I say again: when Sage Meadows turned up.

Sage Meadows! Pretty as a picture in her immaculate, tastefully low-cut cream-coloured silk shirt (silver Celtic brooch pinned at the shoulder) and plain, but figure-hugging knee-length brown suede skirt. High-heeled open-toed cream sandals. Holding a tureen. Yes. A tureen. Of … well, soup I suppose.

Oh great. Great! The crowning glory! The cherry on the cake! Sage Meadows and a tureen! Exactly what this situation required!

Mrs Meadows appraised the hectic scene before her with one cool glance, tossed back her red mane (it didn’t move by so much as a centimetre), shimmied into the garden and approached a cameraman to politely enquire if Mr Huff was around at all. In the course of this transaction she managed to get somewhat tangled up in one of Sorcha’s many Orla-related ‘installations’. The Pavee Queen had tied lengths of string between several of the trees and one of the gutters and the children had strung them with tiny, coloured fabric swatches and little teddies and old, brightly painted wooden pegs and small bunches of wild flowers. It was very festive. There had been much dancing and singing and wailing and processing and chanting and praying, meanwhile. And the lighting of many candles. And daisy crowns strung and proudly worn – of course.

At one point, several rabbit skins had been produced and the children had been encouraged to draw (with black felt-tips) on the smooth white side, in tribute to Orla’s first, legendary vision of the Holy Virgin, during which she appeared holding a branch of Australian bloodwood in one hand and a sprig of Irish goat-willow in the other, wrapped up – head to toe – in a richly decorated possum-skin coat announcing: ‘My Son thirsts dreadfully for the souls of all the Aboriginal peoples, Orla. Please bring them to us, my dear child.’

On another occasion (as Sorcha never tired of telling), the Holy Virgin had appeared to Orla while in Sorcha’s presence, and – under close questioning from the sceptical Pavee – had told Orla to tell her, in her own gypsy tongue: Dhaylon bin bonar, nill stedi nolsk dha tera (this was an old Romany proverb which roughly translates as ‘God is good, but don’t stand too near the fire’).

Sorcha had promptly burst into tears. What Orla didn’t know was that as a small child Sorcha (who was always precocious) had once been entertaining the family as they sat around the campfire by reciting a prayer she’d learned during confirmation class (‘Hail Holy Queen, Mother of Mercy …’) when a spark had suddenly set her long densely layered (and chiefly nylon) skirts and petticoats aflame. She’d gone up ‘like a firecracker’ and the fire – which instantly consumed her – had only finally been quenched by her father hurling her to the ground and rolling her around, violently, in the dirt. Her father’s hands and arms had been badly burned during this process, but Sorcha herself had remained miraculously untouched by the flames. ‘Even the hairs on my little legs,’ (as she never tired of telling) ‘was left perfectly unharmed …’ (Cue audible gasps from her awe-filled child audience who – I don’t doubt for a second – had heard the anecdote many hundreds of times before.)