Midnight Mass
Who out there, of a certain age, can forget the ritual of Midnight Mass at Christmas in Cavan town? I mean proper Midnight Mass, at Midnight, and not the pale, wimpish thing that’s replaced it at ten o’clock.
The fact that it was at midnight was important; that way patrons of Cavan town’s pubs could get a real skinful AND attend to their religious duties. Consequently the town’s cathedral was bathed in odours of drink, augmented by the smell of urine, vomit and other aromas testifying that their producers had dropped the payload in their underpants. Some of these unsteady souls made it to seats where they lay down and went fast to sleep, their snores echoing through the basilica. Others loitered unsteadily around the entrances, occasionally collapsing into a heap beside the doors.
But this world was unknown to those at the top of the cathedral whose front rows were filled with the Golf club at Prayer along with their short-skirted, long-haired progeny who were home for the holidays from “college”. They all basked in the words of Bishop McKiernan’s hypocritical homily, which he habitually wheeled out every Christmas. Each time he nasally ennunciated another of his “do-as-I-Say, not-as-I-do” utterances Cavan Town’s insecure shitty establishment thanked God that nothing would change in their life-time and that their position at the top of the bean-heap was unassailable.
These people knew nothing of the drunken denizens of the nave or of the transept reserved informally for the Half Acre, yet it was not unknown for these sad benighted people to break through and make their presences felt. I remember one year when Frankie-goes-to-Hollywood finished up his spiel by delivering the usual verbal coup-de-grace. “I wantoo tekk this opporchunitay toowish you all a verray Happay Christ-mas”. A voice piped up from the back “What the fuck’s that goin’ to do for a United Ireland?”
