Father Brendan Hoban has recently retired - he’s 70; it was time. The Republic of Ireland is a country of ageing clerics - 70 is now the average age of its priests. With few young men to step into older men’s shoes, this papal visit comes at a time when almost every Irish diocese is facing a vocations “crisis”. Fr Hoban is a founding member of the Association of Catholic Priests. He stepped down as parish priest of Moygownagh, County Mayo, at the end of July, and his situation illustrates why so many parishes are struggling. "There's nobody to replace me," he laments. A parish council has taken over the day-to-day running of Moygownagh and a neighbouring priest is coming in to celebrate Mass and the sacraments. The picture was very different when, as a teenager, he entered Ireland’s national seminary - St Patrick's College, Maynooth, County Kildare - in 1966.

"There were 84 students in my class and about 50 of those were ordained," Fr Hoban recalls. "The class ahead of me had about 110.” Last year, six men enrolled at Maynooth seminary, the lowest in its 223-year history, according to the Irish Times. Founded in 1795 and designed to house 500 trainees, Maynooth was once the largest seminary in the world. It currently houses 35 seminarians - a handful of men preparing to cater for a country of more than 3.7 million Catholics. Maynooth used to be supported by a network of smaller diocesan seminaries across the Republic of Ireland, but they shut one by one. Northern Ireland’s only Catholic seminary - St Malachy's in Belfast - is to close later this year. "If you have no priest, then you have no Mass, and if you've no Mass, then you have no Church," Fr Hoban warns. The Church must embrace change to survive, he says. The priesthood should be opened to women and married Catholics, he argues, ending the centuries-old rule that only single, celibate men can be ordained.

In 1979, there were more than 6,200 priests throughout the island of Ireland. That figure has fallen to just over 3,900 but their age is the bigger problem. "I'm just over 70 and I'm still the average age of priests in Ireland, which is absolutely bizarre," says Fr Hoban. An increasing burden is falling on the shoulders of the country's elderly clerics. Several are working beyond the age of 70, and many retired clerics are regularly called upon to help out. Five years ago, Fr Hoban wrote a book on Ireland's "disappearing priests" which warned that the country was facing a "Eucharistic famine". Now, he says his predictions are “coming true”. He criticises the Irish Bishops' Conference for failing to take decisive action. "We need immediately to ordain married deacons," Fr Hoban says. "We need immediately to decouple celibacy from the priesthood; we need immediately to invite back priests who have left to get married." He argues there are enough men who gave up their vocation to start a family who could now "come back to tide us over the crisis”. Fr Hoban also believes that the ordination of women is almost inevitable and suggests such a move may be "only down the road". He has previously accused the institution of thinking it had a "God-given right to patronise, condescend, disrespect, ignore, and presume that women today will accept the excruciatingly embarrassing efforts we make, as a Church, to limit their role". The Association of Catholic Priests represents more than a quarter of all the priests in Ireland. This summer, it carried out a survey ahead of Pope Francis’s visit, asking almost 1,400 people what they wanted to say to the pontiff about the Church in Ireland. The ACP said the results revealed “huge support for a radical reform” of the priesthood, with the number one proposal being “an equal role for women in the Church”. The status of Catholic women is a "neuralgic issue" for the Church, says Fr Hoban.

If the Church doesn't sort that very soon, we're going to lose an awful lot of our people. We've lost their minds already, but we're going to lose their bodies in the Church, in a sense.

Ireland remains a “predominantly Catholic country”, according to the Irish Central Statistics Office (CSO), but the percentage of the population who identify as Catholic has fallen. A census carried out in 1981, just two years after the last papal visit, showed that Catholics made up 93% of the population.

By 2011, that figure had dropped to 84%. And the most recent census, in 2016, showed a further decline - to 78%. The CSO said the 2011-2016 drop was accompanied by a corresponding rise in the number with no religion, who now account for nearly 10% of the Irish population. Describing yourself as Catholic on a census form does not necessarily mean you actively practise your faith, but religious service attendance levels in Ireland are still relatively high, compared with other European countries. Of the 1,770 Irish Catholics who took part in the latest European Social Survey (ESS), 44% said they attended religious services at least once a week, second only to Poland.

Almost two-thirds (62%) of Irish Catholics said they attend services at least once a month. Just under a quarter (24%) of young Irish Catholics, aged between 16 and 29, claim to go to Mass every week, according to analysis of ESS data from 2014 and 2016. Only their peers in Poland and Portugal professed to be more devout. The Archbishop of Dublin, the Most Reverend Diarmuid Martin, has warned about the “growing alienation" of young people from the Church - acknowledging the crisis is larger than the lack of vocations. Fr Hoban says the Irish bishops have a moral responsibility to ensure there are enough priests to minister to future populations and to look after ageing clergy. After 45 years of ministry - does he ever regret his vocation and would he make the same decision now?

"I certainly would look at it differently," he says.