It was my mother who ushered me away from childhood sectarian leanings in bigotry-blighted Ballymena during the mid-1970s.
She was, not surprisingly, an influential role model.
This is the woman whom I once saw embrace both the Rev Ian Paisley (our family home was next door to his father’s church and backed onto the manse) and Cardinal Cahal Daly (her childhood friend from Loughguile) on the same day.
She brought us up to believe you can be devout within your own particular strand of Christianity, while displaying empathy and respect to those espousing a different one.
Unfortunately for her, any devotion this onetime altar boy had garnered as a kid lapsed long before my teenage years ended, partly fuelled by rumours of paedophilic priests supposedly operating in places far enough away from Ballymena.
One of these cockroaches, however, crawled into our home after my mother’s passing and prior to conducting her funeral.
Obviously we didn’t know it at the time; the trauma came four months later when this debauched, depraved creature — that’s you, Daniel Curran — was charged with indecently assaulting two young boys at his house.
This was followed by similar charges involving nine others aged between 11 and 14, and a subsequent seven-year jail sentence — the first of several convictions as the poisonous, Savile-style drip-feed gamut of Curran’s depravity over several decades emerged.
None of that relatively welcome news removed the psychological stain this deviant left on us but, frankly, it’s nothing in comparison to what Curran’s many victims suffered, and has no doubt continued to haunt them.
There remains, nevertheless, an indelible feeling of violation, even for those like me who wouldn’t think of placing themselves anywhere near the same level of victimhood as those who suffered sexual abuse, yet can still feel duped and maligned by creeps like Curran.
That mephitic dog in a dog collar was in our midst at my family’s most vulnerable time, offering sympathy, piety and prayers for the repose of a decent, respectable, popular and God-fearing woman, even when he was busy wrecking young lives elsewhere.
It’s something I recall with remorse when my mum’s anniversary comes round every November, but it also came to mind last week when reading about how Stephen Mccullagh had been a regular visitor to the shattered home of Natalie Mcnally’s dignified, grieving family, having brutally murdered the 32-year-old.
He inveigled himself into their irreversibly devastated lives, being unwittingly welcomed as the father of pregnant girlfriend Natalie’s child and therefore someone supposedly suffering similar loss and anguish.
By appearing heartbroken, these debased fiends install themselves as victims rather than suspects, with appearances at wakes, vigils and funerals part of their sociopathic, de haut en bas pursuit of control.
As someone with a daughter I love more than life itself, I can only begin to imagine what the McNallys were already going through, without having to subsequently deal with the callous, murdering b ***** d himself hiding in plain sight — and lurking, knowingly, in their house.
These rancid individuals are the dregs of the sewers, and Mccullagh’s hardly the first to prey on a victim’s family for his own depraved ends.
Think, for instance, of the recently deceased Ian Huntley, murderer of 10-year-olds Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman and who, as school caretaker, engaged with the national media, purporting to be a concerned member of a shocked community, having already disposed of the bodies of his innocent young victims in the most undignified of ways.
Perhaps, in the throes of the brutal and ultimately lethal attack on him in HMP Frankland last month, that scumbag finally grasped the profound meaning in Matthew 26:52: “all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword”.
The UK’S most prolific serial killer, Dr Harold Shipman, took morbid pleasure in exploiting the grief of his victims’ families.
He was an insatiable narcissist who enjoyed playing God, often killing patients before ‘comforting’ their relatives, having insisted on being the one to inform them of the death.
In keeping with that ‘spirit’, police ensured that those bereaved by Shipman’s breathtaking litany of crime were among the first to be told that this cold-blooded impenitent monster had hanged himself in Wakefield Prison.
Daniel Curran wasn’t a murderer, but nevertheless revealed himself to be an arrogant, apathetic, emotionless destroyer of people’s lives.
Those who knew this lowlife described him as a loner who rarely associated with fellow clergy — apart from another notorious paedophile priest, Brendan Smyth — but preferred to regularly feed both his alcohol habit and voracious sexual appetite for vulnerable young boys.
He told police that, due to heavy drinking sessions, he struggled to remember who many of his victims were.
Unfortunately, they will never forget him. Neither did my father, who’d already gone off “Fr Curran” long before my mum’s funeral, following what he saw as the priest’s agitated, apathetic emergency bedside performance of the last rites to his beloved wife of 40 years.
As Dad would later ask: “I’m wondering what other plans he was forced to cancel that night.”
‘Daniel Curran was not a murderer, but was nevertheless a detached destroyer of young lives’