Cake and coffee with Pat Buckley, a whistleblower; ex-priest; newspaper columnist; gay rights activist; HIV activist; husband; and the scourge, in his own words, ‘of everyone’.
‘WANKER’ is printed in blue biro beneath Pat Buckley’s name in the Maynooth University copy of his memoir, A Thorn in the Side.
This June, he was meant to celebrate his 48th year as a priest. For almost 40 of those years Buckley conducted independent ministry from his oratory in Larne, a port town 20 miles north of Belfast. In 1998, he was consecrated bishop by another religious exile, Bishop Michael Cox, and for this, both men were excommunicated.
Buckley was a bundle of contradictory positions and guises. In his 72 years he led dozens of lives: a socialist; seminarian; chamber pot chucker; Catholic priest; civil rights activist; whistle-blower; ex-priest; independent bishop; News of the World columnist; tabloid phone-tapping victim; performer of sham marriages; defender of immigrants (through said sham marriages); squatter; blogger; community archivist; media darling; bête noire; gay rights activist; HIV activist; memoirist; husband and the scourge, in his own words, ‘of everyone’.
I visited Buckley in Larne toward the end of 2023. He ministered from the same parochial house he was sent to in the 1980s, later coming to share the place with his chef husband, Eduardo. The oratory is one in a line of pretty, grey, pebble-dashed semi-detached houses on Princes Gardens. ‘If you’re going to squat, squat in a good one,’ Buckley told me, handing over a slice of Christmas cake. He was in clerical dress. A large portrait alongside his late mother, Josephine ( ‘Jo-Jo’), taken at his consecration, hung on the wall.
Buckley’s story begins in earnest in 1978, when he was posted to St Peter’s, the cathedral church of the Archdiocese of Down and Connor, just off Belfast’s Lower Falls Road – a parish that suffered some of the worst violence of the Troubles. ‘It was a bit like walking on the moon,’ he said, describing his first moments in his new parish.
Buckley was 26 years old and two years a priest. This was his third diocese. His congregation was drawn from the soon-to-be-infamous Divis Flats housing project opposite the cathedral. The contrast between his own life and that of his parishioners shocked him. A decade old when Buckley arrived, the flats were already a symbol of segregation. Built in a fit of 1960s optimism, the development aimed to rehouse residents from the disintegrating terraces of the Lower Falls. The community was to enter ‘the adventure of high-rise living’ – or so the project was sold by their MP.
The apartments proved to be worse than the traditional terraces. They might have had indoor toilets, but the rooms were tiny and plagued with insufficient heating, poor plumbing and black mould. Rubbish accumulated rapidly, filling an outdoor swimming pool intended for the local children. There was no way out.
By the time of Buckley’s arrival, Divis was synonymous with poverty and paramilitary control. Unemployment was chronic, with Catholics two and a half times less likely to be in work than Protestants. Photographs taken at the time show paramilitaries and British soldiers sheltering between the same blocks of concrete. In one such image, a mural is visible behind a mechanic. Pausing his work on a car, cigarette between his lips, it spells out: ‘IRSP – INLA ROLL OF HONOUR’.
Amid the violence, the British Army had an observation post on the top of the 20-floor Divis Tower, accessible only by helicopter as the rest of the building was under the control of paramilitaries. Eventually, the army took over the final two floors, staying for 20 years – by the end of their occupation, they had their own designated lift. ‘We lived under their observation,’ Buckley said, ‘all day every day.’
All factions – paramilitaries, police, army – did ‘terrible things’, he recalled. He witnessed three deaths first hand: a young man and two children killed in a bombing by the Irish National Liberation Army. The young man was shot by a British sniper atop Divis Tower. Buckley called an ambulance. Halfway to the hospital, the ambulance was stopped: soldiers, again. ‘I said to the guy in charge, “that man is dying,”’ Buckley recalls. His answer: ‘That’s the idea, mate.’
Buckley was emphatic that ‘his mission’ required he pray with and for anyone. During the 1981 hunger strike, which sought the restoration of political prisoner status to those jailed in the H Blocks, Buckley said Mass in the Maze prison. He engaged in long, spiritual conversations with Bobby Sands, the first of the ten strikers to die. ‘He was very confident about opening his eyes and the Lord being OK with it,’ Buckley told me, relaying Sands’ premonition of his own death. At St Peter’s, Buckley said rosaries with the mothers of the hunger strikers, privately worrying that his actions might be ‘misconstrued as me praying for terrorists’. ‘God is not in the business of throwing people out of his family,’ he explained. ‘The fact that the church does it means there’s something wrong.’
It was true that there was a lot of darkness during these years. But there was also joy, Buckley emphasised, recalling birthdays, weddings, even funerals. ‘It wasn’t all depression.’ He refused to accept a single narrative of Divis Flats and, by extension, the suffocating, cartoonish version of Northern Ireland that persists even now.
But where could he start when there was, in his own words, ‘so much wrong’ around him?
One day in the summer of 1982 he had an idea, a tiny gesture of resistance: a broom. He started to clean. At first, his parishioners resisted: ‘You can’t sweep the streets, Father, your hands are anointed.’
‘Yes,’ he replied, ‘they were anointed, but they were anointed for service.’
