A feature written for the Irish Sunday Mail about the RTE ‘Would You Believe’ film, My Fathers House which was broadcast on Sunday November 1st 2009.
The house really hasn’t changed much, at least not from the outside. It sat at the end of a long driveway; about two hundred metres back from the road, perched above the church which rests in the hollow below. It’s quite an ugly house, pebble-dashed and still painted the same sickly peachy cream colour as it had been years earlier. Two stories high at the front, there’s another floor hidden from view, a basement. One of the first things Fr Sean Fortune did upon his appointment to Poulfur in 1981 was to establish youth groups in that basement and a “reconciliation room” for boys who were in trouble at home.
I could see the roof of the church, in a deep hollow to the left of the driveway. The church is built on an old penal mass site, a place of worship going back hundreds of years. The church itself is rather beautiful, nestling at the bottom of the old mass hollow, below the road and surrounded by trees. Driving down the winding roads that lead to Poulfur is a strange experience for me still. It’s almost thirty years since Fr Sean Fortune first brought me there. But driving that road still always takes me back in time. I still get a sense of what it felt like years earlier as he drove me down the same road, away from my home and family and towards this house, his house, and the place where he hurt me so terribly.
I had been back to Poulfur a few times over the years since then. I came back in 1995 when I made my first statement to the Police, detailing how I had been abused for more than two years by Fortune in this same house from 1982 to 1983. I had come back again in 2001, this time with a BBC TV camera crew to make the film Suing the Pope. That was the first time I had come back to the house itself, but I didn’t go inside. Instead we had filmed in the church grounds, with the shadow of the house looming above. Late one night when we had finished filming I went up to the house and peered through the kitchen window. It was dark and the house was empty so I couldn’t see in. I climbed up on the window sill and hung there, peering in to the darkness, desperately trying to see if it was still the same, half-expecting to see the fourteen or fifteen year old me in there slumped over the kitchen table, alone and miserable, trapped there, unable to prevent or even name what was happening to him. That day I had been desperate to get into the house, desperate to find that me, the boy still trapped in that hidden horror. But now, eight years on, things are very different.
For a start I am not trapped any more. I have come back not to free myself from a secret and hidden history, the truth is long out, and I am free of it all. But not everyone is.
The house is no longer the home of the parish priest in Poulfur. After Sean Fortune left and the savage history of his time there was revealed, his successor didn’t want to live there. So the Diocese built a new house for the new priest and Fortune’s house has instead become a space used by community groups for occasional meetings. No-one lives there now. No-one wants to.
A woman from the area said to me recently that she has often wanted to drive down there late one night and burn it down. That she hated it remaining as a kind of dark mausoleum that reminds everyone of the terrible things that happened there.
When RTE’s Would You Believe asked me to work with them on a film following the publication of my book Beyond Belief earlier this year I knew that this was a great opportunity to talk about this history in a new way. I wanted to explain how facing the truth of my own past, and facing it with those whom I loved, had allowed me to finally break free of it. I wanted to try to show how the same might be possible for anyone who remains caught in a past they fear is too painful to face, whatever the cause. How the truth, and a commitment to try and respect each other as we struggle to move beyond secrets and lies and unspeakable hurt, really can set us free.
And so I had to go back, not only to Poulfur but to Adamstown, the County Wexford village I lived in as a child. I had to go back to my father’s house, to the land he had farmed, as had his father before him. I went back there so that I could talk about how facing the truth of the abuse I suffered had allowed me to find my father. Dad and I had been distant for years, each of skirting around the things we couldn’t say to each other and trapped in silence. Facing the past, reporting the abuse to the Police, had forced us to face each other and changed both of our lives. Dad was central in my coming forward back in 1995, his love and his courage made it possible for me to face my own fear. He was and is a huge source of inspiration for me in everything I do.
What we were able to achieve together in facing the truth taught me that allowing hurt to fester only causes greater hurt. It taught me that in facing that which we fear most we often discover the best of who we are. That’s what happened for my Dad and me. That’s our truth.
Fear corrupts. It freezes us. It leaves us unable to react. I used to be afraid all the time, afraid of facing the past for fear of what I might find out about myself. But not anymore.
So often, we run from things we have done that we feel mark us as bad. I know that feeling; for so many years I ran from my own feelings of shame and self-blame.
I ran from my life on the streets, the nights where I allowed myself to be exploited in exchange for a bed. I ran from the abuse, my memories of it, my physical reactions to it and my powerlessness to prevent it. I believed that these shameful, awful experiences named the truth of who I was. But they don’t.
