IT was not for the first time that the country's most powerful churchman suggested that religious affairs correspondents were disgraceful secularists wilfully undermining the simple faith of the nation's loyal ecclesiastical majority.
But it was to be the last time that the late Cardinal Cahal Daly spun an untruthful spiritual line which he first tried on me in 1972 when he was a bishop in Longford.
Unreconstructed in his Maynooth mind-set to the end, 'Daly hoisted his 'Last Hurrah' just as 1999 ticked towards the dawn of the third millennium.
Accusing the media of wrongly sounding the death knell of the Catholic Church in Ireland, he cited large attendances at Christmas ceremonies that twilight year as harbingers of green shoots for a renewed church.
His flashing bushy eyes brizzled with nostalgia for the crowded churches of the 1950s recorded so graphically by the awestruck German writer, Heinrich Boll, in his classic 'Irish Diary'.
Some 12 years on, it is tempting to deride Daly's delusion that the Irish church was on a revivalist threshold.
We enjoy today the benefit of hindsight from the subsequent paper mountains compiled by the Ferns inquiry 2004, Dublin 2009, and Cloyne 2011, not forgetting the 2009 Ryan report into religious-run reformatories for children.
These state inquiries were to find that clerics such as Cardinals Daly and Desmond Connell of Dublin put the protection of the church's prestige above the wellbeing of children.
In the latter half of that watershed decade of the 1990s a torrent of horrendous revelations showed that these abuses were an integral part of the Catholic Church of the day.
With memory a fickle instrument for recalling chronology, the educational value of the 'Rolling Back the Years' series is to recall with precision the timetable of the Irish church from the contemporary cutting-edge work of Irish Independent journalists, trusting the veracity of then unnamed victims, while church authorities sought to use the anonymity of the courts to defend privileged errant clerics.
Ten nightamre moments signalled the downward spiral of the church in the 1990s.
In May 1992, the Irish public was given Dallas-style access to the bishop's bedroom to witness the intimacies of the purple cassock, the femme fatale and clandestine money payments to rear and educate a love-child sprung from the "magical" 18 months' love affair of Eamon Casey with Annie Murphy.
Attacks in January 1994 by broadcaster Gay Byrne on reports that the recently deceased Fr Michael Cleary had fathered a son with his housekeeper Phyllis Hamilton backfired.
Byrne's remarks gave the story national momentum.
To the dismay of episcopal palaces and parish houses throughout the land, the Cleary affair leapt on to the front pages and the mother and son went into hiding.
Just when the public was beginning to get over the shock of the kindergarten frolics of Bishop Eamonn with Annie and Father Michael with Phyllis, it had to grapple with the more heinous abuses perpetrated by a number of priests and brothers on children; most notably the late Father Brendan Smyth, the cover-up of whose case contributed to the fall of the Irish government led by Taoiseach Albert Reynolds in late 1994.
While 1995 saw the bicentenary of the founding of St Patrick's College Maynooth as the national seminary for training celibate priests, the constitutional ban on divorce which Eamon de Valera and Archbishop John Charles McQuaid co-scripted in 1937 was removed in a referendum by the narrowest of margins.
In 1996, the country was confronted with a larger-than-life version of Graham Greene's 'whiskey priest' when Bishop Brendan Comiskey returned to Wexford as "the wounded healer" after receiving treatment for alcoholism in a US clinic.
Having called for a debate on obligatory priestly celibacy, Comiskey cut a figure between a latter day St Augustine and Martin Luther.
Within the premier diocese of Dublin, prominent court cases involved notorious clerics such as Ivan Payne and Paul Magennis, as victims like Andrew Madden became courageous household names.
The decline of religion was marked by vocations to the priesthood and the religious life absolutely plummeting, in a steady erosion in Mass attendance.
Clonliffe College did not recruit even one student in October 1998.
Three powerful television documentaries, 'Dear Daughter', 'Sex in a Cold Climate' and 'States of Fear' highlighted allegations of widespread sexual and physical abuse in reform schools such as Artane and Goldenbridge.
In the storm of public outrage which followed, Taoiseach Bertie Ahern apologised to victims on behalf of the nation and, in 1999, the terms of a Commission on Childhood Abuse were announced by Education Minister Micheal Martin.
The guillotine was about to fall on the secretive Church of Archbishop McQuaid and Cardinal Daly.
* John Cooney, Irish Independent Religion Correspondent, is the biographer of 'John Charles McQuaid, Ruler of Catholic Ireland' (O'Brien Press, 1999)
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