It was July 1984 and Colm O’Gorman wanted to tell his sister that he had been sexually abused by Fr Sean Fortune. But the words wouldn’t come. Instead, he told her he was gay and that he had been having an affair with the priest, a monstrous character who eventually committed suicide in 1999 while facing 66 charges of molesting young people.

A few years earlier, when he was 15, and the abuse was going on, O’Gorman tried to tell his mother what was happening. Fortune was waiting downstairs in their home in Wexford, about to take him away for a weekend. It was the third such trip and O’Gorman knew what would happen, but such was the fear that the words wouldn’t come on that occasion either.

Fortune had told his young victim that he was the one with the problem. At the time the tactic worked. O’Gorman believed that seeking help or telling someone what was really going on would be an admission that something wasn’t right with himself.

He compared his situation to hanging from the edge of a swimming pool. Because “the words didn’t exist” to tell, he just let go — and drowned.

O’Gorman, 39, is no longer short of the confidence to speak out or the courage to jump into the deep end. Last week the director of One in Four, a charity devoted to helping victims of abuse, announced that he would stand for the Progressive Democrats in Wexford at the next general election. He was joining the PDs, he said, out of conviction and a belief that the party was prepared to change things.

It wasn’t until a New Year’s Eve party in 1995 that O’Gorman finally managed to find the words to tell Barbara, his sister, what Fortune did to him in his teenage years. It was the start of a process that led to the lid being lifted on the most disgraceful and shocking episode in the Catholic church’s history in Ireland. But for O’Gorman it was the first step in his development into a strong-willed and eloquent representative for thousands. Little wonder that he was described last week as a “trophy candidate” for the PDs.

The step into national politics is a controversial one and leaves O’Gorman open to more critical scrutiny than he has received to date. On Friday a tabloid newspaper slyly reported on how the “kind-hearted politician” and his partner, Paul Fyffe, are the guardians of two Kenyan children whose mother became too ill to look after them.

O’Gorman had chosen not to talk about the matter because his family had a right to privacy. But the story will have served as a rude awakening to the rough and tumble world of politics.

Deirdre Fitzgerald, who has worked with him for four years at One in Four, says O’Gorman has a “wicked sense of humour, remains calm and focused and deals with whatever comes his way”.

“Colm is not afraid to confront things that other people find too difficult. He has huge courage and he can take on challenges within himself and outside too,” she said. “He has the inner belief to take this step and sees it as another job that has to be done. He will measure up to it.”

Born in 1966, he grew up on a farm in rural Wexford. When he was 11 his family moved to Wexford town, where he became active in church folk groups and youth ventures. Fortune began to abuse him at the age of 14, while he was a student at St Peter’s College. O’Gorman had intended to study hotel management in Cathal Brugha Street college in Dublin. As he tried to raise the money to go, his abuser offered him £300 if he found someone else — someone younger — as a replacement. He fled.

After hitching to Dublin, O’Gorman stayed with friends in Crumlin, but then drifted onto the streets for months, unable to settle. He remembers sleeping under a bush in Ranelagh and in a cubicle in the lavatories in Burger King on O’Connell Street. He was picked up some nights and got a bed.

When his sister Barbara tracked him down in 1984, he had found a job in a restaurant and a place to stay. Even though he couldn’t tell her the truth, just telling someone he was gay helped. He became part of the gay scene in Dublin. Previously, when confused about his sexuality, he had thought of himself as “something sick and wrong and evil”, but now this changed. “I will never forget the first time I walked into a meeting and realised, ‘My God, all these people are like me’,” he has said.

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