The truth of who I am is to be found in the way I responded to the events that I have experienced. How I chose to deal with them, once I was free to do so.
The things we do as we struggle to survive unspeakable trauma name the power of our instinctive desire to survive, but they say very little about who we are – what we believe and feel, and the principles and values we hold dear. It is only when we have the space to make free and informed choices that we discover who we actually are.
And we can only make those kinds of choices when we face our fear and name the truth. We cannot make them if we allow a house to become a tomb to our fear, a place where we hide our demons and refuse to face them. And that’s what Fortune’s house had become to so many people. That’s why it was time to go back and open up those doors, to refuse to allow that place to remain a house of horror and show instead that it was just a house; that no bogey man lives there now and that it cannot hurt us anymore.
I was met at the door by Fr Oliver Sweeney, the parish priest who came to Poulfur back in 2002, just weeks before Suing the Pope was broadcast and who has been there ever since. He is a good and decent man; with a powerful commitment to the people he serves. He had at first feared allowing me to return with cameras in tow, but in the end he saw that letting the world in might allow this place to break free of the past too. That took courage, and faith, both of which he has in abundance.
He left me alone to walk around the house. I soon forgot the camera was there as I went from room to room. What had been the dining room back then, where Fortune had insisted I sit and have breakfast with him every morning I was there, is now an office. The dark wood dining table and shelves lined with silver teapots are gone to be replaced by filing cabinets and a desk. The room next door is now a meeting room, where regular AA meetings take place; a room where people face their own demons and find strength from a community of others who walk the same road. I liked that a lot. It seemed to me to defy the idea that this house could only ever be a dark place; instead it could become a place of hope and courage.
I went upstairs then. What had been Sean Fortune’s bedroom is on the left at the top of the stairs; it has a big old wooden door painted a gloss white with an old-fashioned ceramic doorknob. There were two other doors at the top of the stairs off the same small landing, leading to other bedrooms, rooms I was never allowed to sleep in when I was brought there. Opposite his bedroom door there had been a prayer space. A kind of small room which had contained a statue of the Virgin Mary which sat upon an altar surrounded by candles in front of which was a prayer kneeler over which there had always been draped a set of glass rosary beads. But that was all gone now. The space was empty, nothing more than a dusty old cupboard.
As I turned to go into Fortune’s old room I remembered how it has looked years earlier. There had been a huge old wardrobe along the right hand wall as one came into the room. Just beyond it used to be a sink in the corner and on the opposite wall was a dressing table with a mirror over it, to the left was the bed, again big and made of old polished wood.
As I walked in, I half-expected it to be the same still. But it wasn’t of course. All the furniture was gone, only the sink in the corner was left. There was nothing there. It was just a room.
As I stood and looked out the window I remembered all that had passed. There were no more secrets. No need to hide from the past anymore. Now it was time to talk about how we might move forward together.
I walked out of the room and headed downstairs to have a cup of tea with Fr Ollie and some members of the parish council and talk about the future. After all, if we allow ourselves to triumph over the past, what else is there?
Colm O’Gorman is the author of the memoir Beyond Belief.
An opinion piece for the Irish Daily Mail, May 26 2009
Over the past weekend senior church figures including cardinal Sean Brady and Archbishop Diarmuid Martin have called upon the religious congregations to look again at the now notorious indemnity deal they negotiated with the state back in 2002. That deal, done in the last days of an outgoing Government, fully indemnified the religious orders against all future financial liability resulting from cases taken by victims of institutional abuse. The deal saw the church contribute €127 million to the now total estimated cost of €1.3billion – less than ten percent.
The Ryan report is frank in its view of the relationship between the Catholic church and the state when it came to responding to child abuse in state-funded, Catholic Church institutions. Mr Justice Ryan describes the attitude of the department of education to the church as ‘deferential and submissive’. The department, which ought to have had a supervisory and inspection role, ‘generally saw itself as facilitating the congregations’.
If the attitude of Dr Michael Woods and former Taoiseach Bertie Ahern is any indication of how that relationship stood in 2002 when the infamous deal was struck, it appears that this may well remain the case.
In 2002, when the BBC film suing the pope was broadcast, the film where I spoke about how I had been abused by Fr. Sean Fortune, Bertie Ahern was asked if he had any comment to make on the public uproar about the cover up of child abuse in the diocese of ferns. He didn’t have a thing to offer.
‘I haven’t really been following that at all,’ he proclaimed. ‘It’s really a matter for the church; it’s not a matter for politicians. I’m not going to cross politics and religion.’
