I wanted the priest who abused me as a boy to burn in hell for ever

In his wistfully eloquent memoir, the actor Gabriel Byrne reveals a terrible secret – and how he attempted to confront his tormentor 40 years on...

Despite winning a Golden Globe, an Emmy and a Tony award, actor Gabriel Byrne has long fought the demons of drink and depression. Now he is addressing those troubles in his memoirs, which The Irish Mail on Sunday began serialising last week, and continues with this, the final part.

SURROUNDED by a moat, the Christian Brothers’ School House for Older Boys was a fine old Irish castle from the 13th Century. The ghost of Oliver Cromwell was said to walk its stairways and corridors, and Queen Elizabeth I once slept in the stone chamber where we had our classes. In 1961, when I was ten years old, a curate visited and announced to the class: ‘Boys, I want to talk to you about vocations to the priesthood. A vocation is a word from Latin meaning “to call”.’

God might be calling you, he said. ‘And if he is, you must answer.’ I thought of God trying to get through to me on the phone.

The curate continued: ‘If you listen to the voice deep inside yourself, in quiet moments, you will hear him. To be chosen is the greatest gift any family could have.’

The curate showed us slides of missionaries in straw hats, flying planes, crossing rivers and jungles in faraway countries such as Bolivia, living a life of adventure like they were in The Hotspur comic. He passed photographs around the class: smiling men surrounded by laughing children. I stood under a map of the world, pointing to places I had never heard of: Papua New Guinea, Tobago, Liberia. And sure enough, I began to hear God. It started as a feeling. And it became more and more real and insistent.

The curate gave me a magazine with an article about a seminary in a village near Birmingham, far away in England, which received boys my age who wished to train for the priesthood. There were photographs of them playing snooker and football and of older boys studying in their own rooms, surrounded by shelves of books as sunlight streamed in through the windows.

My own room. In our house I shared a bed with my two brothers, while my three sisters slept together in another room across the hallway.

‘Put up your hands, the boys who would like to follow the Lord. To save the souls of heathens?’

I saw myself, in that moment, on a horse, in a straw hat, a snowcapped blue mountain behind, crossing rivers full of crocodiles, hacking my way through jungle. I raised my hand.

I left for the seminary one night in October. Neighbours and family came to the house to give a little party for my departure. They pressed coins and notes into my hand, miraculous medals to keep me safe for the journey on the night mailboat across the Irish Sea.

My father had promised to be home before I left, but when it came time there was no sign of him. I heard my mother whisper that he couldn’t face saying goodbye, and he’d be in the pub waiting until we were well gone.

I realised for the first time how much I would miss my family. Now I wanted nothing more than to stay, not leave for another country to become a priest at 11 years old.

I thought of my father teaching me to ride a bicycle, how he held on to the saddle as I wobbled the handlebars. How by the fire in the early morning we would listen to the radio, to the fights from Madison Square Garden. Or how he would wake me at dawn to go out in the still-asleep world beyond the town to pluck mushrooms from dewed grass. We’d fill the bucket, then go home to a feast, sizzling in the butter of the pan.

‘We better be off or this fog will be down on us,’ said Mr Lyons, the neighbour who was to drive my mother and me to the boat.

‘Is there any sign of him?’ ‘Perhaps he won’t be able to leave if the fog comes down too thickly.’

Then my father came like a ghost out of the fog, swaying slightly.

He shook my hand, told me to write to my mother because she’d be worrying. I could tell he’d had a few drinks, his voice trying to be light and cheerful.

‘Your tea is on the table,’ my mother said, and he went into the house. She got into the car and it gave a small sigh with her weight. I climbed in beside her.

‘Have you got everything?’ she asked me. And then I remembered my comics and ran back inside the house. Behind the kitchen door, I heard my father weeping.

YOU’RE HIS FAVOURITE. THAT’S WHY YOU SIT IN THE FRONT, SO HE’S NEAR HIS PET

I WAS a seminarian now, on the road to priesthood and a life of prayer, study and discipline.