James Skivington

THE CONFESSION OF A PAEDOPHILE PRIEST

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2011 James Skivington

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The Confession of a Paedophile Priest

This is the story as it was told to me over three days. The majority of it was spontaneous, with very little in response to questions from me. I have made no major changes in either content or sequence, except to change some indirect speech into direct speech, in order to improve readability. For reasons that will become clear, I have either changed or withheld the names of those involved.

I can’t remember exactly when I decided to go after him. To me, in the beginning, it was just one more story of the kind that had become all too familiar around that time and I suppose when I heard about it, like most other people, I just shook my head, muttered, “Not another one,” and decided it was nothing to do with me. It was only later, after things had changed, I realised that somewhere along the line I’d made the decision, “I’m going to nail that bastard. I’m going to make him pay for what he did.” Don’t ask me why I decided that, I can only speculate. Yeah, I know. Bit of grandstanding, buckling on the old six-gun. That was me all over, then. Of course, in the intervening period, the story hadn’t changed, but I had. It seemed to me I’d made the decision very quickly, but at the time, I remember thinking it might take me the rest of my life to work out why I’d made it at all. Except, I knew if I didn’t cut down on the amount of booze I was drinking, that might not take very long.

I’d heard the story from Harry, an old colleague of mine who I’d worked with, first on the Independent in Dublin and later in London, on the Mirror. From the start we hit it off and over time we got to know each other pretty well, I suppose because we were so similar in many ways, both Irish, Catholic – well, in upbringing at least - ambitious, and with the same sense of humour and gift of the gab. Yet our personalities were the opposite from what some people might expect, he coming from County Cork, who should’ve been the sort of freewheeling one, plunging ahead without a care for circumstance or consequence, and me the careful Northerner from Derry, whose hot Irish blood from my father’s side should’ve been tempered by a healthy dose of Scottish rationalism from my mother’s. But it was the other way round.

One thing we also had in common was that we were both good investigative journalists, although, at least in the early days, not as good as we thought we were. I suppose we fancied ourselves as the new Woodward and Bernstein, exposing arrogance, greed and incompetence in the offices of state and city boardrooms, righting the wrongs of social injustice and generally making it a Better World. We laughed about that later and assured each other that we hadn’t quite made it to that level yet, but only through lack of opportunity, of course. Who were we kidding? Still, when we were on the Mirror together, we had our share of successes and were living, as a friend of my father’s had been fond of saying, high off the hog. By that time I’d also written a few pieces for Tribune, which had been received pretty well, I was making contacts at two or three other prestigious publications and had even had the temerity to submit a piece to the New Yorker. Never heard a word from them. They probably shot the mailman as he approached the building with my piece. I suppose you could say I didn’t know enough to know how little I knew. But, hey, it’s always worth a go. Another one of my pet projects round about then was a proposal, in my head if not yet on paper, to do a biography of John Hume, a fellow citizen of Derry. I still think it would’ve turned out pretty well, but it wasn’t to be. So, you could say, at that time the world was my oyster. Until the shell began to close.

Back then the world of the journo was awash with booze and other stimulants. Probably still is, for all I know. Not as much of it as some would have you believe, but in my early days it was pretty common to have long liquid lunches, often on expenses if you could wangle it, then it would be back for a few top-ups from the office private stock in the afternoon, before going out for a snack and more liquid refreshment, or heading straight from the office to the pub and finally rolling home late, to a dried-up dinner and a dried-up wife, as Rabbie Burns so aptly put it, “nursing her wrath to keep it warm”, with pathetic excuses about deadlines and demanding sub-editors. I didn’t mind too much getting hit by the chilli con carne, it was those big dinner plates that bothered me. Still, I was young and I could take it, both the booze and the brickbats. At least I never succumbed to the rolled up twenty and the white powder on the top of the cistern in the office toilet or any of the other exotic and no-doubt illegal substances that were doing the rounds. Never even tried them, probably because I’d already named my poison and it was a deep and long-term love affair. But apart from the drugs, in those days, I was up for anything.

