A Saturday in Boyle, some time in the early nineties. A field full of scouts being shown how to tie knots and bored out of their minds, and then a red van coming up the road. The van meant football. Whoever was inside it had come to collect you and take you off to a match, and to the lads standing in that field it had roughly the same effect as Santa.

The man driving was Owen O’Donohoe. Most children in the town knew him as the battery man, because that was the work. What none of them knew was anything else about him at all.

He is 85 now, living in a house by the river outside the town, and he agreed to sit down and talk. The first eight minutes of the conversation are the Boyle everyone expected. The remaining fifty five are not.

“I loved Boyle from the day I arrived in it to this very day.”

“My mother died when I was two”

He is a Dublin man, reared on the northside in Marino. He brings up his mother in his first answer, before anyone asks him anything, and he does it without ceremony: his mother died when he was two, his father had four in family, and he found it difficult enough to rear four people on his own and keep a job. Then, immediately, the verdict. He did a good job. They all grew up and got on with life and did relatively well. It was a happy childhood, and Owen says that is the primary thing he would like to say about it.

The Dublin he remembers is a city with no shutters on the shop windows. He and Annette would bring the children into the centre at Christmas. He is not claiming it was perfect, and says so, but by and large it was a place that was safe and pleasant to live in.

“West of the Shannon, you’ll get 60 per cent grant aid”

They moved to Boyle in 1979. There were two reasons, and one of them was that he could not find a suitable school for his daughter Mary where they were, in Swords. The other was his brother, who told him there was 60 per cent grant aid to be had west of the Shannon. That sounded good to him.

The plan was a small factory making office furniture. He could not get a premises in Boyle, so he ended up in Ballinlough, which, in his own summary, was not the best place in the world for qualified carpenters and things like that. He did not last very long in the business anyway.

What he does with that failure is the interesting part. He quotes his accountant, word for word, forty odd years on. You will have to pull yourself up by your bootstraps. And so he did, going from this little job to that little job, until he settled on one: distributing batteries. He worked for Kenneth Stewart, who he describes as an absolute gentleman and a kind man to work for. The run took in the west of Ireland, Donegal, and as far down as south Galway. Stewart died around 1989, he thinks. Owen went out on his own, then worked with another man in Dublin, and stayed at it into the early 2000s.

He managed the under 13s at Boyle Celtic and later took charge of the senior side.

Forty years without a cross word

He and Annette raised the family in Forest View and stayed forty years. Lovely neighbours, he says, and in forty years they never had a cross word with anyone.

They are about four years in the house by the river now, four years last December, and he had no intention whatsoever of moving. Annette and his daughter Sinead heard about the place, came at him with it, and that was that.

Carlo had been in that house before, thirty years ago, when it belonged to another family and his best friend lived in it. Long days by the river.

Owen on the town: there is a kind of cosmopolitanism about Boyle, a mix of local people and people who came from hither, tither and yon, and it works. And then, as his closing argument for the place, a question. Where would you get a park like Rockingham?

“Man is body, mind and spirit”

Then Carlo changes the subject, and puts his own cards down first. He tells Owen he has been agnostic for twenty five years, since sitting at the back of a church around 1999 wondering why he was there and what he was getting out of it. He is not hostile to the idea of spirituality. He just does not know.

That framing is what makes the rest of the hour work. What follows is not a believer being given a platform. It is an agnostic asking a believer of 85 the questions an agnostic would actually ask, and getting answered without a hedge.

Owen starts where he always starts.

“Man is body, mind and spirit. Three elements.”

We look after the body, he says, to a greater or lesser degree. We cope with the mind for the most part. And in relation to the spiritual side, we virtually do nothing. He is explicit that this applies to everybody equally, and that every human being is sacred, irrespective of colour or creed.

“No religion”

Carlo asks what faith he aligns himself with today. The answer is one word. None.

He was a Catholic. He is not now. All religions, he says, are man made, and what he has instead is a relationship. He came into charismatic renewal in the convent school shortly after arriving in Boyle, in the years when a minority within the Catholic church were gravitating towards those meetings, and it was there he read the Bible for the first time in his life.

