Ireland is soon going to run out of priests. This will not come as a surprise to anyone who has been attentive to news from the Church here over the past decade or more. A not insignificant number of dioceses have not seen any new vocations in that time, others one or two, the rare few a small, steady flow. So it is unsurprising that the Bishop of Derry, Donal McKeown, warned recently that we are going to see lay-led Eucharistic liturgies in the near future in Ireland. He is not the first to have mooted such a move, merely the most recent, so it is nothing against His Grace when I say that lay-led Eucharistic services are a very bad idea.