The book was published in 1969. It was acclaimed for breaking free of saccharine depictions of the Irish priest, that ‘soggarth aroon’ beloved of nineteenth-century novelists and twentieth-century Hollywood movies. Its central character is sardonic, even to the point of being caustic, about those trendy clerics of the 1960s who call for a revival of rural Ireland. In his world (just before the changes unleashed by the Second Vatican Council) the mass is still said in Latin, a language whose aphorisms are often quoted with urbane approval by Tom Conroy. His Catholicism is as much rule-bound as it is visionary. For example, he suffers from ‘scruples’ not just about wet dreams, but about being late with his daily reading of the Holy Office.

His initial vocation seems to have been dutiful rather than Damascene. He simply took the place of his brother who had suddenly abandoned the seminary, as if he were a volunteer soldier substituting for one who had deserted an army. Never sure as to exactly why he joined, he lives an inner life too deep ever to risk vulgar self-definition. He is the sort of man who would have understood the Ulster poet John Hewitt’s answer to the question ‘What is the religion of all sensible men?’ – ‘They are far too sensible to define it’.

Father Conroy outrages colleagues who realize that he has not troubled to compose a last will and testament, as if such things were a matter of the sordid letter rather than the inner spirit. Yet his negligence also bespeaks the crisis of a rural Ireland with little sense of its own future. More than once in the narrative, as his powers wane, he finds himself expected to deliver a homily for which he has not prepared, as if in his ideal church, the altar would take strong precedence over the pulpit. He is shrewd enough to intuit that the moral and religious impulses are very different things and may even destroy one another in the end. Hence his indifference to his curate’s social programmes and to his uncle’s partisan campaigns, for as a man of God he must seek the spiritual, rather than political, kingdom.

The disinclination to write a will suggests an inner suspicion that the Catholic Church will not be central to shaping the Irish future. Ten years after The Hungry Grass was published, Pope John Paul II visited Ireland, the first pontiff ever to do so. On the surface, that visit seemed an example of the Church Triumphant, with more than a million people attending each mass he celebrated; but deeper down, his coming registered an immense crisis. Ever since 1967 there had been a sharp decline in vocations to the priesthood, and the official teaching on contraception was widely disregarded. An urbanizing laity was more likely to practice à la carte Catholicism, or none at all.