I suppose we thought of booze as something that went with the territory, the image, a sacred covenant handed down by the older guys who taught us the trade. It wasn’t just an occupational hazard, like black lung for the miner, it was a comfort, a spine-stiffener, when the harrowing detail of human greed, indulgence and staggering incompetence became too hard to bear, when our dislike of having to harry and harass an innocent quarry to get a story finally turned to revulsion. For some of us, it never did. Booze made it all right again, at least for a while. We were the intrepid newspapermen, hard-working, hard-bitten, hard-drinking and above all cynical, the Fourth Estate, although I don’t know how many of us could’ve told you what the first three were. We would be impervious to the blandishments of the corrupt businessman, the doubletalk of politicians and senior civil servants (were any bunch less servile?) and the weasel words of union bosses. We would wield the shield of truth and the sword of righteousness, or whatever bullshit it was that politician came out with, when in fact a ten-year-old would’ve known he was guilty as hell. And often it was just that, bullshit, where the people we were questioning knew our agenda and we knew theirs, so that both journo and interviewee executed a courtly but fake dance, accepted at face value the answers to questions that the other guy in turn knew were coming and then shook hands like gentlemen and happily returned to our respective establishments, duty done and honour satisfied on both sides. Much of it we could’ve written without leaving the office or speaking to anybody. Some of it we did. But that was all part of the game. You gave a little bit, you got a little bit and then went back and tried to work it up into a big, sensational story, like you’d just discovered the Queen was having it away with Gerry Adams.

It doesn’t take a genius to work out that, after a few years of hitting the sauce morning noon and night, my life started to crumble at the edges. And boy did it crumble. I got to the stage where I didn’t think I had any edges left, only the middle, and that wasn’t in great shape. I had bottles of booze stashed all around the house, at the back of the wardrobe, in the airing cupboard, in the cistern and even inside an old plant pot in the garden shed. Looking back now, it seems absolutely crazy, but that’s the way it gets you. Even although there was always some in a cocktail cabinet, wherever I went around that house I knew I was always sure of a supply. And you’ve no idea how comforting a thought that was, even when I wasn’t immediately going to have a drink, to be able to slip my hand between the jumpers on the wardrobe shelf and have my fingers close around that cool glass bottle. Safe and sound, I felt. It was a warm bed on a cold night, it was an old friend’s hand on my shoulder, it was my mother’s hug. For me, I suppose, the booze had started off as a sort of crutch. As time passed, it got more and more like a wheelchair. If I’d had a quarter of the brains I thought I had back then, I would’ve seen that its next incarnation would’ve been a coffin.

Of course, I’ve since tried to figure out why I drank so much. I could’ve put it down to pressure of work or a refuge from a bad marriage or half a dozen other things, but I knew in my heart that wasn’t true. It was me. I had to admit that in the end. Just me, all on my lonesome. But why, that was the question that came to haunt me. It wasn’t as if my family were drinkers. My father only took a couple of beers or a whiskey on special occasions and my mother couldn’t stand the smell of the stuff. Rightly or wrongly I finally worked out that way deep down inside me there was some kind of fear gnawing at me. Don’t ask me fear of what. I don’t know. Of failure, maybe. Of not living up to expectations. Of death? Or of divine retribution when I presented myself at the pearly gates and was condemned by Saint Peter for my black, black soul. And how about all those priests and their fellow-travellers when I was young? It would be interesting to know if they ever had the remotest idea of what they were doing when they put those little worms into kids’ brains. I remember wondering whether some day in the future it might be classed as child abuse. Oh, I had some weird and wonderful theories in those days. But then, there are a hundred theories in a bottle of whiskey.

