We had a papal stool that we kept for years

PILGRIMS, they walked for hours, all night if necessary, carrying fold-up stools, yellow papal flags and their picnics. It didn’t matter that they found themselves in a field among a crowd of one million or 250,000 – it was a private audience. Pope John Paul II arrived in Ireland, in September 1979,to a country where Sunday Mass was still woven into the fabric of the week. But the excitement generated by the papal visit went well beyond the Catholic faithful.

The Polish pope had brought an energy and, almost, glamour to the role – and he was coming to Ireland. The only comparison that anyone could draw – for older generations – was with the Eucharistic Congress in 1932, where almost a million attended a Mass in Phoenix Park. There had been nothing else like it.

Yes, there had been the visit by US President John F Kennedy, of Wexford roots, in 1963. It was magic, but on a different scale.

This was not going to be a quick touchdown. As details of the itinerary emerged, it became clear the Pope would criss-cross the country to meet people. Open-air events were arranged for Dublin’s Phoenix Park, Drogheda, Knock and racecourses in Galway and Limerick. Hence the rush on what became known as the ‘papal stool’.

In the late 1970s, Ireland was a decade into the ‘Troubles’ and enduring a level of murderous violence hard to imagine now.

The word was, indeed the plan was, that the Pope would cross the Border and visit Armagh, the ecclesiastical capital. But IRA atrocities a month earlier – the murders of Lord Mountbatten, a great-uncle of Prince Charles and three others in Sligo, as well as 18 British soldiers in Warrenpoint, Co Down, put paid to that. That put Drogheda on the map and the Northern Irish cars and buses drove south.

It was in Drogheda, on an elevated field overlooking the road north outside the town, that he made his impassioned plea to the men of violence: “On my knees I beg you to turn away from the path of violence and return to the ways of peace.” Many were of the view that in that moment the visit had peaked.

But as the tour headed west, it continued its triumphant path. Galway’s Ballybrit Racecourse was the setting for the youth Mass. The crowd was at high pitch having been warmed up by the Bishop of Galway Eamonn Casey and Fr Michael Cleary. Two charismatics figures then when no one knew about their secret lovers and their sons. The Pope’s opening line – “Young people of Ireland, I love you” – swelled his fan club.

Three days, and up to three million people turned out for their private audience. They waved their flags, ate their sandwiches, folded up their stools and went home happy. The papal stools lived on in households for years.