THE liberalisation of Ireland really began 50 years ago, with the launch of Vatican II, when Pope John XXIII opened the Vatican Council whose purpose was to renew the Catholic Church, and indeed, modernise it.
The trendy word was 'aggiornamento' -- bringing things up to date -- and it was, believe it or not, widely used in the inns and taverns of Ireland wherever lively conversationalists gathered.
Almost overnight, it seemed, the tone of Catholic values softened, just as, almost overnight, nuns threw off their wimples and their 17th Century habits to wear more simplified, modernised garb.
A few costume romantics might have regretted the loss of those beautiful butterfly bonnets of the St Vincent de Paul (so clearly identified in the paintings of Muriel Brandt, showing nuns ministering to the 1916 wounded in the streets of Dublin), but the religious sisters themselves, in every order, hated the starchy materials which rubbed roughly against skin.
In the devotional magazines, themes changed from prohibition -- the list of 'thou shalt nots' -- to more positive issues on social justice.
The care of the old, the cruelty of apartheid in South Africa and of race segregation in the United States were now more underlined as being against the spirit of Christ than the injunction to leave off meat on Fridays.
Discrimination against 'travelling people', said several Irish bishops, such as Dr Peter Birch at Ossory, was a greater sin than 'impure thoughts', which had formerly been an occasion of much reproving.
Bishop Lucey of Cork, who was given to banning dance-halls in Lent, pointed out that if Communism was odious, Communists were only people like ourselves.
Women were no longer required to cover their heads in church, and scarves and hats disappeared, again, almost overnight, at least in Dublin, and what was gained in heady freedom was, perhaps, lost in millinery elegance.
The Council, attended by 2,000 bishops from all over the world, was devised to serve Catholics, but its impact on ecumenical relations was seismic.
No longer was Martin Luther to be denounced as an apostate: now, in the new ecumenical era, he was to be respected as a thoughtful historical figure who was, perhaps, only trying a bit of 'aggiornamento' in the 16th Century.
In the religious magazines, Luther's continued devotion to the Virgin Mary - notwithstanding the break with Rome - was underlined.
Protestants in Ireland were henceforth to be embraced as 'our separated brethren': and there was to be a reconciliation with the Jewish people, with the Catholic press running splash headlines such as 'No Christian Can Be Anti-Semitic'.
Ecumenism was not only advocated: it became virtually a fashion accessory. Previously, those of other faiths had been referred to as 'non-Catholics', but this was now ruled out as unkind and narrow: these were people of other faiths, and they were our brothers and sisters.
'Mixed' marriages were henceforth to be called 'inter-faith' marriages. (Atheists, at this point, didn't come into the picture.)
But Irish Catholics could henceforth attend Protestant services, and John Horgan, who was a reporter at the Council, wrote that the main anxiety, in the West of Ireland, was that 'there mightn't be enough Protestants to go around'.
This was not a problem in Sandymount, Dublin 4, where I grew up, where Catholics and Protestants had always been on good terms, although Protestants themselves were as keen on respecting 'separate spheres' in education, sport (Protestants didn't play games on Sundays), dancing (strict Presbyterians didn't dance) and, sometimes, job situations (The Irish Times ran 'Protestants only' job adverts right into the middle 1960s).
But as Professor Horgan pointed out, the rush of 'ecumenism' unleashed a very natural urge in Irish people, all over the country, to be genuinely neighbourly towards 'separated brethren'. The ordinance that Catholics didn't attend Protestant (or Jewish) funerals had really gone against the grain of Irish traditions of warmth towards friends and neighbours.
It was pitiful that when the first President of Ireland -- and founder of the Gaelic League -- Dr Douglas Hyde, died in 1949 -- Irish Catholics lined the streets outside the Pepper Canister Church in Dublin to pay their respects, but did not venture inside.
The ecumenical spirit even reached Belfast: when John XXIII died in 1963, Belfast City Hall flew the flag at half-mast in mourning -- regarded as a mighty change from the traditional Orange sentiments of what they'd like to do to the Pope.
There were, of course, great liturgical changes within the Catholic Church, with the Mass switching from Latin to the vernacular, and the priest facing the people. Some of these were bewildering to older people (and to people who like rite and ritual, or those who argued that Latin was universalist).
The church inherited by Pope Benedict is now a completely different organisation. Yet the social changes which were triggered were just as enormous, and marked the beginning of modern times in this country.
Of course, there were other momentous events occurring in 1962: the Cuban Missile Crisis, the first James Bond movie, the Beatles' 'Love Me Do', and the ever-widening availability of the contraceptive Pill which fed into modernisation.
Vatican II was, in that sense, part of the spirit of its age -- aggiornamento, indeed.