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.
In 1948, in a global effort to ensure that the inhumanity of the Second World War would never happen again, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR)was passed and adopted by the United Nations without a single dissenting voice.
Colm O’Gorman, Executive Director of Amnesty International Irish Section, in association with RTE Radio 1’s Drivetime programme, broadcast a series of radio columns, one dedicated to each article of the Declaration, to bring this historical and foundational document to life, demonstrating how central and relevant it is to our everyday lives.
Article 26: Everyone has the right to education and to free primary education
Our Constitution says that the state has a responsibility to provide for education. That is to provide for, but not to provide. After attending a local school fundraiser, Colm O’Gorman asks why we don’t demand that the state lives up to a higher responsibility and ensures that every child is entitled to, and receives, the highest possible standard of education.
Colm O'Gorman
In 1948, in a global effort to ensure that the inhumanity of the Second World War would never happen again, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR)was passed and adopted by the United Nations without a single dissenting voice.
Colm O’Gorman, Executive Director of Amnesty International Irish Section, in association with RTE Radio 1’s Drivetime programme, broadcast a series of radio columns, one dedicated to each article of the Declaration, to bring this historical and foundational document to life, demonstrating how central and relevant it is to our everyday lives.
Eleanor Roosevelt once said that human rights begin in ‘small places’. In the first of a series of Drivetime radio columns celebrating the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), Colm O’Gorman introduces the UDHR and explains how our human rights begin in the home, the school, the hospital and our local community.
Colm O'Gorman
