The God Squad

Andrew Madden — the bestselling author of ‘Altar Boy’ — anxiously waits to see what comes of this week’s report into Church sex abuse in Dublin . . . and wonders will his years of patience be justified

By ANDREW MADDEN

Saturday July 25 2009

Back in early 1998 I naively thought that all I needed to do was write to then Taoiseach Bertie Ahern pointing out that there was by then enough information in the public domain to justify an inquiry into the practice within the Catholic Church of moving paedophile priests onto new parishes in Dublin.

I couldn’t have been more wrong — Taoiseach Ahern was not in the slightest bit interested, telling me that the Church was not an organisation that the State could investigate and that the State could only have inquiries into matters of urgent public concern.

I remember being so disappointed that our relatively young new Taoiseach could have such a backward out-of-date reaction to an issue I was sure would never go away until it was properly addressed. Once I had gone public about my experiences as a child and had also told everyone in Ireland that I had been compensated, surely others would come forward to reveal similar experiences and demand similar redress — I wasn’t wrong about that.

I wrote to everyone I could think of then, the INTO, Amnesty International, the Rape Crisis Centre, to name but a few, asking them to write to the Taoiseach supporting my call for an inquiry. I felt, then, that as a child I had not stood up for myself, defended myself against a grown man who had abused me and his position, and as an adult I had just about enough of taking bullshit from people.

Turning things around had begun in 1991 when I found a solicitor to represent me in seeking compensation from Father Ivan Payne. This was the first step in saying that what had happened to me as a child was not okay and I was going to do something about it.

In 1994 I started to move information about my case into the public domain because I was concerned that Fr Payne was still a priest in Sutton and I also felt that other people who may have been abused by him or others were entitled to know that a precedent had been set.

That was a big step but I was becoming stronger as a person albeit starting from a very low point. Even as an adult I hadn’t been great at standing up for myself in work situations, for example, and being an active alcoholic didn’t help — it further robbed me of the ability to develop good interpersonal skills and develop and mature properly as an adult.

But I was finding the strength somewhere and I liked it. In 1997 I went into recovery for my alcoholism and haven’t had an alcoholic drink since.