This is a book you simply have to read. It could change your life – The Sunday Tribune
A confessional – One In Four founder Colm O’Gorman’s compelling memoir is wonderfully well-written, brilliantly paced, and will surely be made into a film,
says Justine McCarthy in The Sunday Tribune
Forgive me, I must rave. This is a book you simply have to read. It could change your life. The author has a track record of doing that: changing lives, and even the most stubborn of thinking. Unless you are a bigot who thinks it preferable to cover up a crime than to be the one who exposes it, you will be in the better of seeking out the company of this book. Survivors of child sexual abuse will find resonances with their own experiences of the universal tragedy.
As if that was not reason enough to race to your bookshop, there is something else you should know. It is wonderfully well written. The early pastoral scenes have wisps of McGahern’s vividness. The observations penetrate as sharply as arrows, despite occasional flights of psycho-babble. The Catholic church is “like a womb, safe and certain”. On Sean Fortune, the predatory curate: “His collar was his pass to everyone, his key to our front door.” The accounts of sexual abuse avoid gratuitous crudity and yet are not coy. The courtroom drama, the media conferences and the television documentary that combine for the denouement are filmic in their pace and visual effect. If Beyond Belief is not turned into a movie, the pope never was a Catholic.
Friends of Colm O’Gorman, champion of the Ferns child sexual abuse scandal, feared it was unwise to tell about when he was homeless and turned tricks with men in return for a dry bed to sleep in. Technically, he says, he was never a prostitute because he got no money – “I didn’t have the self-respect for it; I thought I wasn’t entitled to anything.” In other aspects of his life, he does hold back. He offers no tangible explanation for the disintegration of his parents’ marriage, and, though the book is dedicated to his late father, Sean, he lets his mother’s presence slip away almost unnoticed as the book progresses. Nor does he identify a man from his village who molested him when he was five or a local teenage boy who later did the same to him during music lessons. There is an honour in this withholding, as there is honour in his warts-’n'-all revealing of himself.
O’Gorman’s potted history is well known. He left Wexford for London in the 1980s, came back to testify against Fortune but was deprived of the opportunity by the priest’s suicide, returned again to make a television documentary about the abuse, and changed Irish church history. A state inquiry followed. It found the church had failed to act on countless complaints about priests in Ferns. Bishop Comiskey resigned. O’Gorman won a People of the Year award. He set up home near Gorey with his boyfriend, ran his One in Four organisation for abuse survivors and became a PD senator. It is an epic story about a sinful man, a sinful institution, and someone extraordinary who refused to be their victim.
He was helped along the way by an anonymous man he went home with one night in Dublin and who arranged a job for him the next morning; by Sarah Macdonald, the Suing the Pope documentary-maker; his solicitor Pearse Mehigan; and his brothers and sisters, particularly Barbara and Dee, who broadcast an unsuccessful appeal for his whereabouts on the Gerry Ryan radio show while he was living rough.
If this were a history book it would be a distortion of history. Colm O’Gorman did not single-handedly remove the lid on the Irish church’s harbouring of criminals. But it is not history. It is the memoir of a man whose courage and timing ultimately made the difference. With this book, he continues that mission by rescuing the story of child sexual abuse from media fatigue to make it compelling, relevant and current once again.
Beyond Belief By Colm O’Gorman
Hodder & Stoughton, £13.99
