I had a good friend at secondary school who was an academic high-flyer. Brilliant at maths, English, Latin, physics, chemistry... the lot. I was useless at most of them.
And what was really galling was that not only was he also a brilliant footballer, he was a genuinely nice fella. What was there not to love?
I lost touch with him as he went on to university, before travelling the world as an engineering consultant.
And it was clear he had made a few bob when I met him again, judging by the car he was driving and the clothes he was wearing. By way of contrast, journalism doesn’t pay that well.
I had bumped into him by sheer chance on the Main Street in Letterkenny on a wet Saturday morning and nothing would do him but that we’d go for a cup of coffee and catch up with each other’s lives.
And very enjoyable it was too. He always had a lively mind.
During the course of our banter, he said he had one big question for me, one question that he asked everyone from our era: “What one thing do you think represents the biggest change in our lives since our days at secondary school?”
I went for the obvious: internet, digital cameras, Ryanair flights… and whatever you are having yourself.
“Nope,” he replied. “Naked Attraction.”
“What?” I said, spluttering and spitting out the mouthful of coffee I had just drunk. “That TV show? Are you serious?”
He was, he said, deadly serious.
We had grown up, he pointed out, in an Ireland where sins of the flesh were the ones that dominated in the Church, in the bars and in the home. God help anyone who strayed outside the corral that enclosed our moral lives.
And he had a role cast of facts to support his assertion, things I had totally forgotten.
He pointed out that The Spike, a gritty drama set in inner city Dublin, was immediately dropped after a nude model flashed on screen for all of about two seconds in a scene set in an art class.
What made it even more dramatic for the headline writers of that time was that a furious JB Murray, head of the League of Decency in Ireland, was so enraged he suffered a massive heart attack while on the phone to a national newspaper to complain.
Gay Byrne had caused outrage just a few years earlier when a furore erupted after a minor segment on The Late Late Show when he played a quiz with the audience to see how well couples knew each other.
During the course of the game, Gaybo asked one of the contestants the colour of his wife’s nightie on their honeymoon night. That seemingly innocuous question rocked the country.
All hell broke loose as the show was condemned as “immoral” and the Bishop of Galway described Byrne as a purveyor of “filth”.
In what became known as ‘the Bishop and the Nightie’ controversy, the main source of outrage was that the contestant had replied he didn’t know the colour of his wife’s nightie as it was transparent.
And then the wife joined in to jokingly say she wasn’t sure she was wearing a nightie at all.
That was it. The mother-lode of scandal.
The audience laughed uproariously, but the Catholic Church hierarchy was not amused at all. As someone was later to censoriously remark: “There was no sex in Ireland before The Late Late Show.”
Imagine, my friend asked, given this background, the reaction of those powerful elements of Irish society back then if Naked Attraction with its full frontal nudity had been beamed into Irish homes?
I have remembered that conversation particularly well. I originally dismissed it as just a bit of banter, that my friend was throwing it out there as talking point, a bit of craic. But the more I thought about it, the more I realised he had pretty much nailed it.
The difference in attitudes between then and now is, clearly, 180 degrees.
My eldest son went to university in London and he observed one day that the behaviours and attitudes of young people in Ireland these days were pretty much the same as those in England.
Regular church attendance has gone. Sex before marriage is not even mentioned as a moral issue any more. The days of being outraged by cleavage, tattoos etc are passe. The old Catholic ethos is no more.
What we should never forget, to get back to my main theme, were the real-life consequences for many people from that era who broke the rules.
One episode I recall was a young girl having a big conversation with one of my sisters about her upcoming marriage. I was surprised to hear that a couple of days after the wedding, she and her new husband were heading to Australia. In my innocence I thought it was just an economic decision.
It was only years later I copped on that the hasty exit was because she was pregnant, and being from a good Catholic family she was emigrating rather than bringing disgrace on her family’s ‘good name’.
And if you are a regular viewer of programmes like Long Lost Families or DNA Stories you’ll find a hell of a lot of the children given up for adoption came from Irish parentage.
That was for many the outworking of the moral rigidity of that time.
I suppose at this stage I should put on the record that I am no moral theologian, and have no qualifications in philosophy, but I am still far from convinced that, contrary to what some conservatives would have us believe, ours were the good old days.
Sure, people went to Mass and dressed modestly and all that, but there was a lot of hypocrisy, even downright cruelty.
In Irish society back then, as a well-known cleric said to me in personal conversation more than once, it was more acceptable for a son to shoot someone than a daughter to get pregnant before marriage.
If anyone thinks that’s a wildly inaccurate or over the top observation, believe me it isn’t.