'I found an ape wrestling with my mother in her nightie'

Malachi O'Doherty's new book is the product of growing up with the Christian Brothers, living through the Troubles and spending three years with a swami, he tells Pól Ó Muirí

Malachi O'Doherty: journalist, broadcaster, author and, um, former disciple of a Hindu swami. Few people will not recognise the first three descriptions of O'Doherty. A regular contributor to BBC Radio Ulster, columnist with the Belfast Telegraph and author of The Trouble With Guns, a forensic dismantling of the IRA's campaign, O'Doherty is a well-established, instantly recognisable figure in Northern Ireland journalism.

Born in Belfast in 1951, he belongs to a generation for which "west" Belfast was simply a geographical, not philosophical, distinction. That distinctiveness and difference of belonging is evident in his latest book, I Was A Teenage Catholic. It is a fun title, he says, although fun is not the most complete description for what is within: O'Doherty has taken on God in a frank, compelling and committed dialogue.

Why? It's about "being middle-aged and facing one's own mortality", he says. He was struck by how strongly his religious teaching and upbringing were embedded in him, even though he had long since abandoned Catholicism. "It usually happens that the things that are impressed upon you heavily at school are things which you have an aversion to in later life, not that you have a lingering, unspecific, even sentimental attachment to."

The Catholicism of his early childhood and teens was the toxic tradition of pre-Vatican II, "fundamentalist and dogmatic". "The liberalising thinking which was going to bring the whole thing down in a heap, and which was going to end the religious orders, was something I didn't have an inkling of at the time I left the Christian Brothers."

The Christian Brothers' reputation in Belfast was every bit as fearsome as it was in other parts of Ireland. For O'Doherty they ranged from those who instinctively loved children to those who were extremely brutal and whose only interest was to "keep thrashing these boys and get them through maths".

O'Doherty finished school and began his journey into adulthood in the late 1960s; it was a journey that was to take a different route to many of his contemporaries. "I wanted to play, I wanted to make up for lost time," he says - crawl out from the shadow of discipline, self- restraint and denial that the Christian Brothers had cast over him.

Time for play was short enough. Violence overtook Northern Ireland in 1969, and O'Doherty found himself being caught up in it like everyone else. It is a period that has been misrepresented, he says. There was fault on both sides. In one brush with the British army O'Doherty deliberately provoked a foot patrol. The soldiers broke into his home; O'Doherty came out of his room to find an "ape wrestling with my mother in her nightie. I felt ashamed".

But whereas many of his contemporaries used (and were encouraged to use) such incidents to join the IRA, O'Doherty had a different emotional response. "I thought, this is my fault, not, I'm going to stalk this guy to the ends of the earth and gun him down."

He still finds the events of the era confusing. "The boys who became the Provos were the ones who didn't stay on at school." One of the Christian Brothers who taught him visited the Maze after internment and found "the boys he had known at school, who had been difficult to discipline in school, who had no interest in learning Irish, who didn't say their prayers respectfully, who bunked off school, who smoked in the yard - and there they were, saying the rosary in Irish or singing Báidín Fheilimí. I'm bewildered by it".

He completed a journalism course, began working and distanced himself even more from the Christian Brothers' teachings by experimenting with drugs. "I was smoking a lot of cannabis, taking LSD occasionally, taking opium occasionally."

It's a startling admission. Northerners didn't do drugs, sex and rock 'n' roll in the 1970s. They did violence. But not O'Doherty, who sums up his experiences as being "stoned listening to a Yes album, reading the Gita and being sure it was wisdom".

He went to India in 1975, becoming a disciple of a Hindu swami for three years. "I suppose what I was looking for was the complete opposite of what I'd grown up in. The inclination to go to India was fostered by that awaking of spiritual questions, informed in some measure by hallucinogenic experience."

Once in India he forswore drugs, led a celibate life and practised disciplined yoga. "I had become a good boy again. I now had someone standing over me."

He grew his hair to his elbows, didn't wear shoes and slept on the floor. That period marked him deeply. "My years in India were spent just sitting down, thinking and dwelling on things over and over again."

Returning to Belfast in the late 1970s, he found himself at odds with his surroundings. The political and cultural landscapes were even more fractured than when he had left, and the sectarian impulses did not sit easily with him. While his contemporaries had been stripping down AK-47s he had been stripping down his soul.

Readjusting was not easy. "I was back from India but my head wasn't back. The culture shock for me wasn't India, it was coming back home. I don't think I fitted in very well for a couple of years. It was a fairly traumatic transition. The impact of India had been very, very strong.

"The fact is that meditation had really, really profoundly shaken me up and left me with the recollection of experiences which I could hardly describe - and so I didn't talk about them."

During the early 1980s he did "bits and bobs of journalism" and drifted abroad again, only to return in 1983 and to re- establish himself. His initial concern that he had left it too late to make a mark in his "vocation" proved unfounded. He soon developed a reputation as an authoritative and courageous commentator.

Family bereavements gave his spiritual interrogation a continued urgency. Talking to his mother, he discovered that she had been "letting on" that she had been attending Mass. She hadn't gone over a period of years and rediscovered her faith only before her death.

He was overcome by "an awakening of religious feeling, of religious sentiment" at his father's funeral and started writing the book as "a proof that you don't get away from these questions".

Although he subscribes to no theology he defends the freedom to believe. "We live in a context that we don't understand. We have self-consciousness, examine ourselves, and yet we die. Religion is an effort of the imagination to comprehend what we can't comprehend. I would not take those imaginative tools away from people - and I would use them myself.

"I am not a Catholic; I don't have a theology. All I defend is the right to recognise that the questions are there and the right to ply my imagination around them to my own satisfaction." And to that of his readers.

I Was A Teenage Catholic by Malachi O'Doherty is published by Marino Press