My relationship with my wife had steadily been getting worse and she’d told me more than once that if I didn’t stop drinking – like there was ever any chance of me doing that on her say-so – she’d leave me once and for all. Of course, I knew she wouldn’t, because I knew everything. And anyway, in my head I was in control, everything was fine, everything would always be fine, ad saeculae saeculorum, amen. But every now and then I’d stop drinking for a while, just to show I could, you know, and things would improve between us. We’d spend more time together, go out to a restaurant or to the cinema, maybe go to some friends for dinner, once they accepted that, at least for the time being, I wasn’t going to get legless and insult anybody or keel over and have to be carried out on a shutter. I even began to enjoy this side of life again, my wife and I recapturing some of the magic of the early days, me acting the eejit –well, I’d always been good at that - her pretending to be bored by my puerile antics until she couldn’t hold it in any longer and burst out laughing. One night in the street, on the way home from the theatre, with tears of laughter running down her cheeks, she suddenly threw her arms round my neck, kissed me then gasped into my ear that she was so happy to have the old me back again. Wow.

That, I can tell you, was one of the best moments of my life. Nobody in the history of the world felt better than I did that night. I was a king amongst men, our future of fulfilment and contentment stretched endlessly in front of us, even beyond death, I remember thinking in a crazy moment, and wondered how I could ever’ve thrown aside such a wonderful woman for the scarlet hussy Mistress Booze. For quite a while I really believed I’d cracked it, had finally got rid of that seductive bitch. And I so much wanted it to be true, had every intention of keeping it that way. But there’s no truer saying than that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Little by little my halo began to slip. I could have just one drink, couldn’t I? That wouldn’t do any harm. And it didn’t. Well, not at the time. And my wife was happy that I’d changed and I’d fallen in love with her again – or more correctly, realised I’d never fallen out of love with her – and I would buy her flowers and perfume and chocolates and act the clown for her. Just like old times, like the early days. Heaven. Which allowed me to tell myself that, as I had always maintained, everything would be fine. And so it was. Until one day, it wasn’t.

That was the day they told me I was fired. It was like walking into a brick wall. I had been so stupid, so arrogant, so – pissed, I suppose – that I never saw it coming. Wham! Numb brain and general paralysis of the body. And then a tingling, like the circulation returning after your leg has gone to sleep, awareness creeping back over me, but a different awareness than before, a new reality, a situation that I felt sure my parents must’ve warned me against, way back there in that other life as a different person. It came up in big red flashing neon lights, thrust into my face. “You are an unemployed alcoholic.” Visions of a park bench, a cardboard bed, a freezing night and a squalid death in a piss-stinking pedestrian underpass were there right in front of my eyes. I don’t mind admitting, the sudden starkness of it scared the hell out of me and I was wildly casting around for an exit door. I have to get out of here. This can’t be right.

But it was, of course, as I realised later, because some months before this, I’d started being late handing in whatever I was working on, missing deadlines, and the quality of the writing and fact-checking had clearly been going downhill. Not clear to me, though. As usual back then, I just laughed it off and called it finger trouble. Give me a break, I’d say, I’ve never learned to type properly, I just bang away with the two index fingers, the old hunt and peck. It was only then I recalled Harry having taken me aside on two or three occasions, telling me I’d better pull myself together and cut back on the booze or I’d be in big trouble. I replied along the lines of just because he was a lightweight and couldn’t stick the pace didn’t mean I couldn’t. I suppose I thought I was writing Pulitzer-prizewinning stuff but these plebs didn’t recognise it and the more I drank the better I thought my writing was. I cringe now at the thought of it. The only way I would’ve had a chance to win a Pulitzer Prize would’ve been to get the selection committee as poleaxed as I was.

Doesn’t take a genius to work out that, after I got the bad news, I hit the pub and went on a bender that lasted maybe three, maybe four days. In that state, who’s looking at a calendar? I’ve got a vague idea when and where I started out but of the other pubs, whether two or twenty-two in number, I have no recollection whatsoever. The first thing I remember is coming round on a couch in a living-room and gazing up past this stranger’s face to where there was a large plaster rose in the middle of a high ceiling. It turned out I was in a house in Islington, a big place with bow windows and fancy internal shutters that folded back and recessed into the wall. The decor in the place struck me as old-fashioned, Edwardian, maybe, though classy and well-maintained, with embossed wallpaper, Chinese vases and curtains with exotic birds that looked as if they could fly right up and perch on the fancy picture rails. The kind of style I’d call bordello baroque. I wouldn’t’ve been surprised if Florence Nightingale’d walked in to look after me, though I bet my breath would’ve snuffed out her lamp.

