Last Saturday night 8,500 people gathered in Dublin’s 3Arena to hear an intellectual discussion. It was the biggest crowd anyone could recall for such an event in this country.

The 3Arena normally pulls that kind of audience only for a music act, but this time they were there to listen to a neuroscientist, a journalist and a clinical psychologist discuss morality, religion and the meaning of life, with a bit of politics thrown in.

The three were, respectively, Sam Harris, Douglas Murray and Jordan Peterson. Harris is one of the “new atheists”, an American version of Richard Dawkins. Murray is a critic of mass immigration and multiculturalism, and the author of The Strange Death of Europe. But the big draw at the top of the