When Mgr Desmond Connell was named as the new Archbishop of Dublin in 1988, at the age of 62, he told a member of his family: “This is going to be a crucifixion for you and for me.”

The remark has several resonances. As spoken, however, it almost certainly said more about his ascetic spirituality than it reflected any prescience on his part about the storm that was about to break over the Irish Church and which, to use his own word, would in due course “devastate” his period in office.

He seemed an unsuitable choice to fill such an onerous role, in an archdiocese with 194 parishes and a population of more than a million. Nothing in his previous experience made much sense of it, except, perhaps, his closeness to his immediate predecessor-but-one as archbishop, Dermot Ryan, and the expectation that he would be a strenuous defender of doctrinal orthodoxy – hardly Dublin’s most pressing requirement at the time.