The house belonged to the guy who was peering down into my face. Expensively dressed, quietly spoken, some kind of aristo or maybe a professor of something, I would’ve guessed. He told me he’d seen me in his local. I remember being surprised that a man like that would use such a word. I’ve never knowingly gone to a pub in Islington in my life, the West End was always my stamping ground. This guy said he had “seen the signs”. What bloody signs? He’d had a brother who drank like that, he told me. Had, I thought. Oh dear, that doesn’t sound too good, but then his brother had probably let his drinking get out of control. That’s the way I used to think in those days. Unbelievable. Of course, that was because I knew I’d be all right. I always was.

At some point I must’ve told him my name and what I did, or more correctly what I had been doing. He seemed impressed and told me he used to read my stuff in the Tribune and the Mirror, though he didn’t look like a Mirror reader to me, and said he liked it a lot, “admired” I think was the word he used. Then while I was basking in the warmth of his praise he slipped the knife in. Some time back, he said, he’d noticed the writing’d started to go downhill. He’d persevered for a while then finally stopped reading my stuff altogether.

Now, a journo’s used to contrary opinion, even antagonism from readers. Indeed, pieces are often written to provoke just such feelings. It creates controversy, sometimes out of nothing much, and that helps to shift copies of newspapers and magazines. That’s the thing so many punters forget. The primary objective of news print media is not to inform the reader, discover the truth or expose corruption, greed and lies by people with influence and power in the land, it’s to sell copies of the publication in question. This may be by means of the foregoing, but the flogging of those printed pages has to be the sine qua non of the operation. I remember feeling a small pang of what I can only call pain when the Islington guy said my writing had gone down the pan. Antagonism, even hatred, I could handle. Indifference was something new to me and I didn’t like it.

At first I was so hung over there was no fight in me. But slowly I warmed to the task. I asked him how I came to be in his flat and he said that in the pub I had become incoherent and barely able to walk, then had virtually passed out. So in the absence of any address or phone number on me – I can imagine what my wife would’ve said if he’d asked her to come and get me - he’d taken me to his place, just round the corner. And that was when he hit on me. Had I no pride in myself, he asked, and I, being smart as a whip, told him the Bible said pride was a sin. Then he enquired as to what my parents might think of the state I was in and I said, with some weird sense of satisfaction, like informing a guy setting off to walk round the world that he’d turned into a cul-de-sac, that that was sorted too because they were both dead. Did I have a wife then, what about her? Another easy one, I assured him. I hated my wife. The more annoyed I made her, the better, then she might bugger off and leave me in peace. I was sitting in one of his beautiful leather chairs and he was standing in front of me and I remember seeing his fists tightening by his sides. And yet he merely asked me if I had any kids. This time I just answered with a “no” and he muttered that he supposed we should be thankful for something. Then he wanted to know had I any religion. Who asks that kind of question nowadays? I wondered if he was one of those Jehovah’s Witnesses or a Seventh - day Adventist, or maybe was he looking for a contribution to that long-ago favourite of Catholic schools in Ireland, money for the Black Babies in Africa. An uncle of mine used to say wouldn’t it be cheaper just to send them out a load of condoms instead. Sacrilege. In the event, this guy never declared his religious affiliation, but I think I can guess what it was.

