Books
Death of a Child is an experiential book in which the reader is invited into the minds and hearts of a family devastated by the death of their beloved son and brother, Cathal, in a traffic accident in 1990. Through the voices of the parents and siblings, it explores the many feelings, thoughts and behaviours in their struggle to survive, exist, and finally to live following the tragedy.
It is one of the few books to explore the impact of a deep loss on siblings as well as parents. Sometimes siblings are sidelined as societal sympathy is directed at the bereaved parents. In this book all Cathal’s siblings have a voice and it shows the terror and grief that they, too, suffered. The book uncovers a family slowly and painfully emerging from the darkness and chaos to reach some kind of acceptance and to make the decision to live rather than to merely exist.
The aim of the book is to validate the grief journey of so many others and to offer hope when they feel hopeless.
Available in Ireland and the EU on Amazon.com and in UK on Amazon.co.uk and amazon.com. (Due to Brexit, books produced in England will not be available for some time to Irish purchasers).
The royalties from this book are given to the Children’s Hospital in Crumlin. I have some copies and will give to anybody who has lost a child and contacts me.
Please click on the link below to find out more about this book and download a chapter.
EMERGING FROM THE DARKNESS
THE INCREDIBLE JOURNEY OF A WOMAN OF MORE THAN ORDINARY COURAGE AND HER MANY FACES
Her Daily Struggle with Dissociative Identity Disorder (Multiple Personality Disorder)
This is Volume 1 of a three-volume work on the story of seventy-year-old ‘Margaret,’ who suffered horrific sexual, physical, verbal and emotional abuse by three perpetrators from the age of four until she was twelve years old. Pregnant at such a young age, she was taken for an abortion by one of the perpetrators and her story strongly suggests that the doctor was not only in secret collusion with the paedophiles but was a paedophile himself. All the perpetrators are long dead, but they left her with a lasting legacy of distress in the form of dissociative identity disorder, once known as Multiple Personality Disorder. This serious brain injury results in splits in her personality, known as dissociative or ego parts. She had eighty-seven such parts, each one with its own personality and outlook.
She has been in therapy with me since 2016 and slowly the story of her awful suffering emerged. It is a bleak and shocking story. She is a truly remarkable and courageous woman, who despite the appalling abuse, triumphed as a caring person and mother. Despite her constant suffering from anxiety and depression she functioned very well as a worker and held a responsible job.
This book has several interlinking aims. Firstly, it is to show how very difficult the life of a person with structural dissociation is on a daily or weekly basis over a long number of years and the struggle it brings to therapy. Its other purpose is to give courage to those who suffer from this debilitating complaint and to show that, with perseverance and patience on the part of the client and the therapist, a good degree of peace can be achieved. By early 2022 Margaret was sporadically beginning to experience this peace.
This book is unique because it tracks the daily life of a woman with DID over many years in great detail. I counselled Margaret on a weekly basis and received hundreds of emails to supplement the face-to-face therapy. These are all recorded in the book.
Margaret was unfortunate, because not only did her personality split from brutal and regular childhood sexual, emotional, physical and financial abuse, but as a young adult, she met and married an emotionally and financially abusive individual. To compound her adult abusive experiences, she married into a farm and suffered ongoing emotional and financial abuse at the hands of her parents-in-law. In short, Margaret suffered abuse practically all of her life. As she struggled with a lifetime of abuse, her twelve-year-old son, who had a serious heart complaint, became ill and died. The fact that she has survived and functioned as a good parent and a competent employee is a miracle.
I hope you find the story as interesting and moving as I did.
This book is available on Amazon.com. It is available in UK on Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com. (Due to Brexit, books produced in England will not be availablefor some time to Irish purchasers).
Understanding and Healing the Hurts of Childhood(2018)
It is difficult to believe that childhood largely dictates how our adult life will be. The seeds are sown from very early childhood before conscious memory begins, and, therefore, in a counselling setting it can take months for the adult to make the connections between childhood and adulthood. It can be challenging to realise that what determines how we will be later in life is the nature of the attachment we have to our parents or caregivers from birth onwards.
Attachment is a psychological term, and a secure attachment is an intense and unique relationship that forms a lifelong bond. The person that the child forms the bond with is known as the attachment figure. An insecure attachment, on the other hand, is the opposite, where no bond or a very weak one is formed, and from that comes many of the painful issues that beset us in adulthood. This book examines some of these wounds and shows how we can heal them. It explores fear, anger and jealousy and many other stresses related to these, which are outlined throughout the book.
This book is not meant to be a criticism of parents or caregivers. We do our best as parents, but we must face the reality that our best is not always enough. We are human, but our most important role in life is to properly nurture our children. We don’t have to be award-winning parents; we only need to be good enough. Unfortunately, some of us fail to be good enough.
This book is available on Amazon.com
Abuse – Domestic Violence, Workplace and School Bullying – Cork University Press, Cork, Ireland 2011. Available from Cork University Press, Amazon and all major bookshops.
The book looks at five types of abuse – physical, emotional/psychological/mental, verbal, sexual, and financial/economic, which will be examined in the context of intimate relationships. Bullying in the workplace, which can contain all of these types of abuse, is also explored. While there is a chapter on child abuse, the book mainly focuses on adult victims and highlights the harrowing behaviours of abusers. It looks at the concept of boundaries, which are breached by abusive behaviours, and examines the abusive personality, how the abuser thinks, and the importance of childhood issues in shaping the abusive personality. Finally, the book outlines the concept of leaving an abusive relationship, and what to do when that decision is made. It ends with a chapter challenging abusive people to change their behaviours.
I’ll Meet You at the Roundy O (2018)
This novel is an account of a world long forgotten. In a humorous and entertaining way, it looks at aspects of life in a small parish in rural Ireland in 1950s and 1960s. It is a fictional work based on fact, and the protagonists are mainly people struggling with poverty.
Parts of the novel revolve around five youths, who formed a gang from a very early age, and how they interacted with the adults of the time. The novel also shows how the youth of the time developed, growing from childhood to adolescence to young adulthood, how their sexuality formed, and how inhibited they were in their romantic relationships. The incidents in the novel are fictionalised, but many are based on what happened in real life and bring to life what it was like to live at that time.
This book is available on Amazon.com
Priest, Politics and Society in Post-famine Ireland – Wolfhound Press, Dublin & Humanities Press, New Jersey, 1983.
This was the first in-depth study of the role of the Irish priests in Irish political life, and shows the wide-ranging and crucial role they played in the political and social movements in post-Famine Ireland. The book also looks at the level of vocations, the education of the priests, and the extent of Mass going in pre-Famine Ireland. It focuses on Co. Tipperary, and this facilitates a study of great depth.
Available from Kennys and Amazon..
Prince of Swindlers. John Sadleir M.P. 1813-1856 – Geography Publications, Dublin, 1999.
This is the extraordinary story of the rise and fall of John Sadleir. Scion of a Catholic gentry family, Sadleir was educated at Clongowes, became a solicitor, Member of Parliament, newspaper proprietor, defender of the Catholic faith, and above all a speculator in votes, land, railways and banks. Unfortunately, he became one of the biggest swindlers of the Nineteenth Century, bringing misery to thousands of people who trusted him. He lies in an unmarked grave in Highgate Cemetery.
Available from Geography Publications, Bookworm (Thurles) and Amazon.
