Muireann O’Connell has shared her thoughts on the “bizarre tradition” of doing a first confession as a child.
The presenter spoke about the religious tradition on her podcast And Another Thing with Emma Doran where the two spoke about the Catholic church when they were growing up.
Looking back on her communion day, the Ireland AM host revealed that she always thought that the whole ceremony was a bit “weird”.
She said: “It’s weird because it’s a rite of passage for so many people, I shared this on Share Your Shame and there was a few people who made their communion in countries outside of Ireland. It just wasn’t a big deal, it was grand.
“Well here it’s a thing where Irish people lose their sh*** when people are like “that American Holiday”. We’re like “it’s ours”. Halloween and communions, whatever about confirmations because all the kids are cynical by the time you get to that.
“I always found it weird, I tried to get mam to get me a red dress. I thought it was weird the white dress.”
And she wasn’t the only one thinking this as Emma chimed in to say that her son Tommy wasn’t making his first communion along with the rest of the class.
She explained: “Ella is baptised but Joe and Tommy aren’t. Tommy is in communion year and he’s not making his communion… Tommy is the only one [in his class]… Everything they’re doing in the class is to do with the communion…
“When he finds out about the money I think that could be tricky, but he still has money from his birthday. The birthday parties they just give cash now. When Joe had his communion and there were a few of them not making it I thought great but by the time Tommy came around I thought there’d be more.”
Deeming the whole thing as a “bizarre tradition”, Muireann added that it was nothing more than “putting the fear of God into children to come up with sins.”
She said that most children, like herself, made up their sins as they “don’t know what a sin is”.
“I think I said I shouted at my mother, I never shouted at my mother. They make you lie. What you should be doing is “I’m lying to you right now about coming up with sins because you keep explaining to me what sins are but I’m seven. I’m good, I’m clean. Why are you trying to infect me?”,” she said.
Emma added: “I think what people forget is now when you do confessions it’s in the open, back then you would have been in the box. It was intense.”
