We were unlikely pilgrims, my two friends and I. We carried no relics, no holy water. We mumbled no prayers on the journey, nor did we consider any self-sacrifice. That wasn't us. We were born Catholic and had decided to stay Catholic. We were not second-class citizens from the North but the sons of second-class citizens. And the Pope was coming to Dublin and we were going to be there, just like everyone else, because we were as good as everyone else.

The need to be included was important. While many in Ireland merely accepted or even bemoaned their Irishness, I protested mine. I raged at the inclination of so many southern friends to denigrate life in the Republic. I felt independence was wasted on them. I was sick of being categorised not as Irish but as a Northerner, of being held at arm's length. I was Irish, and unhyphenated Irish at that.

I had felt little inclination to go to Galway for the Mass for the Young of Ireland as that meant accepting the patronising "youth" tag. I was having none of that. I decided not to head for Drogheda either. Like others, my disappointment at the Pope's decision not the visit the North had soured into annoyance. I was not going to be fobbed off with notions of his visiting the Archdiocese of Armagh from the "safe" side of the Border. Knock? That was for the fanatics and the rosary-whisperers.

It had to be Dublin. We had to be part of a million-strong throng in the Park. I, at 19, was confident. My single-mindedness came easily to me. It was a black and white world and I was rarely bothered by indecision. Pope John Paul was an exciting figure then, light years away from the bulk of his predecessors - the half-dead Italians with crusty voices. Here was the new Pope - the sportsman, the linguist, the political pope, the moral campaigning superstar and, above all, the traveller. This Pope was on world tour and the Dublin gig was the place to be. I wanted to hear him rage against the big wrongs of the day: Thatcher; The Bomb; imperialism; repression; big business; poverty and the paramilitaries.

The scale of the proposed Mass in the Park was awesome. A million people - one-quarter of the population in one field. The scale of it was biblical.

The recommendation to bring a fold-up chair seemed odd at the time, even corny. It would also be emblematic and that was something the three of us could not dismiss.

The chair was to become a mark. Unlike our fathers, we had not felt a need to conceal our national identity or our religion. Yet the requirement to walk to the train station complete with overnight bag and fold-up chair meant declaring, in a most visible way, who we were and what we were doing. It had been easy to stand up for causes at student protests. It was easy to join a march and shout slogans at a rally. It was a safe, phoney radicalism - but this was something else.

It meant doing for the first time that which I had not done before - at least not in suspicious Belfast. It had been normal to tread warily, to know your company and to keep to safe subjects when you didn't. I had picked up, subconsciously perhaps, the canny knack of sounding-out others and of calculating where I stood. I wasn't beyond taking a stand, but provoking needless confrontation was a different matter.

The walk to the train station with the chair didn't offer the luxury of such choice. I needn't have worried. Chair-carrying Irish Catholics arrived at the station from all directions.

Marked men and women every one - but utterly unharmed. It seemed the morning was memorable more for the autumn sunshine than for my lone march of silent defiance. Perhaps what I had stood up to was nothing more than my own teenage insecurity.

Dublin lived up to expectations. The excitement was total, the sense of occasion, historic. I had my first slug of neat Powers from a bottle offered me by a man I didn't know. There was an eruption of euphoria amid the dawn in the Park as the huge Aer Lingus jumbo lumbered overhead, en route to the airport. I can still feel the thrill of it.

I warmed to the Pope's opening line: "Like Saint Patrick, I too have heard the voice of the Irish calling to me and so I have come to you, to all of you, in Ireland."

Yet he never mentioned the Bomb, or repression and he didn't lay into right-wing governments and he left Thatcher alone. I found him long on the merits of the Eucharistic mystery and disappointingly short on the wrongs of the world as I saw them.

We listened to his Drogheda sermon on the radio and his mispronounced plea to the paramilitaries to call it off. It wasn't convincing and I'm not surprised they found him fit to ignore.

I returned to Belfast, an unchanged young man, grateful for the Pope's visit yet deflated by the tone and extent of his moral lecturing. I still hungered for something more radical, challenging and in tune with my world. Perhaps I still do.

On the approaches to Belfast Central station, bigots stoned our carriage and shattered the windows. No one was hurt but I lived off the yarn for some time.