Turner told this newspaper that whenever; he sings Faith Of Our Fathers, though some think he is mocking the hymn, he is, in truth," singing it "like it's one of my favourite songs" and acknowledging that "it and things like, Holy God are beautiful music". They are. As Turner noted at the time, such hymns also tap into the sense of spiritual, yearning that defines Irish music and art, in general.

Admittedly, to many people a melody such as We Stand For God probably now sounds like a kind of "Battle Hymn of the (Irish) Republic", a crass piece of propaganda which re routed, if not polluted, this sense of spiritual yearning. Likewise, revisionists listening to Hail Glorious St Patrick are bound to ask whether or not St Patrick actually was our "glorious" saviour or simply the original colonist for Rome. If, of course, this original "Paddy" existed at all.

But then Faith Of Our Fathers obviously connects with its audience in a space where such questions can be suspended for an hour or so.

Ireland is currently travelling through a time of spiritual crisis. The success of this album is, the clearest indicator of that crisis, maybe even a communal cry from the heart of people who ache to return to a period of moral certainties which now is gone.

Frank Patterson is involved for a number of reasons: he finds the melodies of the hymns exciting and inspirational; he knew them by heart from childhood days engaged in attending missions and processions with his parents, and he inevitably found in his rediscovery of them a tangible connection with his social and familial upbringing, links long since resigned to memory. Malaysian born Regina Nathan also grew up with the hymns through regular, choir work, having been raised in Dublin and taught by the Mercy sisters in Ballymahon, Co Longford. For her, a similar thread of recognition for the project was immediately established.

Frank Patterson remembers 80,000 people singing Faith Of Our Fathers itself at an All Ireland final, so it wouldn't be too unrealistic to imagine a comparable bout of communal devotional singing at the Point next Friday and Saturday. At the end of both evenings, one can virtually guarantee ne'er a dry eye in the house.