Can a man be raised from the dead? That is the question being posed by a religious revival in Northern Ireland that threatens to turn Tigers Bay into the Protestant equivalent of Lourdes.

This is one of the most deprived areas of north Belfast, a loyalist working-class enclave whose community spirit has been sorely challenged by the ravages of drugs, unemployment and poverty. For the past five weeks, Tigers Bay seems to have become a place of miracles, with almost medieval expressions of religious fervour linked to a revival campaign that originates in Florida.

A dead man, it is claimed, came back to life and is now able to give newspaper interviews. This is thanks to a prayer campaign supported, it is said, by up to 130m people. Every night less dramatic ailments, such as chronic fatigue syndrome, alcoholism and neck pain, are being “cured” in Tigers Bay by the simple laying on of hands by Brian Madden, a charismatic Pentecostal minister who claims God works through him.

A local man and self-proclaimed sinner, Madden is very like the people who flock to his Elim Christian Centre on Alexandra Park Avenue. He likes to relate how he turned away from a life of violence and drugs in a road-to-Damascus style conversion as he drove along the M2 near Carrickfergus in 1987. Right there in the car, God warned him he was going to hell, and Madden asked Christ to save him. “The immediate change was sorrow for joy. No need for drink, drugs, tobacco and a change of friends. Happiness filled my heart and a great assurance that I was now saved. I wanted everyone to know,” he said.

So he has been telling people ever since. Last week he prefaced services with lists of forthcoming media appearances. “We do want to thank God for that good report in the News Letter today. Did everybody read it? Go and buy the News Letter and read about the resurrection. It will blow your mind,” he told a healing service on Thursday, and then listed off forthcoming BBC interviews, including one on Sunday Sequence this morning.

The “resurrection” is that of Andrew Duffin, 18, a local man whose heart stopped in the Royal Victoria hospital (RVH) last month. Duffin was hospitalised after the stolen car in which he was a passenger crashed into a wall. His father, a member of Madden’s congregation, made an international appeal for prayer.

As Madden now tells it, Duffin had been dead for 16 minutes and doctors held out no hope, but, miraculously, he pulled through. Even before he did, across the world in Lakeland, Florida, an evangelist named Bob Sullivan stepped onto a stage and told a cheering crowd that young Andrew in Belfast had come back to life.

A consultant reportedly told Duffin his recovery was nothing short of a miracle. Madden takes that literally and claims it is due to the fact that millions of members of his Pentecostal denomination across the globe prayed for Duffin. Numbers may be exaggerated: the worldwide membership of even the largest Pentecostal denomination is put at 54.7m. But what of the medical evidence?

The Belfast Health and Social Care Trust, which controls the RVH, can’t discuss an individual’s medical records, but it did confirm that Duffin had been a patient in intensive care. Coronary facilities at the RVH are among the best in the world.

Asked what would be normal in the case of an 18-year-old who suffered cardiac failure following a crash, the trust replied: “Life-saving resuscitation measures are put into place immediately and supported by other methods of treatment, for example, fluid and drug therapies. These measures are sustained for long periods of time before a patient would be pronounced dead.”

Life support is usually maintained for more than half an hour, sometimes up to an hour. This means Duffin was lucky to have survived his ordeal and recover, if indeed he was on life support for 16 minutes. But not everyone would consider it a miracle, in the strict sense. Nobody is claiming, for instance, that brain function had ceased.

Duffin wasn’t a Christian at the time of his accident and didn’t know that people were praying for him as doctors fought to save his life. Could the heartfelt prayer of Madden and the other Pentecostalists have increased his odds of survival?

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