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“Quite a lot of those young people were coming from families that were second and third generation unemployed” he says. A point he mentions a few times is the lack of a stable adult role model for the kids that meant they were cut adrift from a normal childhood. “Many of those kids were living in a total reversal of nature. At a very young age they were responding to their parents needs as opposed to the parent responding to their needs. It brought many of them into the world of crime”.

So many young people died in Southill from drugs and violence that he helped to set up a support group, called Lost Futures, for the parents who were suffering another reversal of nature, that of outliving your children. The strain of overseeing so many funerals of suicide, overdose and homicide victims shows on the lines around his remarkably blue eyes.

At one point the strain was too much, and he cracked, when his mother died, having suffered for too long from Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, and his voice breaks when he remembers having to be strong and perform the mass at his own mother’s funeral.

He ended up in America being treated for post traumatic stress disorder. “I was beginning to question everything. I just couldn’t accept that children because they were born on one side of the tracks as opposed to the other, because they didn’t have a stable adult model in their home - that they were born to fail”.

He says he’s cured now, after the treatment he got in America, where he made friends with Vietnam vets suffering from the same thing, but even though he’s tall and physically healthy looking, with a shock of thick dark hair, there is still something very fragile about him.

It’s probably the inner struggle that is revealed in his voice and body language, the impossible reconciliation between what he thought the world was, and what it actually is. The veneer of civilisation that Southill stripped away for him, showing him a new world that he has to adapt to.

He works now with people with learning difficulties. It’s a tough job for most people, but for Joe, it’s simple, compared to what he left behind. He’s proud of the kids there and beams when he talks of their small achievements. But he has not left Southill completely behind.

“I believe we’re losing a whole generation of young people –to heroin, to excitement, to addiction per se, and to a lack of a stable adult model in their home” he says. “I hope to still try and play a part, in trying to be a father figure to those. It distracts me from those other questions but I do often ask the question”.

The depression creeps back in sometimes. When he sees a woman and her two kids being deported back to a country with no prospects, it eats at him. He worries about her and her kids and he worries about the kind of country that would deny those kids, born on the wrong side of the border, the opportunities they could have had here.

When he speaks, it’s obvious by the clarity and passion of his opinions that he’s spent time thinking about the issues. He refers regularly to his four dogs, who keep him company in his house. The image is that of a favourite chair, a fireplace and the four dogs snoozing on the floor while he reads the newspaper and thinks about his life. He paraphrases Voltaire in questioning the commonness of common sense but he also quotes Eric Clapton by saying “denial isn’t just a river in Egypt, it’s where we’ve been living all our lives”, in reference to the outdated rules of the church, so there must also be a stereo in that comfortable sitting room.

He entered the seminary in the seventies as a teenager, because “back then we were revolutionaries, you know, and we wanted to change the world”. Reflecting on his time there he is surprised at what was expected of him. “One of the things we were taught was to be all things to all men - which is the greatest recipe for insanity I’ve ever heard” he laughs.

His views aren’t perfectly aligned with the church on many issues, and maybe that’s why he seems quite a lonely man still, even after recovering from post-traumatic stress disorder. “My friends today would certainly be those that have gone through depression” he says. It seems like he needs the company of those that understand.