Kieran O'Hagan

Kieran O’Hagan was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and left school at fifteen. He was an aspiring pianist and was offered a scholarship to London when he was seventeen which he had to turn down for financial reasons. But music remains crucially important to him. He still practice the piano daily and has sung in a number of choral groups all his life.

After marriage and three children in three years, he studied English as a mature student at the University of Ulster. He then took an M.Phil in Social Administration and Social Work at the University of York. He worked for more than twenty years in frontline social work particularly in childcare and mental health. He won the Community Care Travel Scholarship in two consecutive years, and worked with Mother Teresa in Calcutta and Los Angeles. He also did a lecture tour in Victoria, Australia, and presented papers to child abuse conferences in various parts of the world.

Many of the child abuse papers and articles he wrote were published in national and international journals. He wrote his first textbook in 1986, Crisis Intervention in Social Services, and eight more textbooks subsequently.

He experimented in textbook writing. Each of the first chapters in many of his textbooks are written more as dramatic fiction than fact. The chapter would be based upon real people who would be heavily anonymised, and real events. This fictional, style of writing would enable readers to explore with greater honesty and precision the feelings and vulnerabilities of the characters described. There were two objectives: firstly, to convey all the drama, conflict and suffering endured by these characters; secondly, to confront the social work student with the true nature and dimensions of the challenges they would face.

In his first book Crisis Intervention in Social Services, he described in the first chapter how a mother reacted when he told her he was visiting her home in response to a child abuse referral concerning her five-year-old son:

"Mrs Walker yelled out. She charged in and out of the room repeatedly, yelling abuse at me, yet with a terrified look in her eye. She had…..the loudest piercing voice that quickly rendered Playtime inaudible, and had the two younger children scrambling to their feet and rushing to her side in utter panic. ‘Mammy! Mammy! What’s wrong…? What’s that man doing mammy?’ they screamed, as they clutched her waist and stared petrified at me."

Not exactly “textbook” writing. But you can see where and how his interest in fiction was nourished. In 2009, he published his first novel, The Verdi Solution, which tells of a terrorist plot to blow up Liverpool’s Metropolitan cathedral during a performance of Verdi’s Requiem. It was widely acclaimed in reviews. His latest novel Rotherdam! was released as an e-book on Amazon (see flyer and read the first chapter on site). It tells the story of six women and a fourteen year-old girl caught up in a massive child sexual abuse scandal, subjected to male brutality and depravity, bureaucratic indifference to their suffering, and threats of annihilation should they attempt to do anything about it.

Dr. Alison Platt of Liverpool University has written of Rotherdam!

“Very few books about child sexual exploitation rend the heart and engage the mind as much as Rotherdam!. A novel as traumatising as it is grippingly intelligent in its depiction of events based on real life, O'Hagan unearths and exposes the heart of darkness running through this northern town. His masterly narratory web in which every strand is woven consummately into one connected whole shows, from the inside and in close-up, how systemic institutional failures happen. The redemptive love between the two main characters reminds the reader of the power of the individual to bring about seismic ‎change in an age where many of us can all too often feel disempowered.”