I see that my old mucker Father Neil Horan is back in the news again.

Regular hotpress readers will recall that my esteemed journalistic colleague Liam Fay more or less discovered the good father as far back as the last century, and at the time we were all so taken with the cleric’s jolly plans to boogie into the Promised Land on the Day Of Judgement, that we plucked the ‘The Dancing Priest’, as we called him, from the massed ranks of the spiritually weird, and gave him pride of place on the cover of Liam’s digest of religious GUBU, Beyond Belief.
I say ‘spiritually weird’ in the full knowledge that this statement is, of course, entirely tautologous. Nevertheless, some of Fr Neil’s harshest critics seem to think that he’s a certified dingbat simply because he wants us all to know that the end of the world is nigh.

Imminent Apocalypse

But surely, in this respect, he’s merely following in a long and venerable line of mystics, prophets, seers, sages and former goalkeepers, all of whom, at one point or another, have predicted the imminent apocalypse, invariably based on a forensic examination of the smallest print in the Good Book itself. That they have all been proved wrong, so far, is neither here nor there: the point is that Neil Horan is hardly letting the side down in taking The Word at its word.
As he told Liam Fay: “It is safe to say that if Armageddon doesn’t happen very soon, if the Kingdom Of God doesn’t emerge within the next few years and if Christ doesn’t come within this generation, the Bible is a totally fallacious document, a fraud.”
There’s also the point that the many of those who are calling Neil Horan “a nutcase” would probably themselves dearly hold views which, objectively, can only be described as preposterous. Not the least of these is the routine belief in transubstantiation.
To the sensible person, this is merely a very desirable word in Scrabble, but to the devout it’s the established fact that they can wander into a near-by building any day of the week and partake of the actual body and blood of a man who travelled around in the middle east two thousand years ago. And these people call ‘The Dancing Priest’ a nutter?
All that said, the rockin’ cleric has, shall we say, complicated the case for his defence by combining direct action with Biblical prophesy in a rather controversial style. But even here, it’s not hard to pick holes in the arguments of his accusers. Take the Irish Times correspondent who, in an impassioned piece about the glory and tragedy of sport and all that shit, proclaimed that Horan’s interference in the Olympics marathon was “even more inexcusable” than his trespassing onto the Grand Prix track at Silverstone.
Hello? Earth calling sports hack? Are we really to take it that the stopping of a marathon runner in his tracks is a more disturbing event than a human being causing cars travelling at supersonic speeds to have to swerve around him?
Now I’m sure we all feel for the Brazilian who got taken out in the marathon but, let’s be frank, it was the capacity for carnage attendant upon Fr Horan’s performance at Silverstone that should have even his staunchest supporters accepting that The Dancing Priest’s retirement from public life ought to be rather more imminent than the apocalypse.
As for those headlines screaming that Neil Horan had “shamed” Ireland, I have two words – one of which is “off.” Sam Snort hails Fr Neil as a man of sincerity, who is not afraid to walk it – or even run it – like he talks it. However, I would now equally sincerely suggest that it’s time he hung up his dancing shoes and retired to the privacy of a quiet place and a life of letter-writing, contemplation, chewing his favourite fig-rolls and privately preparing for the arrival of the apocalypse, imminent or otherwise.
Either that or stick him in defence for Ireland’s World Cup qualifying campaign.