Within days, 500 residents had gathered to sweep up the streets alongside Buckley. Next, they painted over the graffiti. The place looked so renewed that one visiting gas engineer, assuming he’d driven to the wrong estate, turned back around and returned to his depot. Buckley arranged for an RTÉ team to document their work, and the group set up the Divis Flats Residents Association. To celebrate, the residents organised a festival with bands, music and parties. Buckley persuaded the local police to hang back until it was over.
‘I think I can start by trying to bring a bit of hope,’ he told me, remembering how he felt back in his dungarees on that first morning of the clean-up. ‘Because hope is the beginning, perhaps, of a lot more.’
He didn’t know it then, but this was to be Buckley’s final summer at St Peter’s. He had already clashed with the local clergy over his handling of the hunger strike, and he had other unusual ways of dealing with problems that had also got him in trouble. Pragmatic to the point of eccentricity, he sourced an illegal master key from ‘reformed’ joyriders to return stolen cars. Now, the impromptu festival at Divis had drawn attention to his idiosyncratic ministry. He was swiftly moved from Divis to Kilkeel, a port town just beneath the blueish range of the Mourne Mountains.
The newspapers offered a different story. A headline in the Irish Examiner in late January 1983 read, ‘ANTI-TERROR PRIESTS MOVED’, quoting the local bishop’s statement that Buckley needed ‘a rest’. In Kilkeel, Buckley continued to be visited by the Troubles: held up at gunpoint by his own masked parishioners as he supervised a disco, and subjected to systematic intimidation by the Ulster Defence Regiment as he tried to give Mass.
Frustrated by all channels of complaint (the local police, the Church), Buckley’s name began to appear regularly in the papers: ‘Priest challenges hierarchy’, ‘controversial priest’, ‘rebel priest’. It seems likely that Buckley leaked stories. He wanted the Church to take leadership on the ongoing violence, rather than ‘simply condemning atrocities as they happen’. But to do so would be to take a position in a fraught sectarian conflict, going against the Church’s claim to neutrality.
Buckley was part of a generation of priests influenced by liberation theology, a Marxist approach which originated in Latin America in response to appalling socio-economic inequality. This generation, reading the Bible from the position of the oppressed, were sure that the strictures of the church would be loosened by the shifting social mores.
His rebellious streak and religious calling were inextricable, both emerging at a young age. His sincere early faith co-existed with a distrust of institutional authority, inherited from his father, Jim, who took Pat to picket lines from a young age. He brought these convictions into the priesthood – in 1986 he even attempted to form a union for priests and nuns. His track record of insubordination began when he was a seminarian. During his time at his first seminary, Clonliffe College, Dublin, he made loud jokes about bishops, and posted the Dean a pair of women’s tights with ‘Seamus, we love you’ emblazoned across the arse. He was kicked out for throwing a chamber pot out of a window.
Larne was, in a strange way, the perfect next parish for a man who had always leaned into conflict, with its history of gunrunning, its Democratic Unionist MP Sammy Wilson, and its enormous July celebration for the Battle of the Boyne (when the Protestant King William took victory over Catholic King James).
If the position in Larne was intended as a penalty for Buckley, it was a crudely constructed one. In his first week, loyalist gunmen were sent to his house. Luckily, he was out. The police provided Buckley with a pistol and two days of firearms training. He was unfazed, embarking on a programme of his own making of cross-community church visits. This went well, until Ian Paisley got wind that Father Pat had visited his Free Church. Another public spat followed.
This was not the quiet ministry his diocese had imagined. They called Buckley to their office with an ultimatum: conform or be dismissed. Buckley refused, accusing them of not ‘faithfully representing God’. As he told a BBC interviewer, he did not believe in ‘blind and stupid obedience’.
Buckley also refused to leave the presbytery, betting that the Church could not weather the embarrassment of calling in the Royal Ulster Constabulary to evict him. He settled and was elected as a councillor, holding office from 1989–93. In 2012 he earned squatters rights to the oratory through the courts.
His independent ministry had a core mission: liberation from shame. ‘We are calling beautiful things “dirty”’, he told me, when discussing his book on sexuality (‘This one was really controversial,’ he smiled). His own liturgy contains a grace prayer to read aloud before sex. As he put it, ‘even atheists shout ‘oh God’ at the time of orgasm’.
Before his death, aged 72, on 17 May this year, Pat was kept busy with weddings and his blog. He married those who had been refused by the Church, with many Travellers, divorcees and same-sex couples passing through his doors. He was also convicted of performing 14 sham marriages for illegal immigrants. His defence: ministering to evade the UK’s increasingly hostile attitude to newcomers.
Pat’s personal blog provides another singular arm of his ministry, with its own complex network of nicknames, contributors and characters. He wrote in all caps, with short paragraphs, salacious headlines, prurient details and regular memes – Buckley’s stylistic brand of vigilante justice.
I found it hard to reconcile the angry, bitter tone of the blog with the kind, soft-spoken man who served me Christmas cake. I suspect that the rage of the blog was mollifying for those who have suffered the worst harms of the Church, a witness to its cruelness and its contradictions. The blog’s tagline, with its coy double-meaning, now serves as an epitaph: ‘The truth will set you free, even if the truth is revolting.’
