Today is Good Friday, probably the most important day in the Christian calendar. Some 1.4 billion Catholics will commemorate the crucifixion of Christ and await Easter Sunday with its promise of resurrection. Pope Leo will address the city of Rome and the world (urbi et orbi) from the balcony of St Peter’s Basilica. It is to be hoped he will continue his commendable record of condemnation of dangerous and unnecessary wars, and remind those of his flock inclined to support such endeavours that they do not reflect the Christian message.

Until 2018, pubs in Ireland were closed on Good Friday. When I moved to the north inner city of Dublin in 1977, I discovered that there was a whole culture of young people devoted to finding ways of drinking on Good Friday. Most of us had problems with the Catholic Church as a patriarchal, misogynist, homophobic organisation and felt no obligation to continue the Catholic observances with which we had grown up. So there were parties.

One I remember with great clarity was hosted by chums on Summer Street, between the North Circular Road and Mountjoy Square, around 1978. We were scoffing delicious food in their flat and blathering about left-wing politics and modern literature when we heard chanting from outside. We flocked to the front door, to find a small procession moving up the street, headed by a priest and a man carrying a very solid-looking cross, and intoning prayers. We stared at each other in mutual bemusement, us in our hippy clothes holding large glasses of wine, and the procession intent on spiritual matters. It remains, for me, an image of two very different Irelands.

I had become friendly with some members of the Communist Party of Ireland who hung out in my local on Gardiner St. It was revealed to me, amid attempts to persuade me that Stalin was a very good thing, that the Communist Party had the best shindig in town on Good Fridays. The following year I made my way to Essex Street to find a room laid out with fabulous food, cooked by a woman comrade with Michelin star potential, a secret weapon for the party. And vast amounts of drink.

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One of my chums specialised in a party version of Tom Paxton’s Talking Vietnam Potluck Blues, a riff about finding fantastic marijuana in guess where, which involved the line: “Great God almighty! Pastures of plenty!” This was the feeling that overcame us as we observed the excess of bounty on the communist tables of Essex Street.

The song that finished the evening was of course The Internationale – “Arise, ye starvelings, from your slumbers”. No starvelings left at that stage.

I loved the comrades, despite our ideological differences, and some of them are still my close friends, but the party, in every sense, was coming to an end, and the arrival of Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985 heralded an end to the old regime and an all-too-brief experiment in glasnost and perestroika before the little KGB man now in charge got his iron grip on a humiliated Russia.

Other Good Fridays were spent running a shebeen in a basement in Mountjoy Square, where we sold pints of draught Guinness for four times its usual price, having persuaded our local bar, Hill 16, to donate two kegs (88 pints per keg), and gave the proceeds to worthy organisations such as the Divorce Action Group and the local After Schools Project. Price of admission was £1, and for that you got a pint of stout, a slice of delicious pizza made by a talented cartoonist of our acquaintance, and the right to participate in a game of Don, working-class bridge.

A reason for the great success of these ventures was “the goo”. The goo is a longing for draught Guinness which overtakes the sufferer when they know they can’t get their hands on a pint. This was before widgets that made canned stout allegedly taste like the real thing, and further technological developments which made it taste more like the real thing. The only alternative to the real thing in those days was a bottle of stout, and while bottled stout had its connoisseurs, it was emphatically not the real thing. Our shebeen was a solution to the goo problem, and seriously over-subscribed by those who were afflicted.

[ ‘A blessing for the country’ how The Irish Times greeted the Good Friday drink law in 1927Opens in new window ]

So the goo contributed to left-wing causes in the inner city. And there were many. The north inner city had long been designated the most disadvantaged area in the country, with tragic levels of unemployment, bad housing and educational neglect. And into the middle of all of this, in the early 1980s, came heroin, which then became the big issue, threatening the lives of young people and pitting the community against the dealers selling death to their own people.

I was lucky to live in the area at a time when action on these matters was being taken by a cohort of extraordinary young people, including Tony Gregory, Fergus McCabe, Mick Rafferty, David Connolly, Tessie McMahon, Seanie Lambe, Theo Ryan and many others. Urban community development was being pioneered in the north inner city; in 1982, Gregory held the balance of power in the Dáil and was able to negotiate a deal to have housing, education, employment and other issues addressed with an injection of badly needed investment.

The houses survive to this day, and the jobs lasted for a good while. Many local projects were conceived and established at that time, ranging from job training to adventure sports to intensive youth projects to feminist organisations to arts ventures. It was a time of optimism and hope, when change seemed possible.

The big differences between then and now are lack of housing, and all-pervasive social media. In the ′80s, young people could rent places cheaply and aspire to buy at reasonable prices. The head space that creates is hard to imagine now. One of the reasons my generation was radical was that we weren’t constantly trying to find somewhere affordable to live, and we weren’t scrolling on machines packed with conspiracy theories, pornography and endless ads. We had time and space to think about our country, our localities and the international situation.

As you quaff a pint of draught stout in your local tonight, or whatever takes your fancy, think of a bunch of left-wing young people in the early ’80s having a lot of fun, and sympathise with our failure to change the world as much as we wanted to.

Catriona Crowe is an archivist and podcaster

© The Irish Times