Around about then I began to get my second breath. I’d been brought up a Roman Catholic but now I was in rehab, I said, in the circumstances surprising myself with my own wit. My God, what an obnoxious asshole I must’ve been at that time. He gave me a strange look when I mentioned the Catholic thing, I can see his face now, but I’ve never been able to figure out what that look was. Something from long ago, like suddenly seeing through a doorway into a forgotten land. Almost as if he’d just realised he’d known me before from somewhere. He told me I should go to Alcoholics Anonymous straight away, that they’d sort me out if anybody could. And as usual, I was charm personified and told him I wasn’t going to be a bloody stand-in for his brother who he’d obviously failed to help. I’d guessed that last bit and saw immediately I was right. He sort of sagged, grimaced and then pulled himself up again, almost begging me to reconsider what he’d said, “if not for those close to you”, he added, “then at least so that you can get back to that great writing you used to do and that many people no doubt appreciated.” Very nice, I’m sure, but by this time I’d come out of my drunken stupor enough to know I needed a drink and I wasn’t going to get one from him.

So, a little unsteadily, I pushed myself to my feet and was suddenly hit by the stink of my body odour and clothes. How long had I been wearing them? When had I last washed? Blank. Those odours and being unable to remember anything much, made me realise I’d fallen down a few more flights than I’d thought. An old tramp couldn’t have smelt worse. Gone was the well-dressed man-about-town (sounds great but what a bloody cliché that is) smelling of Chanel, Guerlain or some other expensive unguents, as Harry would say. Now I was kitted out with other stinks that came as complementary with the fags and booze, like bad breath and corrosive body odour. Although he gave no reaction, I knew he’d caught the stink too, and this made me embarrassed and angrier than before. I must’ve looked aggressive because he took two little steps backwards and pulled back his head like he was expecting an attack. Which was what he got, with both barrels.

I asked him who the hell did he think he was, interfering in the life of a complete stranger (being a reader of my stuff conferred on him no right to friendship whatsoever, I reckoned) and dragging me to his house without consent. It was probably kidnap. And then a lot of other stuff that, looking back, was nothing to do with him, but just a burden that I needed to offload onto someone, anyone. He didn’t answer but simply looked kind of sad, as though he’d heard all this before, as I daresay he had from his late brother, like he already knew the story and the inevitable outcome. I told him thanks for nothing and left the house, slamming the front door behind me in a final and masterful display of self-justification. But then, I was good at that. I’d perfected the technique when I was a kid.

I stepped outside and smelt the fresh air of North London. Not my natural milieu, but that was easily remedied, though not in the same pub he’d dragged me out of the night before. I glanced back at the house and briefly saw him looking at me out of the window before he shrank back behind the curtain. I just remember a look of sadness on his face. After that, he came up in my dreams from time to time, kind of haunted them, I suppose, silently drifting past with his hand out, a pleading look on his face. I would be fine, I told myself. I was a bloody good writer and I’d get another job, and probably a better one, no problem. Wow. With those powers of imagination, I should’ve been writing fiction.

Not only could I not get a better job, I couldn’t get any job. Word gets around fast in that trade and then you’re pigeon-holed: boozer, piss-artist, lush, saucehound and all the other labels that go with it, like unreliable, obnoxious, probably a wife-beater and doesn’t love his mother. And then, what a surprise, my wife left me, we sold our house and I ended up in a grotty basement flat in Battersea, the kind of place you’d keep pigs, if they weren’t too fussy. I didn’t know it at the time, but that was the start, just the very, very beginning of my realising my true situation, a dawning, I suppose, and yet funnily enough it wasn’t a light that came over the horizon but a darkness, like long black fingers that rippled and probed and threatened to swamp me, snuffing out any of that meagre light of hope that was still in my life. That’s the way it felt, anyway. And the person who’d started that growing realisation, that sad, charitable if enigmatic man in Islington? I didn’t even know his name and I doubt if I could ever find that house again. Although in a sort of a way, I did find him later, or at least his spirit.

Naturally, I kept pestering old colleagues in the hope they’d point me in the direction of some work. At first, I got expressions of sympathy from everybody I talked to – “You can’t trust management as far as you can throw them” and “You’ll probably go on to bigger and better things, mate” – but I knew they were just going through the motions. After the first few weeks, Harry was the only one who’d take my calls. And like the true friend he is, he told it to me straight.

