What do you do when you're not practising Catholics but your daughter wants to make her First Communion?

Anne Wayne and Joe Moran decided to support her all the way and their daughter Mairéad made her First Communion in May 2014.

Probably not an unusual story in many Irish households but Anne, an Australian immigrant to Ireland, wanted to understand why the celebration of First Communion is so popular in this country.

So she recorded her family's journey to the big day. In this documentary Anne asks Mairéad why she was so keen to make her First Communion, speaks with Joe about the meaning of Catholicism in their family life and interviews contributors including a Catholic priest to find out why the First Communion is an integral part of growing up in Ireland.

As well as an intimate exploration of one family's experience of First Communion, the documentary highlights the consequences of the historic relationship between church and state in Ireland.

Contributors to the Documentary:
- Fr Seamus Ahearne, Association of Catholic Priests and Parish Priest, Rivermount, Finglas, Co Dublin
- Dr Katie Cagney, Lecturer in Psychology, Waterford Institute of Technology
- Áine Hyland, Emeritus Professor of Education, University College Cork
- Professor Tom Inglis, author of Moral Monopoly: The rise and fall of the Catholic Church in Modern Ireland, 1998, 2nd ed., Dublin: UCD Press.
- Dr Mary Magray, author of The Transforming Power of the Nuns: Women, Religion, and Cultural Change in Ireland 1750-1900, 1998, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Narrated and produced by Anne Wayne

Production Supervision by Liam O'Brien

First Broadcast RTÉ Radio 1, June 7th 2014

Repeated RTÉ Radio 1, May 16th 2020

An Irish radio documentary from RTÉ Radio 1, Ireland - Documentary on One - the home of Irish radio documentaries.