McGrath, I guess you would have to be catholic to think that the inclusion of a mass at a fleadh is somehow promoting the fleadh. But maybe I'm missing the point. IF you can turn it into any kind of sense, fine.

Like Ard Mhacha I am a member of a branch in Northern Ireland, and I've never once heard religion mentioned. Guest ND says "I understand the conflict in many Irish minds over this," but I suspect the conflict is less in Irish than in US minds.

What's your problem, McGrath, with what Ard Mhacha described as the norm in his branch? Why can't you be content for people to make their own arrangements for any worship they want to do - by all means making use of multi-denominational information such as that you found in the Clonmel programme? The fact that the info was there works against your own case, I would have thought. Why should CCE be endorsing any one religion over any others? Why fear losing that tiny bit of patronage?

ND questions why DT has only now raised the matter. He seems to have a sensible reason, but for my own part I would argue that attitudes to catholicism have changed dramatically in very recent years, not least in that famously Irish city, Boston. But so too in Dublin and Belfast. Presumably even popes will henceforth balk at calling St Peter's Chair "that sacred repository of all truth." Obviously the child-abuse and financial-abuse scandals have been a big factor but so too have been spectacularly ill-judged initiatives such as the 1998 beatification of Alojzije Stepinac (who farcically had to be deemed a martyr to get round the need for a miraculous intercession).

And incidentally I would not go along with Jewish, secular or any other organisations patronising any particular creeds. I would welcome a world in which people increasingly believe or don't believe not because of family ties or peer pressure but because they have made up their own minds. CCE in my view is behind the times in this respect as in many others - as witness Treoir, which resembles a throw-back to the 1950s!