You can't dodge destiny. As the sun moves into Aquarius and Mars continues to expose its planetary horns, the most spectacular Saturn Return this decade chose to manifest itself last week when Annie Murphy came back on to Irish television. If, like Clare McKeon or Eamon Dunphy, you know its significance, you may well wonder what this portent brings. The fates are obviously summoning: time to take stock.
Saturn reportedly appears as the cosmic garda, a seven-year astrological itch when all those karmic debts you've accumulated start scratching at the door. It is, in fact, exactly seven years since Annie Murphy met "a tall, handsome man with friendly eyes," more commonly known as journalist Conor O'Clery, to whisper the first words of what became the scandal of the decade.
All changed, changed utterly, when the story that rocked a nation was formally born in these very pages three months later on May 7th, 1992, under Annie's own sign of Aries.
Then it shattered beliefs. Now Saturn's back, promising a powerful encounter with the forces of destiny in all their inexorable fatedness.
But this time around a terrible cliche is born. Instead of passion, we have sentiment. Instead of controversy, we have a lesson in the art of suffering that would put Sylvia Plath to shame. And instead of Catholic priests, we have their former lovers, proposed to us as high priestesses of a spiritual new age where love conquers all. A compelling image, but no less dangerous for all that.
The measure of the whole sorry Annie Murphy/Eamonn Casey tale is not so much an epic in the tradition of Diarmuid and Grainne, or an Electra doomed to love men like her father, as Murphy claimed she had in her ill-advised book Forbidden Fruit. Nor can it match the glitzy parallels pioneered by Liz Taylor and Richard Burton, or Jerry Hall and Mick Jagger.
It is more a matter of background and foreground, and of how, in seven years, the one has so firmly supplanted the other. What was exceptional has become ordinary. What is ordinary is no longer news. And what was squalid has not in any way changed.
Last time, when everyone gasped with shock, Annie Murphy was admirably dignified on a prime-time Late Late interview which cast her as Eve, the temptress who dared to steal a bishop's seed.
This time, on Later with Clare McKeon, she was presented as a different kind of myth, an artist in that craft some people used to think matters most of all: love, passion, endurance; specifically, the creed that falling for a prince comes first and above all else.
Dignified she remained. Fixed on the dream of a perfect love with a spiritual prince she had made an art of loving, and spent her life in the process. As she sat with Phyllis Hamilton, partner of the late Father Michael Cleary, not even her striking facial resemblance to the ageing Hazel Lavery - her pain showed like a watermark - could make anyone see her as a woman to whom the fates had been kind. Or as an artist of the new Ireland.
The interview with Murphy was a coup, another notch in the belt of McKeon, fast becoming to late-night television what Gay Byrne is to prime time. This was the medium's chance to redeem itself from the mud into which that earlier interview had sunk Annie Murphy, and by association all of us. No one will bully Annie any more, and certainly not if McKeon is around.
But somewhat like the poet Christina Rossetti's, the tragic fury of Annie Murphy's life never quite matched the kind of tragic fury that patience and discipline could turn into great art.
"Yes, I loved him all too well, and my punishment is just," Rossetti wrote as if for Murphy's mouth. "Haughty in its humbleness, proud in its idolatry."
In this lay Murphy's real tragedy, a sorrow of the order of being born with the soul of Billie Holiday and then discovering that, although you can feel the blues, you just can't sing them. To fall into the trap of those generations of female souls who wrote teeth-grinding lines like Rossetti's, or believed that love is all of life, is to hook up to a fate far worse than falling for a bishop.
It is to fall for the trap of talk-show celebrity which says that pain is glamorous, that what marks you out is not so much what you do in your own name, but what is done to you, and how nobly you suffer.
When the final credits rolled to the sound of Phyllis Hamilton's voice explaining how she had really fancied Burt Reynolds, the most lasting sense was of a conversation that had finally talked itself out. And not before time.
The persistent impression was of veterans wounded in combat, of people we honour for their gutsiness in fighting a war now long over and, for the most part, forgotten. One wondered if the President should award them purple hearts for being front-line soldiers in the battle that made yesterday the past.
I mean no disrespect to Annie Murphy. She said it like it was, kick-started the charge on hypocrisy and irresponsibility within the Roman Catholic Church, contributing in the process to the debate on fatherhood now moving into the foreground. In so doing, she may have cleared away another obstacle in the homecoming route of Eamonn Casey.
But if Bishop Casey's return is the natural end of this story, imagine the roar through the heavens if McKeon gets to interview him.