BELFAST (NORTH IRELAND)
Belfast Telegraph
Dec. 9, 2019
By Helen Carson
Fermanagh-born cleric Father Brian D’Arcy says the time was right for his tell-all memoir which reveals how he was sexually abused in the church as a young boy, and again as a teen.
The 74-year-old priest, whose book It Has To Be Said is now on sale, tells how he suffered clerical sexual abuse but had to wait until the perpetrators had died before he could unmask them.
The 400-page book also documents how the veteran broadcaster and author, who is often dubbed ‘the showbiz priest’, influenced Father Ted actor Dermot Morgan’s portrayal of his most famous TV role as the hapless Craggy Island cleric.
The Crossgar-based priest also tells how he played a key role in the Northern Ireland peace process by smuggling letters to key loyalists from former Taoiseach Albert Reynolds, who he had been friends with during the showband era in Ireland.
And amid the most shocking revelations about clerical sexual abuse, Father D’Arcy admits struggling all his life to deal with the trauma of the assaults.
“Many of the stories in the book couldn’t have been written (previously) because many of the people were still alive,” he explains. “The story was worth telling. Now I can tell it with greater freedom.”
The importance of setting the record straight in his 70s was also an issue for the priest: “I’m getting to an age where I could wake up dead tomorrow, or my memory would go, so I had to sit down and do it.”
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