It is not my task to teach ‘religion,’ it is my task, as set down by the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment, to teach student about religion and religious views, and to also explore non-religious views.

Whatever the educationalists’ perception of the role of the Religious Education teacher, the reality in rural Ireland is that the there is still a persistence of the old beliefs among teenagers who have grown up in a social media generation.

There would be few who did not admit to at least some belief in the supernatural, but it is a supernatural that is far removed from anything taught in any church.

The most difficult task of all is to try to argue for Christian saints who have been stripped of the legendary powers they have accrued. Saint Patrick without snakes to banish, Saint Brigid without a cloak to cover the countryside, Saint Kevin without a blackbird, Saint Columba unable to rely upon the psychic powers of Saint Canice: reduced to the status of mortals, they do not capture the imagination.

Along with belief in Patrick standing on the hill of Tara, there is a random collection of superstitions, particularly a belief in fairies.

William Allingham’s Nineteenth Century poem was one that explained to me something of the fear that still exists in rural areas of ‘fairies’.

If children at primary schools in the past were taught poems telling them that there was a danger of being abducted for so long that they would die, is it any wonder that such ‘harmless’ rhymes combined with a realm of superstitions to create a fear of the fairies that can still appear in classroom conversations and that can still be seen in thorn trees left untouched in fields?

Here’s The Fairies

Up the airy mountain,
Down the rushy glen,
We daren’t go a-hunting
For fear of little men;
Wee folk, good folk,
Trooping all together;
Green jacket, red cap,
And a white owl’s feather!

Down along the rocky shore
Some make their home,
They live on crispy pancakes
Of yellow tide-foam;
Some in the reeds
Of the black mountain lake,
With frogs for their watch-dogs,
All night awake.

High on the hill-top
The old King sits;
He is now so old and gray
He’s nigh lost his wits.
With a bridge of white mist
Columbkill he crosses,
On his stately journeys
From Slieveleague to Rosses;
Or going up with music
On cold starry nights,
To sup with the Queen
Of the gay Northern Lights.

They stole little Bridget
For seven years long;
When she came down again
Her friends were all gone.
They took her lightly back,
Between the night and morrow,
They thought that she was fast asleep,
But she was dead with sorrow.
They have kept her ever since
Deep within the lake,
On a bed of flag-leaves,
Watching till she wake.

By the craggy hill-side,
Through the mosses bare,
They have planted thorn-trees
For pleasure here and there.
Is any man so daring
As dig them up in spite,
He shall find their sharpest thorns
In his bed at night.

Up the airy mountain,
Down the rushy glen,
We daren’t go a-hunting
For fear of little men;
Wee folk, good folk,
Trooping all together;
Green jacket, red cap,
And a white owl’s feather!

I often wondered why the church never said anything to counteract such stuff – but maybe the church, with its threats of limbo, purgatory and hell, was just as bad.