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THE SATURDAY INTERVIEW:FROM WHERE John O’Shea stood in the early 1970s, the rhythms of life were playing themselves out nicely enough. A signed up, bona fide sport obsessive, he found himself earning a wage from it, firmly ensconced on the back page of the Evening Press. He was recently married and his last job in the coal yard was by now an anecdote. If this was what the future looked like, he’d have been tempted to take it.

As he tells it, it was about this time that his father had a word in his ear and left him with something to mull. “Maybe he was only doing a favour for a friend, a Capuchin priest called Frank O’Leary who was running the Simon Community, or else he genuinely felt I was having too good a time. He suggested to me that I do something for someone else.”