"WE WERE in love with each other since we were children." This is how Robert describes his relationship with Joan, his wife of 34 years. But they remember their wedding with horror.

He was a member of the Church of Ireland and she was a Catholic. "We could not be seen together," said Joan. "He could not come into the house to listen to records. We ran like fugitives to try to be together."

They got engaged secretly and eventually they told their parents they wanted to get married. They went together to see the parish priest in the south Dublin parish where they lived. "He frothed at the mouth at the idea," Robert said. They were interviewed separately and first Robert was questioned about his beliefs. "He contradicted me. He said if I believed what I said I'd be a Catholic, but it was what I'd been taught."

Worse was to come for Joan. "He asked my how could I be so ungrateful to my parents when they had adopted me when I was a little baby. He then told me to write to the bishop for a dispensation, but that he didn't think I'd get it."

She was just 18. She left the presbytery in tears and ran home to confront her parents with the priest's revelation. Her father went to his house seeking an explanation and the priest told him he had mixed Joan up with her friend, who was adopted and knew she was.

This was just one of the experiences which has coloured Joan's attitude to the church in which she was reared.

The dispensation came through, but the priest said he would not marry them in the parish church, they would have to marry in a neighbouring parish. Robert signed the statement saying he would bring the children up as Catholics. He did not feel happy about it but felt there was no alternative.

He talked to his own minister, but found him unhelpful. "He said these marriages don't work anyway."

The marriage had been arranged for 9 a.m. on a Saturday. "It did not take place before the altar, but in the vestry. It was over in four minutes," recalled Joan. "We were told there would be no flowers and no photographs. Some of my relatives took photographs and they show two frightened, drawn looking young people. I don't even want to see them."

"We were literally terrified," said Robert. "We were so young. We'd done nothing wrong, but we were treated like criminals." His father did not attend the wedding, but his mother did, and there was a small family reception. "What the priest succeeded in doing was making us non church goers for years," said Joan. "The Church of Ireland canon was very extreme in his views, too," added Robert.

They had four children, all boys, in the next seven years. The day I'd come out of the hospital, an auntie would come with a shawl and would have an arrangement made for a baptism in the church. She'd run with the child to the church and then bring him back and put him in the pram and say, `There you are'," said Joan. The baptism celebrations took place later.

She went to confession saying she wanted to use the contraceptive pill and the priest told her he could not give her absolution. She did not go back. The children were reared as Catholics, but Robert felt they suffered from the lack of enthusiasm which resulted from Joan's experiences and because he could not be involved.

"I always felt an outsider at the baptisms and things like that. I never felt included. I was used to Bible reading at home and was very involved in Sunday school and the Boys' Brigade. I felt they missed out on all that. They're not interested at all now."

Then they had a daughter who, like her brothers, went to the local Catholic school. A new school was being built and Joan met the priest who said she was not going to it. "That's when I had enough," she said.

Shortly after this, Robert's mother died. At her funeral, Joan approached the rector and asked him if she could join the Church of Ireland. He told her to come to church for six months and think about it, which she did.

She joined the Church of Ireland, as did their daughter, who had never felt part of the Catholic church, though she had made her First Communion. She is a member of the junior choir. Nine years after the birth of their daughter they had another son, and he was baptised in the Church of Ireland. Their eldest son has a daughter the same age.

"I feel the children are part of something now," said Robert.

However, he stressed they felt no bitterness about what they went through, and the attitudes they met in both churches were very different now from those of 34 years ago. They are very happy in their marriage, their family and now the church of which they are both members. "But some people did not survive it," he said.