In 1979 more than a million people flocked to Phoenix Park, Dublin to see Pope John Paul II speak. 

Among them was Sister Stanislaus Kennedy, now a well-known nun, social campaigner and author.

"People walked and walked – I was one of them – from early in the morning, to Phoenix Park, a million people, and it was all joyous and jubilant and exciting," she remembers. 

An estimated 2.7 million people greeted that Pope over a three day visit, in Dublin, Drogheda, Galway and Limerick, seen as one of the greatest mass events in modern Catholicism. 

Now, with another Papal visit approaching this weekend, the situation is "absolutely different", she says.