To be fair, amongst poets and academics/scholars who were attracted to the Heavenly Banquet verses, O'Faolain has company. One of the pioneering Old-Irish philologists, who ought to have known better, was just as distracted as O'Faolain by the opening stanza about the ale-feast, distracted from the Christian virtues enumerated in the remaining stanzas. This scholar's name was Whitley Stokes, whose dates are 1830 - 1909. He did the verses, and indirectly St. Brigid, no favors at all, when he published an article about the manuscript source of the lyric. Stokes devoted pages and pages of his article to line-by-line translations of the Martyrology in the manuscript; but he would not so much as quote, let alone translate, the ale-feast poem. He dismisses the lyric, instead, with these remarks:

"This curious poem, in which God is regarded as a soma-quaffing Indra, is followed by a scribe's note stating that it was transcribed in Dublin on 1 August 1627, from an old vellum book belonging to Flann mag Craith."

So, to add insult to injury, Stokes compares this to the folklore of Hinduism.
Of interest in Stokes' report, is his witness to the scribe's comment in the manuscript. If The Heavenly Banquet was in a bound manuscript which was considered "old" in 1627, one may speculate how much longer the poem had been around. The manuscript described by Stokes is not in Ireland, by the way, but in Brussels, Belgium, and it supplies the only known copy of The Heavenly Banquet -- no other source is known.