In Ireland we live in a 30-year time warp. What for most of the rest of the world was “the Sixties” did not arrive for us until the 1990s. Indeed, the start of our Age of Aquarius can be dated to that week in the spring of 1992 when the story broke in the Irish media that a prominent and popular churchman, Bishop Eamonn Casey, had carried on a long affair with an Irish-American woman, and that he had a 17-year-old son by her. It was the first of a series of religio-sexual scandals; suddenly it was apparent that the old description of Ireland as a “priest-ridden country” was no metaphor at all.

Freed from the Church’s centuries-long stranglehold, we did what all free men like best to do: we started making money and spending it. The 1990s were our coming-of-age party.

Right through the Sixties, Ireland was a dour place. Pubs were shut on St Patrick’s Day. The only place where a drink could be had on our national holiday was at the annual dog show at the Royal Dublin Society; it was surely the best-attended dog show in the world. The St Patrick’s Day parade was a glum straggle down O’Connell Street of a few floats featuring pre-Riverdance girleens doing stony-faced jigs, a couple of gun carriages, and the odd American high-school brass band, led by baton twirlers whose skimpy skirts provided men with the day’s sole flash of excitement.

All that was a far cry from the California of sex, drugs and rock’n’roll, or the Paris of les evènements. It was in Paris that Peter Lennon, a young expatriate Irish journalist, was working in the 1960s as a stringer for The Guardian. When the newspaper sent him to cover the Dublin Theatre Festival in 1966 he looked at his native land with a Frenchified gaze, and was appalled by what he saw. He stayed on, and wrote a series of Guardian articles that caused a sensation in Ireland — to criticise the country is one thing, but to criticise it in an English newspaper is tantamount to treason. Then he hit on the idea of showing up his homeland in celluloid: “I got the idea of making a film in which Ireland would condemn itself out of its own mouth.” He persuaded the nouvelle vague cinematographer Raoul Coutard to come to Ireland with him.

The result of this collaboration was Rocky Road to Dublin, a gritty, none-too-subtle exposé of a confessional state held fast in the grip of a smugly ignorant, overweening clergy and a political establishment cowering in fear of what used to be called “a belt of the crozier” — a public rebuke from a bishop — which could blight a career. Understandably, when Lennon tried to show the film in Ireland he came up against the glass wall of Irish self-censorship. Lennon appeared on the influential Late, Late Show, where it was charged, falsely, that the film had been made with communist finance. Journalists, with honourable exceptions, joined in the rout.

In his film, Lennon was merciless in exposing the hypocrisy, self-delusion and plain ignorance in which Ireland seemed content to wallow. On screen, cherubic schoolboys declare their belief that because of Adam’s sin “their intellect was darkened, their will weakened and their passions inclined to evil”. An oily executive of the Gaelic Athletic Association explains how members caught playing “foreign” games such as rugby or soccer will be banned from playing GAA sports for six months. A university professor deplores pop music and lewd dancing. And the priests, of course, are everywhere.

For those of us in Ireland who lived through the 1960s, Rocky Road to Dublin is utterly, heartbreakingly, horribly compelling. It richly deserved the success that it had abroad. In 1968 it was the final film to be shown in the International Critics’ Week at Cannes, before the festival was shut down at the behest of Godard and Truffaut, who were supporting the rioting students in Paris. Lennon claims that the film was “adopted” by the student revolutionaries and shown “around the Sorbonne faculties”, to be followed by heated discussion of “the film's main theme: ‘What do you do with your revolution once you’ve got it?’ ” The revolution in this case was the 1916 Rising and the War of Independence that followed it. Ireland, of course, is still wrestling with that question.

At the time when Lennon was making his film one of the most powerful figures in Ireland was the Archbishop of Dublin, John Charles McQuaid. He had read and deplored Lennon’s Guardian articles, but acceeded to his request that he might follow and film a priest going about his work. The priest was the egregious Michael Cleary, one of the first of the “swinging priests” who were intended to make the the Church seem appealing to the youth of the day.

Cleary is shown singing a song in a women’s hospital ward, clicking his fingers and swaying his hips; engaging a trio of gravediggers in a grotesque chat; and delivering to camera a statement of his mission, which is to encourage the faithful with a bit of a song and a joke. It was not until long afterwards that it was revealed that Father Cleary, like Bishop Casey, had been conducting a long-standing affair, and that he too had a child. A rocky road, indeed.

John Banville’s novel The Sea has been nominated for the Man Booker Prize

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