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My brother wanted to travel lighter through life without the burden of his untold story inside him

There were times while writing a book about my brother’s abuse at the hands of a priest when I felt that I just wasn’t up to it, but Gerard inspired me

Brothers Gerard and Damian Gorman. Photograph: Kieran Griffiths

Damian Gorman
Sat Jun 18 2022 - 06:00

In November 1970, in an act of depraved, criminal selfishness, the paedophile priest Malachy Finegan began to abuse 11-year-old Gerard Gorman from Newcastle, Co Down. Gerard is my brother. It took him 40 years to tell another living soul what had happened to him. And, 10 years after that again, he asked me to help him tell his story to the wider world — fully, until he himself thought it had been told properly.

I have said this before, but it remains true: that the first rule in helping someone tell their story — especially a story involving trauma — is not to be a tube, as we used to say when we were young; not to be a tube in thinking that the story is essentially about you. That way lies further hurt as well as untruth, for you end up treating the other person as material. And what do you do with material? You cut it, tear it, stitch it and otherwise do violence as you make something out of it, and call it “yours”. It isn’t. It is the life story of someone else. And your job is to bring what you can to the telling of it, and lay that at the other person’s feet.

What Gerard actually asked me at the end of 2019 was to “do that thing you do for other people”. What he was referring to was work I’d been doing for almost 30 years, to help people bear witness to how they’d experienced conflict in Ireland, the Middle East and other places. In some instances the people had literally incorporated those conflicts, having shrapnel too close to vital organs or a bullet too close to the heart to be removed. This was reality — and not metaphorical reality. You couldn’t be a tube. You could trigger something. The stakes were too high.

Are the stakes any higher when it’s your own brother? No, and yes. No because in helping someone, anyone, tell their story you take on various roles — researcher, interviewer, writer, editor etc — and in each of those roles all that really matters is how well you’re doing the job itself. At the point of writing, for example, all that matters is the writing — not the beauty of your intentions, nor the busy hinterland of your reasons for committing to the work. What matters at the point of writing is only how the writing is taking place. And yet there were times in this process when my “professionalism” was floored; when Gerard would say, for example, “He put something into my bottom. I honestly don’t know if it was his penis or something else,” and I’d think, “This is our Gerard. He was 12.” And he was a very young 12.

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Paedophile priest Malachy Finegan

In the period when he was being abused, as a first-year student in St Colman’s College in Newry, Gerard found a place to hide from Finegan, a place of sanctuary: a little storeroom behind a blackboard, above a chapel. He was later involved in a protracted legal process. In February 2018 he told something of his story in a BBC Spotlight programme Buried Secrets, but he did it in silhouette and under an assumed name, “Patrick”. On reflection, he thought that he was still a small boy hiding. One of his reasons for wanting to do the book was to go up to that storeroom, take his 12-year-old self by the hand and lead him out, assuring him that he couldn’t be hurt any more.

My ambitions were modest, as they should have been. Gerard wanted to tell his story in a book, so it had to be readable. And not only readable, but bearable as a read. The register of the voice, the shape and pace of the narrative, had to be such that it wouldn’t be a purgatory altogether to go through it. Yes, the story was serious — profoundly serious — but there had to be some sense of “breathing space”, some zest and refreshment in the telling. Without that, it could never cross the distance to a stranger.

The voice was the easiest thing to deal with. Gerard put himself through the telling of his story because he wanted it to be heard. And if I didn’t hear it first, sitting right beside him, no one else would. So I listened to him very deeply; I listened for all I was worth. I may not have taken every word, but I took all my “notes” from him; all the story’s “music”.

Gerard’s ambitions were bigger than mine. Apart from those already mentioned, he wanted to change lives, including his own. He wanted to travel lighter through life without the burden of his untold story inside him, and he also wanted to speak to other abused people in the loneliness of their lives — people barely speaking to themselves about what had happened to them. We decided the best way of achieving those aims was to tell his whole life story, rather than just the “abuse story”. In this way we hoped the book would speak to more people, more broadly and more intimately. We’ve all had a life, a journey, an inside story. And while his has been marred by a particular horror — and this is not shied away from — the fact that he was abused at 11 and 12 has not shut every bit of light out of his life. The “whole life” approach allowed us to include some of the craic he’s had; some of the friendships and fun. Because, thank God, you can’t feel hurt every second. Just as you can’t hold your breath forever, even if you want to.

Gerard Gorman as a boy on the book's cover.

As well as trying to make the book bearable for readers, I wanted to make the process of doing it bearable for Gerard. So we took our time. We broke it up. We had plenty of walks, and stops, and slices of cake. We had Patsy Horton — not only a fine publisher, but the best of human beings. Even so, there were times in the making of the book when I felt that I wasn’t the best person for the job — that I just wasn’t up to it. But Gerard inspired me, as I know he will so many others. And three weeks ago we got the book over the line with a launch at Derry’s Playhouse theatre. Archbishop Eamon Martin, the head of the Catholic Church in Ireland, was there. He sat at the back and he listened. It is to the credit of the man that he was there. And a mark of the man our Gerard is that he was invited.

So Young: The Taking of My Life by the Catholic Church by Gerard Gorman, with Damian Gorman, is published by Blackstaff Press. Damian Gorman is a poet and playwright

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