“What are you, crazy? How many times did I warn you? But of course, you always know better, don’t you? Look, Mike, I’ll do my best for you, but don’t hold your breath, ‘cause your reputation’s shit. So, here’s how it’s got to be. Before anything else, give up the booze. Otherwise, you’re pretty much finished in this game. Yeah, I know it’ll be tough, but you can do tough, can’t you? I’ve seen you do it. Jeez, how did I ever end up with a friend like you? Count friggin’ Dracula would be less hassle.” Harry always was one for the purple prose. I smiled in my usual fetching manner and told him, “I will give it up, Harry. Promise,” and then later had a few drinks to ready myself for the job I knew he would soon get me, after which I wouldn’t need to drink any more.

And he did try his damnest, I know he did. We’d meet now and then – in a pub, where else, although twice I astonished him by only drinking orange juice – and he’d tell me who he’d talked to and their responses, which, however he attempted to dress them up, amounted to the same thing, “That piss-artist? You must be bloody joking!” From time to time he would suggest some minor story he’d happened upon but didn’t want to follow up himself, saying that my only hope was to go freelance and if I came up with a good finished piece there was a fair chance someone would buy it. And a couple of times I did follow up on leads he’d given me, but before I could get very far, somebody else’d broken the stories. At other times I’d help him out with pieces he was writing, giving him my opinion, making suggestions for improvements or re-drafting, for which he paid me over-generously. I hated taking that money, especially as I knew he didn’t even need my help, but I’d little choice. I was just about flat broke.

Then one day he told me about the priest. Now, although I was brought up strictly as an RC, religion is not my natural territory, so for example, I was never an altar boy nor did I have any inclination to become a priest, despite my mother nudging me towards it. So when I read the details on the sheet of paper Harry gave me I said, “Thanks, mate, I’ll follow this up,” and then looked for the nearest waste bin. That was a while after the big paedophile priest thing broke and there were a few stories around. Of course, I’d been as shocked as everybody else, and my heart went out to the victims, but it didn’t hit home, because I’d never been abused or knew anybody who had been. I don’t suppose they would’ve told me anyway. In his usual laid-back way, Harry didn’t seem all that surprised, said it’d probably been going on for centuries and what did they expect with a bunch of so-called celibate men running the place. I told him he was a cynic, but he said, “Not cynicism, Mickaleen, life experience.” For me, the scandal had quickly become yesterday’s news, I suppose because I’d never taken the time to sit down and think about the implications of it. The only thing I ever sat down with in those days was a bottle of Bushmills and that wasn’t exactly conducive to lucid thinking.

Still, I was polite and listened as Harry filled in a few details about this guy, in his late fifties, for many years the chaplain to an orphanage in the north-west of Ireland, run by nuns. He’d suddenly left a couple of weeks before for a destination unknown, saying he had to attend to urgent family business. Before he left, a woman had made an accusation that she’d been subjected to sexual abuse at the orphanage, but she’d not named the priest. It was only after he left that other women came forward and named him as the abuser. Now, there’ve always been hysterics and publicity-seekers around, I’ve met plenty of them in my trade, and there are also those who’re supposed to have what’s called False Memory Syndrome. You know you haven’t arrived until you’ve got a syndrome. But it was clear that the increasingly frequent stories of child abuse by the clergy in Ireland had given individuals the courage to come forward for the first time. So, maybe there could be some substance to the accusations against our guy. That’s what we always used to call the main man in any story we were doing, “our guy”, as if, once we’d decided to follow it up, he belonged to us. And I suppose he or she did, kind of. He would virtually be our creation before he hit that front page, shaped as we decided, presented as we wanted, a makeover, and not necessarily with all the original features. Our ticket to a big story, we hoped.

