DUBLIN

“THE IRISH CATHOLIC Church is a corpse waiting to be officially pronounced dead. The Protestant Church of Ireland is a fringe encounter group masquerading as a religion. The arrival of nearly a million protestants from Ulster in any United Ireland might just save Christianity on the island. Or not.”

Dr Enoch Socrates of the School of Hemlock in Dublin, was addressing a christian conference, held for the first time in secret, on the future of belief on what was once labelled the island of saints and scholars.

“Today, I see no saints, I see little scholarship worthy of the name,” he continued. “All I see is conformity to a new secular orthodoxy, founded in the usual self-righteousness of such creeds, just as willing to crush an individual who refuses to bend before it as any of its predecessors. And those who should speak out, do not. While those who do speak out are silenced, cancelled, worn down, broken by a new priesthood. We have been here before. Perhaps only Irish unity can now save us from ourselves. It would be a supreme irony if it were so.”