Exploring abuse: Michael Harding’s The Kiss

“Inside the mind of a paedophile,” said the headline last Sunday (May 2). The article, by the Sunday Tribune’s Ali Bracken, told the story of the serial abuse of children by the California-based Irish priest, Oliver O’Grady – in his own words.

It was “the affection of the hugging,” that O’Grady particularly enjoyed; it “awakened within me urges to be affectionate in return.” When an altar boy he liked, aged ten or eleven, arrived at the sacristy, he said, “I might go over and give him a hug, and if he responded by allowing me to hug him and offered to hug me in return, that sort of gave me permission to continue at that point.”

Irish theatre, child abuse, and The Kiss

“Inside the mind of a paedophile,” said the headline last Sunday. The article, by the Sunday Tribune’s Ali Bracken, told the story of the serial abuse of children by the California-based Irish priest, Oliver O’Grady – in his own words.

It was “the affection of the hugging,” that O’Grady particularly enjoyed; it “awakened within me urges to be affectionate in return.” When an altar boy he liked, aged ten or eleven, arrived at the sacristy, he said, “I might go over and give him a hug, and if he responded by allowing me to hug him and offered to hug me in return, that sort of gave me permission to continue at that point.”

The Evidence I Shall Give at the Abbey

One day at the dawn of the 1960s, a remarkable script landed on the desk of the director of the Abbey Theatre, Ernest Blythe.

Blythe was in his 70s. He had retired from politics almost 30 years earlier, and had been managing director of the Abbey for 20. His was a staid directorship, and the Abbey survived his reign on a diet of “forgettable and now forgotten farce, melodrama, and Irish-language pantomimes,” as the Dictionary of Irish Biography pithily records.

But this play was to be different. It was by a judge, first of all: Richard Johnson of the District Court, Tralee. And it tackled an issue of then rising controversy: the breaking up of families by the state-supported system of industrial schools, orphanages and reformatories.