Martin O'Brien
Gerry Gribbon tells Martin O’Brien of his faith journey from alcoholism
Remarkable can be an overused word but it hardly does justice to Gerry Gribbon who features prominently in the first episode of City of Faith, a six-part BBC Northern Ireland TV documentary series about people of faith in Ireland’s ecclesiastical capital, Armagh, which begins next Monday night.
Gerry, (78) is a Falls Road native, born and brought up a short distance from Clonard Monastery where his faith took root first as an altar server at the daily 6.30am Mass from the age of eight or nine. And later as a member of the choir and the Boys Confraternity, like his first cousin Jim McDonald who featured in this space a few weeks back.
What makes Gerry remarkable is his lifelong and mercifully successful battle with alcoholism, his heroic endurance of more than his share of family tragedy and a sustained and multifaceted record of voluntary service at home and abroad since childhood that cannot be detailed in the space available.
That service is underpinned by an unshakable faith in God and a strong devotion to St Gerard Majella whom he is named after.
“People ask me do I believe in miracles. I see miracles all over the place in people who have been written off bringing their lives together. Sure I am a miracle, I am one,” he says with a broad smile in the living room of his home near St Patrick’s Catholic Cathedral in Armagh.
Gerry will not be at home next Monday might to watch himself on television.
Nor will he be around to see episode two of a striking series that takes us on a penetrating journey into the lives and daily routine of devout Christians of many denominations on a variety of voyages of faith often coping with unexpected pain and loss alongside the joys and ordinariness of normal living.
Instead Gerry, a lay Cistercian, will be 7,000 miles away in the Catholic Archdiocese of San Fernando just north of Manila in the Philippines where with the help of John Boyle, the philanthropist he is overseeing the building of St Patrick’s Village, a development of 100 houses for homeless families, carried out by the St James the Apostle Housing Association.
Appeal
Over the past 14 years following an appeal from a Filipino priest after a flooding disaster he has visited the country about 16 times.
“We have already built a village of 72 homes, for 580 people, called St James the Apostle Village, a learning centre and a church, St Patrick’s Church, Armagh Square, San Fernando,” he told The Irish Catholic on the eve of a three-week long aid mission to the country.
He points out that St James the Apostle receives special devotion in San Fernando and it is not lost on him that St James says most starkly that faith “without deeds: it is totally dead.”(Jas 2:17).
Gerry Gribbon, is the father of five children from his first marriage to Claire who died of cancer at the age of 37 in 1975 having been diagnosed with breast cancer about nine years before. Their eldest child, also Gerard, (34) a nursing assistant at St Luke’s Hospital in Armagh, a married man with no family took his own life in the most tragic of circumstances 17 years ago.
Depressed
Gerard was suspended from duty pending an investigation after a patient made an allegation of a sexual assault against him. He became depressed and took his own life by taking an overdose.
“He told me he was innocent and I believed him.”
For the past 18 years Gerry has joined the Armagh Carmelite group on their annual pilgrimage to Lourdes where “there is a great tranquillity and peace and [where] our job is to labour to the sick and disabled in whatever way we can help them.”
He was in Lourdes when a priest told him that Gerard had died and had been found in his car in a layby near Dundalk.
He was also told that the RUC had called at Gerard’s house on the evening he died with a letter stating that the allegation against him was unfounded and that he had no case to answer.
It was, he thinks, the worst moment of his life but somehow he received help to find a way through it.
“I turned to God and he is always there and he helped me.”
Gerry joined the Order of Malta as a volunteer at the age of 10 and recalls he was its first cadet in Ulster.
The guiding principle of the Knights of Malta to ‘Serve Our Lords – the Sick and the Poor’ has been a constant focus for him down the decades.
Particularly poignant memories include working to alleviate the plight of Hungarian refugees who fled to the North after the Soviet invasion of 1956 and helping to re-build Bombay Street in 1969
He is regional assistant commander of the Order’s ambulance corps and until six years ago was regional director of the Knights of Malta’s ambulance corps in Ulster, a post he held for nine years.
Gerry is a Knight of Magistral Grace in the Order and his second wife, Anne, (nee Toal) from Toomebridge, Co. Antrim, a former Franciscan sister who once worked in a leper hospital in Uganda, whom he met at the Cistercian monastery in Portglenone, is a Dame of Magistral Grace.
He is also a trained volunteer who offers support to newly released prisoners.
Recovery programmes
Giving comes easy to Gerry Gribbon. It’s his way of thanking God for the gift of sobriety.
“It took me seven years to finally get sober at the age of 30. I ran up debts of up to £15,000 in the mid-Seventies.” That is the equivalent of around £90,000 in today’s money and it took him nine years to pay it off.
He owed his bank alone £9,000 and vividly recalls making his first repayment, a ten shilling note or 50p in today’s money.
He recalls himself and his young wife and children being evicted from their rented house and running up big debts with virtually every moneylender in Belfast.
“The most important thing God has given me in my life is the gift of sobriety, without that I would not have anything at all, I would have lost everything.”
Gerry is eternally grateful to his first wife, Claire, for having the courage to go to a priest in Clonard “in desperation” who put him in touch with Alcoholics Anonymous in the person of a Protestant man in the staunchly loyalist Sandy Row area who pointed him in the direction of ultimate recovery.
He actively contributes to recovery programmes for alcoholics to this day.
Lack of bitterness
Gerry is also grateful to Anne, whom he married in 1978 and became “a second mother” to his five children aged from nine to 15 at the time.
Gerry who trained as a carpenter and worked for a Protestant builder on the Shankill Road for many years moved to Armagh more than 35 years ago when he secured the post of buildings maintenance officer with the Southern Education and Library Board.
The Troubles impacted dramatically on Gerry when his builders’ van was hi-jacked and he was “blind-folded and put under house arrest” by future hunger striker Bobby Sands and his companions in 1976 when they attacked the Balmoral Furniture Company resulting in a fateful prison sentence.
It was “a terrifying experience” which meant losing four or five weeks work and testifying in court. But he holds no bitterness and understands where Bobby Sands was coming from in the context of the treatment he and his family had experienced.
That lack of bitterness would be no surprise to those who know Gerry Gribbon because he is a person who evinces gentleness.
City of Faith, made by Tern Television for BBC Northern Ireland begins on Monday May 26 at 10.40pm on BBC1.
