I would like to offer a modest survival strategy for the Irish church. Break with Rome. Change the rules on priestly celibacy, the ordination of women, contraception. Have the Irish Reformation, 500 years delayed. In other words, the Irish Catholic church should go Protestant. For a while.

Mossie Dillane, the 73year-old priest who this week was outed as Ireland's answer to Abraham, another OAP first-time dad, is already a footnote in history. No flight into exile like Eamon Casey. A few headlines, a couple of angry callers to Liveline. By March he'll be a pub quiz question.

To the extent that anybody could be made to care about it, the story was presented as final evidence that the doctrine of priestly celibacy would simply have to be changed. But not a whisper of how that might actually happen.

With little fear of contradiction on this island, Bishop Willie Walsh of Killaloe made a similar argument last year. Unlike Brendan Comiskey a decade earlier, he wasn't summoned to the Vatican to offer an explanation for his remarks.

Perhaps because the Vatican has seen the same opinion polls that show a large majority of Irish priests agree with Walsh and not with Pope Benedict.

But Bishop Walsh is whistling in the dark. A Vatican synod in October reaffirmed that a debate on celibacy would not be entertained under this pope.

And around the time of the Ferns Report, the official Vatican response to the suggestion that men who had the option of marriage and normal sexual development might be less likely to abuse children was to launch a witch-hunt to expose and expel gay seminarians.

All of this is about to become irrelevant in Ireland, of course. There are at present 1,368 Catholic parishes with 2,643 churches in the 26 dioceses and archdioceses of Ireland.

According to the same statistics offered by the Catholic Communications office, there are 2,949 active diocesan priests in Ireland.

The average age of a Catholic priest in Ireland is about 61 years old. And there are virtually no replacements being recruited. If a young man in 2006 says he's thinking about becoming a priest he'd be more likely given therapy than encouragement.

So in a decade, Ireland will face the Great Catholic Crunch. As is happening in Boston and London today, churches and other church property . . . particularly in high-value, low-Massattendance urban areas . . .

will be deconsecrated and sold off, parishes will be consolidated. The tenuous hold the Catholic church has on the primary education system today will be unsustainable as those properties are sold to pay for priestly pensions and nursing home care.

So here's my suggestion.

This spring, Bishop Willie Walsh should ordain a married priest . . . for good measure, make it a married woman. Pope Benedict will demand he come to the Vatican to explain himself.

He should refuse and instead barricade himself in Joe Duffy's RTE studio.

From there, he should spend the following week as the main guest on Liveline, where one after the other, Ireland's other bishops could come on the programme and explain why they support the move.

By Friday, helped by suggestions from various RTE presenters, a demonstration of 250,000 would march to Dublin archbishop Diarmuid Martin's office to demand he support Bishop Walsh.

Martin flees to Rome and the offices are occupied by Bishop Walsh.

On the Late Late Show that night, Bishop Walsh could debate the Papal Nuncio. Walsh could argue that King Oswiu of Northumbria got it wrong in 664 when at the Synod of Whitby he gave in to his wife and gave Rome primacy over the Celtic Churches, or some other argument obscure enough for a 20minute TV segment. Pat Kenny could ask Eamon Casey, who just happens to be in the audience, what he thinks . . . the national healing process nearly complete.

The following Monday, Joe Duffy could proclaim Willie Walsh patriarch of the Irish Catholic church.

There would be a legal battle, of course, with those remaining loyal to Rome jostling with the reformers to lobby the priests and nuns named on the title deeds of each piece of church property.

Meanwhile, Willie Walsh would lead a grand council that would rewrite the sections of canon law that would bring it into line with modern Irish life, thus saving the church from extinction.

After all that, they can wait until the next pope, and . . . like the Eastern Rite churches of the Maronites, Ukrainians, Syro-Malabars, Chaldeans (all Catholic, all with married priests) . . . reestablish their communion with Rome, while retaining their new rules. So it'd be Catholic again, and we'd avoid the embarrassment of having to agree with Ian Paisley on the last 500 years of Irish history.

Of course, this is crazy talk. Heck, soon I'll probably say they'll be playing soccer and rugby in Croke Park after singing God Save the Queen.