It wasn’t all about the football celebrations in Mayo this week. On Friday, in Murrisk, they also found time to open the Croagh Patrick Immersive Experience, a virtual reality visitor attraction at the foot of the Reek.The facility uses “body tracking” technology (guided by the user’s movements) to recreate the climb for those who can’t do it physically. But the organisers insist the idea is to complement the pilgrimage, not replace it. Even if visitors do climb the real mountain, they may also enjoy experiencing its “hyper-realistic virtual digital twin”, which offers the added value of having a digitised St Patrick as your tour guide.I climbed the old-fashioned way last weekend, although in the taxi from Westport out to Murrisk, my driver reminded me that the modern Reek Sunday is nothing like it was 25 or 30 years ago. “Back then the village would be at a standstill,” he said. Now there were about “seven or eight thousand” climbers on the day, less than a third of what it used to be, and no traffic jams any more. But that wasn’t because people had stopped climbing, he said: “It’s just that now, they’re climbing every day.”I first did Reek Sunday back in the mid-1990s. And smaller crowds aside, the most obvious change since then, probably, is in the hand-held accessories of climbers. It used to be mostly rosary beads (and there are still plenty of those, in fairness). Now it’s smartphones, for the obligatory selfies and social media broadcasts. And even if conventionally religious, the modern pilgrim is also likely to be keeping one eye on the teachings of the iPhone health app and other such all-seeing gurus.[ St Patrick’s Bed? – Frank McNally on spending All-Ireland final night in a Mayo bridal suiteOpens in new window ]Omniscient as my phone thinks it is, mind you, it didn’t seem to realise I was on a mountain at all last Sunday. “Floors” are the only climbs it recognises, in which currency I usually average about 10 a day.On this occasion, back at sea level, it congratulated me on “229 floors”, probably assuming I was in New York for the weekend and had run up and down the Empire State Building twice.If St Patrick were to repeat his 40-day fast on the Reek today, I wonder if he too would be tempted to bring his iPhone for company? In a way, it might be in keeping with the traditional story. Instead of the devil and the “black demonic birds” that haunted him up there, he could be tormented by constantly having to check his feeds from Facebook, Instagram and the infernal X, with its many distractions designed to test the patience and virtue of saints.In the end, rather than banishing the serpents Ireland never had, the exasperated holy man might have settled for breaking the grip of the social media giants, flinging his phone into the Valley of the Demons, and sending the birds (Musk, Zuckerberg, etc) after it.Another thing that has changed since my first Reek climb is “St Patrick’s Bed”: a railed off section of the summit where he supposedly slept. Unless memory deceives me, this used to be unadorned by human souvenirs. Events at Croke Park last weekend have surely given Reek Sunday a whole new lease of life, at least in MayoNow it has succumbed to the neopagan practice of tying rags and other offerings to the railings, or leaving mementos pinned down by stones. The result is a bit of a mess, more like Tracey Emin’s bed than a saint’s.One thing that hasn’t changed since the 1990s is the gauntlet of (mostly Northern) evangelists you run at the foot of the mountain. They seemed, however, to have adopted a softer tone than before, when they used to discourage the pilgrimage as a way of atoning for sin.An affable Oliver McAllister, “from County Londonderry”, told me he had no issues with the climb, “as long as you’re not doing it to win favour from God”.Pilgrims climb Croagh Patrick on Reek Sunday. Video: Michael McLaughlin Editor: Eoin Ronayne For that, he explained, you only had to ask, sincerely. He went on to tell me about the day he won favour from God, “on the 23rd of October 1989 at eight o’clock”, then handed me a booklet with the full story. But events at Croke Park last weekend have surely given Reek Sunday a whole new lease of life, at least in Mayo, crowning what has been an annus mirabilis for St Patrick’s cult in the county.First there was the homecoming visit of Mark Carney to Aughagower, a village strongly connected with the saint, and long an important stop on the pilgrim route to the Reek. Then came the extraordinary sequence of events that led to Mayo’s Sam Maguire Immersive Experience, opened on Monday in Castlebar and now on tour. After that, the new virtual reality thing at Murrisk was just a bonus.I say “annus mirabilis”. But really, this all happened in a much more concentrated period, which itself carries religious overtones. For – lo! – between Carney’s visit to Aughagower and Mayo’s All-Ireland, there elapsed a period of 40 days and nights. Well, all right: if you’re going to be pedantic, it was 42.