Maybe it was because it was so close to my home ground in Derry that I began to feel a bit of interest, maybe it was just because I was desperate, I don’t know. Over the next few days, however much I tried to push it away, in my mind it just grew and grew until it came to dominate my thoughts, which first made me annoyed, then curious as to why it should be that way. One evening about a week later I decided to wrestle it to the ground and deliver a fatal blow. So I sat down with the remains of a bottle of Bushmills, but of course I had another two bottles, one in the bottom of a wardrobe and another in a dressing-table drawer. Amazing, isn’t it? Even when I lived alone, I still hid the stuff. Who from, for God’s sake? I poured myself a drink and settled down to face this child abuse story head on. The more I thought about it, the more it troubled me, the more it grew in importance. And, to my astonishment almost two hours later, the bottle of whiskey sat untouched on the table. It was then I knew, as the Chinese say, that I was living in interesting times. Almost from the moment I sat down at that table and began to think about those kids who’d been abused, all of them unknown to me, of course, I was swept back into my childhood. Memories came flooding over me of my teachers, some of them quite kindly, some intimidating, of priests, most of them intimidating, and of the nuns, those disembodied faces peering out from their flowing habits, gliding along like black Daleks, as Harry once said, and sounding just about the same most of the time. All of these people, because the teachers in one respect were just a lay extension of the priests and nuns, they were bent on saving my immortal soul at a time when I wasn’t entirely convinced I had one, far less one with a complimentary original sin courtesy of that sociopath Adam who just had to eat the fruit of that tree after he’d been told not to. “And all these thousands of years later,” I remember thinking as a kid, “why should I be taking the blame for it? I don’t even bloody like apples.”

It was when I started thinking about my parents and their religious belief, what they had endured for it, not least from the priests, it was then that my anger started to burn. I thought about the effort and expense they had put into it, the christenings, the first communions, the confirmations, the ill-afforded money given to the Church for this and that, including the occasions once or twice a year when each person’s contribution to a special collection was noted and later read out from the pulpit. When I tell people that now, they don’t believe me. But Harry remembered that too from the republic. Moral blackmail, he called it. I remembered my grandparents, who I’m sure followed every letter of Church teaching, I thought about my great-grandparents and their parents, people I never knew, right back into the mists of time, all keeping the faith, as people used to say, and in one way or another paying a heavy price for it, sometimes even with their lives. It was then that it hit me with the force of a wrecking ball, that some of those clergy had not only abused children and young people, but in fact had retrospectively abused my parents, my grandparents and countless generations before them, by rendering hollow and valuing at nothing their efforts to maintain the integrity of their faith, a faith that was defined, promoted and maintained by that same clergy. And yet all the while some of them, as they say, had been talking out of both sides of their mouths. How much discrimination and forced emigration, how many beatings, deaths and dispossessions of property had these people endured in the name of the Church, all of it pissed on by these hypocrites. A paedophile is bad enough, I thought, but paedophile clergy, like bent coppers, are the worst of the worst.

Somewhere in the middle of that night, it struck me that this wasn’t just a crime against innocent children, although of course it was very much that. It was also a slap in the face to all those in Ireland who’d laid it on the line for the Catholic faith over hundreds of years, who had in effect signed an affidavit – or more correctly had one signed on their behalf - saying that they would stick with it come what may. That affidavit, I thought, was now running with the tears of those children. A thousand thoughts went through my mind as I sat there staring at the wall. Had some of those from the Protestant tradition been right all along? Were we a priest-ridden nation? Was Karl Marx on the ball when he said religion was the opiate of the masses? And yet, like a battered wife who keeps returning to her husband in the hope that he’ll mend his ways, even I still felt a pull towards that coquettish old harridan, the Church, whose very essence had seeped into my bones. Oh boy, I was gunning for somebody that night. And it was then, at that rickety little kitchen table with saw-cuts at the edges, that I shed a few tears for ancestors known and unknown, saw them struggling to make a living out of bad land and worse climate, but always faithful to Mother Church. Now she seemed to be feeding them only the rancid milk of a barren woman. There and then I decided it’d fallen to me to do something, however meagre it might turn out to be. I know I probably wasn’t thinking straight, was more than likely being melodramatic, as you can so easily be when you’re the only member of your own audience. But I knew my motivation was sound and I recognised that an opportunity to make some small amends had landed in my lap. If I could find this priest.