MY MOTHER told me a startling story the other day. She related it in the most casual manner. I pass it on for reasons that will become obvious further down this article.

When she was a child, she says, circa 1918, her mother fell ill and she was sent to stay for the duration with her granny in Belfast. At that time, Ireland was one big political entity under British rule.

Her granny was a Protestant. Her granny sent her to Sunday school where she read the Bible and sang 'The Old Rugged Cross'. That got her out of her granny's hair for the day, to take the most practical view of the matter, and it meant she was in good hands, by her - by all accounts very good-living - granny's lights.

It was openly done and nobody back in Derry, where my mother was being reared in the Catholic faith, made any fuss about it. After six weeks, she returned home.

Then Ireland was partitioned along sectarian lines and the cultural and political factors flowing from that came into play, one of them being religion as a handy makeshift badge of identity. My mother recalls people shifting from one part of town to another if they married a person of a different faith and families being rent asunder, their troubles fuelled by ranting, raving clerics promising damnation. Catholics, in particular, were forbidden what was precious to them - a wedding in their own Church.

By the time I reached a similar childhood age, circa 1952, myth, rumour and theological fact had been welded fiercely together into cautionary tales, the central thesis of which was that hell awaited those who strayed outside their particular religious turf. We were taught these things literally.

Excommunication, for instance, was the punishment that would befall those who went to places like Trinity College. Not that I had ever heard of Trinity College, but we were told not to go into Protestant churches. In the way of all ordinances forbidding children to do this, that or the other, my friend Renee and I snuck into the Church of Ireland cathedral in Derry.

MORTAL SIN

We have both lived to tell the tale and more - nowadays you're not considered to be any kind of a decent, God-fearing practising Catholic unless you've attended at least one ecumenical service a year in a Protestant church. The really bad old days of the government of the Republic standing on the pavement outside Dean Swift's cathedral while obsequies were conducted inside for deceased President Douglas Hyde, are well and truly gone.

I mention all this - and will spare you the gory details of children telling each other in the school playground such facts of life as that when a surgeon had to choose between saving a mother and her unborn, the mother was selected for death so that another soul could be brought into being - because a momentous event is about to take place, or so they would have us believe.

The twenty-fifth anniversary of Humane Vitae is upon us, and the present Pope intends to mark the occasion by reiterating its hoary oul mens' tales - that the use of contraception is wrong, forbidden, a mortal sin, and a sure guarantee of hellfire and damnation.

I was twenty-four years of age when the original was published in 1968. I didn't even notice it. Presumably, the younger readers of Hot Press won't even notice the updated version either. The only reason I bother to bring it to your attention is that you should not be denied, on account of your youth, the opportunity to fall about laughing in these dreary days when there is so little else to smile about.

The longer you live, the funnier life can be. I wonder if older Protestants have such a good time? It would make you believe in the afterlife really. It would be lovely to think of my great-granny chuckling in her grave.