St Patrick's day

My desk was next to Martin Monaghan. He was ok, but he was a bit smelly. I couldn’t tell him that, I had to leave it to others, because I was an altar boy. Mrs Boyle, our teacher, had warned us beforehand that we were to be on our best behaviour because she was going to bring in someone very special to see us.

We already knew who it was because we could see him waiting outside the classroom door through the window and it wasn’t someone special, like Fu Man Chu, or even a policeman with an Alsatian dog, that could do tricks and not bite you, it was only Father McDonald. Father McDonald already knew me because I was an altar boy, so he knew that I was actually the best in the class. I liked him, but I’m not sure that my Da did. He called him 'the playboy' because he was so young and had curly black hair and all the mums liked him.

Father McDonald had a big smile for us. But we had a bigger smile because Mrs Boyle was leaving the classroom. We were lucky because sometimes we got Father Clarke who asked questions about the Catechism and you had to learn the answers. It wasn’t like SRA when you looked at the answers and wrote the letter in for the question, you actually had to learn them off by heart, like multiplication tables. So just as you need to learn 4 x 1 = 4, 4 x 2 = 8, 4 x 3 = 12, Father Clarke would ask you a question like why does God love you? And you better know that answer or he would be incandescent with rage. Mrs Boyle would need to stand behind him, sitting at her desk, watching us, to make sure we knew these answers. Da said Father Clarke was old school.

Father McDonald had a shamrock with him.

‘Boys and girls,’ he said ‘does anyone know what this is?’

It was a weed, but today it was a shamrock. Everybody had then in their jacket lapels or if they fell out, like mine, in their pocket, but I’d brought it out to put on my desk, like a bit of munched up grass.

I was almost out of my seat pushing my hand up in the air, so that he could see that I knew the answer better than anyone else.

‘Yes Mary?’ said Father McDonald.

It wasn’t fair he always seemed to pick the girls. But at least she had what looked like a shamrock plantation taped to her jacket lapel with yellow tape and she got the answer right. Noel Behan who also had his hand up would probably have said something stupid like it was a pencil sharpener.

Father McDonald was here to tell us about St. Patrick. And talk and talk and talk he did, but not in a bad way, in a way that you could look out of the window and watch what the jannie was doing in the playground and still listen. St. Patrick had killed a lot of Prodies, then he got bored with it and went back to being a priest. Then when it was nearly time for Father McDonald to leave he asked if anyone knew what a mortal sin was.

Well, a mortal sin was something like missing Sunday mass or killing someone. I wasn’t sure what was worse, so I didn’t stick my hand up. Nobody did.

‘A mortal sin,’ said Father McDonald, ‘is when there is a packet of six chocolate Penguin Biscuits, enough for each member of the family. And some boy, knowing full well that he has already had a chocolate Penguin Biscuit, takes another and another, knowing full well that his sisters have not had one. That is a sin even God himself can not forgive’.

I think Father McDonald winked at me. But priests don’t wink.