I remember being dumbstruck at the ignorance of that view. The head of our government believed that the abuse of children by priests in Ireland was not a matter for the state. That child protection and responses to such serious crimes was not the business of the state. No wonder, it seemed to me, that such abuse had been able to continue with impunity and that errant clerics were left free to rape and abuse in dioceses across Ireland. No wonder that children were so abandoned by a state whose attitude of deference rendered it submissive to an organisation it had an obligation to hold to account for the savage harm it inflicted upon children in institutional ‘care’.
Over this past weekend we saw further defence of an indefensible deal and more evidence of a blinkered, ill informed ignorance of the reality of a dark past.
The state, it would appear, was reluctant to bankrupt the church by forcing them to be properly accountable for their failures and crimes. Why?
Why should the church, like any other entity, not be held to account? If the consequence of their actions is that they become bankrupt then surely, so be it. Perhaps in order to rebuild elements of a church that has so abandoned their founding Christian values they must first be torn down. Irish society built up the Catholic Church in Ireland through financial donations, volunteering and vocations. If Ireland values a renewed, healthy reformed Catholic Church it will do so again. What gave Messers Ahern and Woods the right to make that decision for us? What gave them the right to decide that we would happily underwrite the Catholic Church and protect it from the consequences of its own actions? Isn’t that up to us to decide for ourselves? Isn’t it time that the church and the state in this country were finally truly separate entities?
The Ryan Report has achieved a lot. It has entirely vindicated the words of victims who suffered barbarism at the hands of those whose duty, and professed vocation, should have demanded tender and Christian care. What it has not delivered at all though is justice.
Justice demands accountability. It demands that the perpetrator of a wrong be held accountable for their actions and that they make reparation for the harm caused to their victims. This has not happened.
No one has been named in the report, for understandable legal reasons, though some names are beginning to emerge into the public arena through the media. Few have been prosecuted through the courts, and the evidence collected by the commission cannot now be used to prosecute those found to have committed heinous crimes against children. There has been no legal accountability, no naming of those responsible and no accountability, apart from before the court of public opinion, of the institution so responsible for these shocking atrocities.
The state, through its flawed systems and deferential attitudes, has failed victims of abuse in institutions once again.
And so we find ourselves in a position where ministers suggest that it would be helpful if the congregations were prepared to reopen and renegotiate the deal they struck with Dr Woods. Yet again the church will not be held to account but requested an agreement to offer a ‘gesture’ as Archbishop Martin put it yesterday.
Well, gestures are not good enough. Accountability is not something that ought be in the gift of the perpetrator, rather it should be ensured through the actions of a society focused on justice.
The state must put in place a new process. For a start it must carry out a full audit of the assets of all religious congregations and bodies implicated in the Ryan Report. It should determine the value of all available assets and whether there has been any transfer of assets in recent years to put them beyond the reach of the state. We need a NAMA for the church, a body to assess and then seize assets which can be used to ensure at least financial accountability by those responsible for the crimes detailed in the Ryan Report.
One other thought. Cardinal Sean Brady has called for a ‘one church response’ to the findings of the Ryan Report. Let’s hold him to that. After all, bishops are the superiors in their dioceses. They and they alone determine whether a religious order can operate within the boundaries of their individual kingdoms.
And bishops are not without responsibility for abuse in institutions. In the case of those operated by the sisters of mercy they have some direct responsibility. Until 1994 there was no national governance structure for that particular order. Instead there were twenty-six separate provinces with leadership teams who reported to their diocesan bishop. The bishop was their superior. It seems to me that it is now time to ask the bishops what responsibility they accept for abuse perpetrated in institutions under their control.
I have often been heartened by the courage and frankness of Diarmuid Martin. He has shown a capacity for bold and radical leadership. We need more of that now.
He and Cardinal Brady are in a position to do more than suggest a new approach by the religious orders. They can insist upon change as a condition of allowing those same orders to operate within their dioceses – as can their brother bishops.
And what of Rome? Where does the Vatican sit in respect of this ‘one church response’? Given the wealth held by Rome surely it’s not too much to ask that this one church to which we have sworn our allegiance every Sunday for so many years might now agree to sell off some of its art, surrender its penchant for ermine-trimmed robes and grandiose exhibitions of wealth in order to ensure redress for the crimes of those who operated in its name.
Perhaps, through such a return to the true Christian values of its founder, we might even witness a renewed and resurgent church, renewed by newfound honesty and humility – and finally able to look to the future.
Colm O’Gorman is the author of Beyond Belief, published by Hodder & Stoughton.