He has a line he returns to more than once, and it is worth putting on the record because it shapes everything else he says. No individual has a right to impose his view, spiritual or otherwise, on another person.

His own brothers and sisters are Roman Catholic, and his advice to any Catholic is to go and study the history of the church and find out exactly what they believe. His own reading of that history places the origins of Roman Catholicism at around 300 AD with Constantine, which is his position rather than a settled one. For the people themselves he has one thing, he says, and that is love. He is not going around with a condemnation for anybody.

“If I buy a machine, I have to read the instructions in order to work the machine. If I want to know God, I need to get into his word.”

The mathematician and the man with the chalk

Two stories carry his argument, and both are about people who did not start where he is.

The first is Ivan Panin, a mathematician who, as Owen tells it, set out to prove the Bible was nonsense, found patterns in the numbers of it he could not explain by chance, and ended up believing. Owen hedges twice in the telling and says anybody who wants to can go and look it up.

The second is Arthur Stace, in Sydney. Born into an alcoholic family, an alcoholic himself, in and out of prison, until he wandered into a church looking for a few bob and came out changed. He was illiterate, and he spent the rest of his life chalking one word on the pavements of the city in what Owen says was beautiful copperplate handwriting. The word was Eternity. At the turn of the millennium the city put it up in lights on the Harbour Bridge.

“Faith is a gift. It’s not something we have.”

The questions an agnostic asks

Carlo works through them one after another.

Where does a man get his morals if he does not believe? Owen says he cannot judge where any man is coming from, only that a man needs a moral compass. He reaches for a boat. He was out on the water once when the fog came down and you cannot tell north from south, east from west. That is the man with no compass.

Which god, when there are thousands of them and you get yours by accident of birth? There is only one, he says.

Is the Old Testament worth reading? Absolute total nonsense, he says of the suggestion that it is not.

Can a person be spiritual without a doctrine? On agnosticism specifically, he is gentler than you might expect. He says he does not have a big problem with it, because an agnostic is at least not saying outright that there is no God. His advice to an agnostic is simply to take a step and ask.

Where he does not hedge

The second half goes further out, and it should be said plainly that from here on these are Owen’s views, stated as his own.

He rejects the idea that science and faith are opposed, and says true science and the gospel complement one another. From there he is scathing about Fauci, about the pharmaceutical industry, about a media he says decides what the country hears, and about the word conspiracy theorist as a way of closing down anyone who disagrees. Carlo, who has a background in pharmaceutical science, agrees with a good deal of it.

He believes the family is the fundamental structure of society and that it is under attack. He disagrees with legislation passed here in recent years, while saying in the same breath that it is other people’s decision and they do not have to impose it on him.

He tells a story about Gay Byrne interviewing the Abbot of Glenstal on The Meaning of Life, asking whether there was a heaven and then whether there was a hell, and getting a clear answer to the first and a convoluted one to the second. Owen’s own answer to both is yes.

He does not accept that Christians and Muslims worship the same God, and cites an inscription he saw on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem as his reason. He reads Daniel and Revelation as describing the days we are in now, and the passage in Revelation about buying and selling as pointing at digital identity and a coming one world system. He had a van once with four words in the back window on that subject, which is how he ended up in a shop in Croghan being asked, from the other side of an aisle, whether he believed it. The voice belonged to the local priest.

Near the end he reads a passage he has written down, attributed to Steve Jobs, about lying on a sick bed and finding that recognition and wealth have gone meaningless. Whether Jobs ever wrote it is doubtful, and it has circulated online for years without ever being traced to him, but Owen reads it as a man who believes it and finds it true.

“I was an idiot and I didn’t know it until I let God direct my path and then I became something.”

The last word

Carlo always closes the same way, by handing over the final word. Owen uses his to ask if he can say a prayer, and then says one, out loud, for everyone who hears the episode. Agnostic, atheist or otherwise, he says, more than once, so there is no doubt about who it is for.

Whatever you make of the hour before it, that is how he chose to finish.