MICHAEL was an altar boy in a Wicklow village when Father Joe (not their real names) arrived in the parish in 1974. Michael remembers that a couple of weeks after they met, the curate started bringing him to his home on Friday and Sunday evenings after the boy had served Mass.
"On the first occasion when I can remember being abused I was sitting in the sitting room of Father Joe's home. I remember him asking me to sit on his knee. I was only about 10 years old at the time. I sat on his knee and I remember him kissing me and putting his tongue into my mouth.
He brought me into his bedroom where he actually undressed me and undressed himself. We both got into his bed. I can remember him performing oral sex on me on this occasion.
He asked me to do the same on him but I refused. He would then lie on top of me.
These kinds of acts went on most Friday and Sunday evenings for the next three years, "month after month, year after year, with perhaps short breaks at holiday times".
"I went along with it because of my young age and because I still looked up to him, despite what he was doing to me," says Michael. "I was reared in a very strong Catholic family. That was also why I couldn't tell my parents . . . They would have killed me if I'd said anything like that against a priest.
Michael also remembers being invited to stay the weekend in the house of an acquaintance of Father Joe's, in a working class parish in west Dublin. This man has since left the priesthood. Michael still remembers the colour and number plate of his car when he came to collect him and another boy.
This priest insisted that Michael should sleep in the same bed as him. During the night he woke to find his pyjama trousers had been removed and the priest was lying on top of him. The following night Michael insisted on sleeping on the fold up bed where the other boy had been the night before.
A few months later similar events took place in the west Dublin priest's house. Between six months and a year after this, Michael was one of 10 or 12 altar boys brought by Father Joe and the west Dublin priest on a camping trip to Kerry. Again, the second priest insisted he should sleep beside him in the tent.
During the night Michael woke to find his sleeping bag had been pulled down and the priest was fondling his penis. At no time, he says, was any force used against him he "felt obliged to participate in these sexual acts" because of his respect for the two priests.
Sometime in 1977, at the age of 13, he stopped being an altar boy, and his visits to Father Joe's house ended.
That was the last he heard from the priest until December 1993, when he received a Christmas card from him and a request to meet him to "talk about old times". Michael ignored this and a follow up letter but the priest obtained his new address from a relative and wrote again looking for Michael's forgiveness and asking him to telephone him.
They arranged to meet in a Dublin suburb, where the priest was a curate, towards the end of 1994. Michael told him he was unemployed and separated from his wife and two children. He says the priest again asked forgiveness for "what I did to you all those years ago" and he forgave him.
Their conversation then centred on how Michael could get back into employment. Michael says he told the priest he wanted to buy a taxi, and the priest offered him £5,000. He says he received the money a couple of months later as a bank draft from the priest's building society.
A short time after this, Michael says, he had a row with his estranged wife, and for the first time revealed the sex abuse against him by the two priests. His wife wanted him to report the matter to the Garda but he said he had promised Father Joe he would not take it any further.
Shortly after this conversation, Michael says, he phoned Father Joe to put to him his wife's suggestion that the priest should report the instances of sex abuse to the Archbishop of Dublin, Dr Connell. "He refused to do so and cried on the telephone, stating that he was finished if he did."
Michael says that during this conversation he emphasised the trauma the abuse had had on his marriage, and Father Joe had offered to give his wife £7,000. Later, Father Joe gave him an envelope containing a bank draft, saying "he didn't begrudge her the money and she had it with his blessing".
Michael remembers the priest saying: "I hope I won't be hearing any more about this." He himself says: "I had been telling him from day one that I wasn't taking it any further."
However, despite reluctantly accepting the cheque, Michael says his wife continued to insist that Father Joe's history of abuse should be revealed. In September 1995, Michael says, he rang the priest again to try to persuade him to report the abuse to the archbishop. "He cried and said `I'll be finished if I do'.
"He then became abusive and said I was trying to blackmail him. I said that money didn't come into it and I had promised him already that I wouldn't take it any further. But I still insisted that he needed help especially if he wanted, as he said he did, to go on the missions."
At the end of this conversation, Father Joe offered to make payments to Michael's two children. In a follow up call, they had a discussion about whether the payments should be delayed until the children were 18 or 21, and agreed, at Michael's insistence, on the latter. The total promised, in annual instalments of £1,000 and £3,000, was £19,000, says Michael. In the event, no more money changed hands.
The following month Michael finally went to the Garda and made a statement about the abuse. "I broke my promise to him, but he broke a much more important promise to me with all the sexual abuse he gave me. In the end I couldn't keep quiet. I said to myself. . . that if someone comes along in two years and says he was abused, too, I would not be able to forgive myself."
Michael also spoke to a Dublin solicitor, Mr Julian Deale, and asked him to take a case for compensation against the Catholic Church. An exchange of correspondence followed, effectively ending last February with a letter from the Archbishop of Dublin's solicitors, Arthur O'Hagan, saying that since Dr Connell "does not consider he has a legal liability and has been so advised by ourselves, the question of paying compensation does not arise".
Michael also sought help from an Eastern Health Board social worker. The social worker wrote to the Dublin diocesan chancellor, Mgr Alex Stenson, who deals with most child sex abuse allegations in the diocese, requesting counselling for him. In the event, Michael's solicitor advised him to refuse the resulting offer of counselling at the church approved Granada Institute in Dublin.
Perhaps surprisingly, Michael is still a very strong Catholic. In this whole business I went through stages of not wanting to harm the church. I have no time for priests now, but I still go to Mass, Communion and confession and say my prayers".