Read against this wider perspective, The Hungry Grass might be taken as an elegy for a doomed way of life and for a priesthood that did little or nothing to arrest its decline. As a young priest during the war of national liberation, Tom Conroy acquires a reputation for favouring socialism and is transferred by a nervous bishop to a poor, out-of-the-way parish. Even after this punishment, which he humbly accepts, Father Conroy continues to harbour sympathy for dissidents, silently endorsing the actions of a poor boy who stole the silver of another priest in order to give himself a start in life. He notes with dry asperity the emergence of a new kind of party hack in politics after independence: a coalition of large farmers, publicans and ward heelers sailing, like new recruits to a pirate ship, under a flag of convenient pietistic nationalism. Landless labourers, once welcomed without stint at the food table of families for whom they worked, are now made to eat at a separate bench, as members of a lower order, and the cost of that food is deducted from their wages. Father Conroy is not, in the end, a social radical, but all around him he notes the hidden injuries of snobbery and respectability destroying the new state.

The old Latin rituals persist and the priest says mass at an altar facing a crucifix, but already – before the shift in furniture ordained by the Vatican Council – Tom Conroy has a tendency to confront that final puzzle: his own congregation. Its members may take him for granted, as he may sometimes take them. ‘What do ye want a church at all for?’ is a question that may trouble him even as he puts it to his people. He is alert to the absurdities of a subsistence economy, which calls men in their forties and fifties ‘boys’ simply because they are still waiting to inherit their families’ land. He can mock the obsessive-compulsive religiosity of elderly men, while recognizing that many old men he encounters may be versions of himself as he prepares to die. His inadequate speeches are increasingly followed by a clued-in, turbo-charged alternative, tossed off with fluent insincerity by one of the men of the new order. In that ambiguous context there is a certain nobility to be found in his refusal to pontificate or to state what he doesn’t truly feel. This priest is too honest for self-assertion.