Michael Harding was going to be a priest. It was the era of Vatican II, of liberation theology, or worker priests pursuing social justice.

The church, he thought, was the place to be.

He was already, by passion, a writer. Aged 14, he was given a manual typewriter by his uncle, and knew that was all he wanted in life.

But there would be plenty of room in the new church for a writer.

So, in his mid twenties, after a few years working as a teacher in a open prison, he returned to college, to Maynooth, as a seminarian. He was no innocent. He had been in love, and had lived with a girlfriend at college. But the church seemed different, then. In the heady aftermath of Vatican II, Harding and his fellow revolutionaries expected that clerical celibacy would be just one of the many outdated prohibitions soon to be abandoned.

But in religion as in politics: events intervened. Pope Paul VI, who called the Second Vatican Council, died; months later, his successor, John Paul I, was also dead, in “mysterious circumstances”; within weeks, a young, deeply conservative Pole was pontiff, and the church lurched dramatically back to the right.

The teaching environment at Maynooth was transformed. Within a year, the radical theologans that had fired up Harding and his peers had been taken off the shelves. They were replaced by an “orthodoxy of intellectual fascism”, he recalls.

Months before his ordination, Harding went to his bishop. He wanted out. He no longer believed. Stay, the bishop told him. Give it a go.

Harding had studied for four years; he said he’d give the priesthood four years in return. Posted to a parish in Fermanagh, he was exposed to “an enormous amount of hatred and violence”, on one occasion witnessing a killing. It left him traumatised, but with a deep well of stories to be written. Four years came, and he knew, “it’s time now to be the writer”.

He drew heavily on his experiences of the North, and on his insights into the church, and into the corrupt sexuality of the church in Ireland in particular, in his early work, which included the 1986 novel, Priests. Looking back now, he sees that failure to follow up on the promises of Vatican II as the watershed moment in modern Irish culture, the time when the opportunity to address the deep dysfunction that had been stored up was missed, with repercussions that are clearly echoing now.

In the 1990s, Harding had a great run at the Abbey, while Patrick Mason was director, having six plays staged; but, on the final on, he felt, “I can’t do that again.”

While other 1990s playwrights were pursuing and finding success on the bigger stages of London and New York, Harding was disinterested in such success, fearing it “would disallow me to be as unruly as I am.”

He wanted to make theatre “more physically”, and to be less encumbered by the production process, and set out on a path that would lead to a series of collaborations that were artistically innovative but modest in scale.

The latest of these has just arrived in Dublin for a run at the “dangerously intimate” space of Bewley’s Café Theatre. The Tinker’s Curse  is a play that had been fomenting in Harding’s head for over a decade, since a residency he did in the early 1990s with a Traveller community at a Tullamore halting site.

He recorded hours of interviews with the Travellers, and promised to one day write a play about them. “I would say to them I wasn’t interested in issues, I wanted stories.”

“There’s no doubt that Travellers are a distinct ethnic group,” he says. “Their nomadism is a very deep ethnic culture, referred to in ancient Irish texts. Travellers have yet to get across to settled people how profound that culture is.”

The “dysfunction” that manifests itself on occasion within that community is similar to that of other nomadic peoples, like the New Zealand Maori or the North American Navajo, who have been urbanised and “forced to live as settled people,” he says.

Storytelling is a core part of their culture, he says, and if it is no longer practiced formally as before, “those gifts live on informally”, in the “absolutely beautiful” rhythms of Traveller speech.

Capturing those rhythms for the theatre has been a practice he likens to journalism, both in the formal act of interviewing and transcribing, but more fundamentally in the process of attempting to record the nuances and minutiae of ordinary life.

When Harding does creative writing classes, he tells his students, “you write with your ears.

“Forget about you, and your ‘complex’ life, and your anxieties,” he says. “Just listen.”

In writing The Tinker’s Curse, he became “a filter for people to tell stories.” The play takes the form of a monologue; rather than lamenting the proliferation of monologues in Irish writing (particularly new plays by emerging writers), Harding sees it as “the most naked, pure thing” and “a tradition in Ireland for centuries.”

“The story – that’s what we’re masters of. Storytelling is my religion.

“I see myself as akin to the bard: you’re not sure who he is or where he came from, but he’ll tell you a good story.”

And so this bard will be at Bewley’s Cafe Theatre, telling stories, lunchtimes till April 3 (booking on 086 8784001 or at www.bewleyscafetheatre.com).

Published in the Irish Independent