Welcome









Brian O’Hare, MA, Ph.D., is a retired assistant director of a large regional college of further and higher education. Married, three children, ten grandchildren, one great grandchild. He plays golf three times a week off a ten handicap and does a lot of voluntary work. Any writing he has previously done was academic…very much restricted to a very specific readership. Several articles in educational journals were followed by a number of book-length reports for the Dept. of Education and the University of Ulster.
He has also written an interesting biography of a man who daily performs amazing miracles of healing…The Miracle Ship. That’s with an American publisher…hopefully to be published within the next year. (There are some seriously fascinating episodes in that for a blog…if he gets around to starting one!)
He had a liver disease since childhood which resulted in him taking early retirement a number of years ago. In 2002 he had a liver transplant but is strong and healthy now. He continued to do academic writing well into his retirement and followed that with a memoir about his liver transplant, dealing with the physical, emotional and spiritual experiences that came from that period in his life (A Spiritual Odyssey, published by Columba Press, Dublin).
Recently he experienced a desire to write fiction. Hence Fallen Men. It is a story about three priests…but it is religious in much the same way Thornbirds was religious. He has also finsihed a second book (see BOOKS). It’s quite different from Fallen Men… a detective mystery inspired by an old 14th centure painting of the Last Judgement. It’s called “The Doom Murders”. He is currently writing a third book, “The 11.05 Killings” featuring the same detectives as in The Doom Murders.

2 comments:

  1. New Book on Kindle

    The Miracle Ship
    by Brian O’Hare


    The march of secularism has impacted negatively upon the beliefs and attitudes of many ordinary Catholics. Morality is becoming relative, equality legislation is superseding scriptural norms, liberalism is replacing good conscience. These problems are well documented.

    One little-talked about effect of modernism, however, is the dying belief in miracles. Ireland, for so long the Isle of Saints and Scholars, has become materialistic and secular. The practice of faith is waning and there is no longer any awareness of the Lord’s promises of healing (healing of the body, healing of the spirit, healing of the mind) through prayers of faith. I am sure the same holds true for many other countries in Europe and further afield.

    Inevitably the Lord responds positively and directly to circumstances which threaten his Church. In recent years he has given the gifts of the Holy Spirit to a number of holy men in Ireland whose mission, like that of the early disciples, is to heal the sick, cast out demons and preach the Word. One such man is John Gillespie.

    Recently a little girl with irreparable brain damage was pronounced dead by two hospital specialists who advised her parents to switch off the life support machines. Today she is a healthy teenager. A teenage boy whose spinal cord and several vertebrae were crushed by a lorry was destined to spend his life in a wheelchair, able only to move his head. He now plays football with his friends. A gypsy curse that brought death to numerous members of a single travelling community over five generations has been lifted and ended. A young man tormented by six demons has been delivered and set free.

    How were such miracles wrought? What do they have in common? They have John Gillespie in common. John spends his days travelling North and South of Ireland bringing miraculous healings to people (numbering already many thousands), delivering others from demonic oppression, and preaching the Word of God. Who is he? How has he been gifted with such extraordinary power?

    John Gillespie is one of a small coterie of specially gifted men in Ireland (others are Larry Cummings, Eddie Stone, Joe Dalton) who have been brought to extraordinary ministries by the Holy Spirit. John’s own invitation was particularly dramatic

    Some years ago a priest gifted with prophecy, Fr. Ronnie Mitchell (who wrote the Foreword to the MS), told John of a vision he had in which a huge, heavily laden ship was approaching a harbour dock where John was standing. The ship was called The Miracle Ship. The priest saw Jesus on the prow, calling to John to deliver “… ‘all of these miracles to my people’. This ship is laden down with thousands upon thousands of miracles…for his people…God is bringing you a miraculous healing ministry. Only you can deliver these gifts…He wants you to accept this calling. There will be thousands of miracles worked through your hands...”

    After that John had little choice but to accept the Lord’s ministry. The Miracle Ship tells his story. So! Do you believe in miracles? Do you believe in demonic possession? In exorcisms? Perhaps you had better hold your response until you have read The Miracle Ship. It offers a true account of John Gillespie’s life, of the miracles and deliverances that follow his prayers. The stories will amaze you. If you read and liked Briege McKenna’s Miracles Do Happen, you’ll love The Miracle Ship.
    The Miracle Ship is to be launched on Kindle on Monday, 25th November, 2013







    ReplyDelete
  2. INTRODUCTION
    When I first met John Gillespie, his reputation had preceded him. I was not quite sure what to expect, perhaps someone tall, imposing, wearing a black suit, someone other-worldly and ethereal. Instead, and I know he won’t take it amiss when I say this, I found a very ordinary man in his early fifties, medium height and build, jeans, open-necked shirt, hair going slightly grey, little to distinguish him in a crowd. He was extremely unaffected, chatty, constantly laughing.
    As I got to know him, however, I began to learn that here was a man characterized by a fierce determination, a trait not immediately discernible on early casual acquaintance. He is possessed, too, of a strong sense of vocation, so caught up in bringing Jesus and his healing to people that he can see himself as little more than a simple conduit between God and the petitioner seeking help. And it was in this utter lack of a sense of self that I found a man with a profound and abiding faith in God and an unassailable belief in Jesus’ power to heal.
    Yet nothing about this plain-speaking man cries out, or even whispers, that he was destined to live a most extraordinary ministry. He is an ordinary man, a farmer’s son. He was born into a pious, hard-working familywho lived generally frugal lives. Wealth was never a possibility for them nor, indeed, was it ever an aspiration. John has inherited and continues to live this essentially Christian ethic of working to earn what his family needs and seeking nothing more than that.
    John is not a seventh son of a seventh son. He claims no mystic connections to the universe or to exotic foreign cults. As Shakespeare once said, “Such men are dangerous.” Initially he was reluctant to undertake the ministry Jesus had planned for him. John had his own plans for his life. He was eventually to experience a conversion, however, a life-changing decision to live his life as Jesus wanted him to live it, not as he wanted to live it himself. He became a man who, as Pope Benedict XVI once said about his own ordination to the priesthood, “…has been touched by the mission of Christ and was privileged to carry his presence to the people.”
    There is little to find in John’s humble background that could have presaged his miraculous ability to bring healing to thousands. And yet, is that so strange? Peter Seewald, in his book on Benedict XVI, says that “…real ‘personalities’ are to be recognized, not in magnificence, but in humility.” John’s humility is utterly genuine and unaffected. He is not aware of it. It is not a state he strives for. It just is. He feels no sense of personal achievement at the strange healings that are accomplished through his hands because, as he says simply, “I don’t do anything! Jesus does it!”
    During our occasional brief meetings, John would tell me amazing stories. I found them fascinating and I was delighted when he asked me to write his story. When he began to tell me the personal details of his early life, however, about the sufferings he endured for years, about his intense, argumentative, sometimesbelligerent relationship with a silent, strangely unresponsive God, about the powerful faith that never allowed that relationship to wane, I began to fear that I could not do his story justice. The strength of his belief, his single-minded determination to meet, as he says, his “violent state with violent prayer,” his innate conviction of Jesus’ desire to heal all of his people, left me humbled. Only once before (and that’s a story written elsewhere) have I encountered such determined belief, such ineffable patience in the face of extreme adversity, such hope where no hope seemed to have any right to exist.
    Fortunately my fears of inadequacy do not matter. John’s personal story is so astonishing, the simple facts of the extraordinary healings are so complete in themselves, that their telling requires no great literary skill. The pages that follow are testament to that

    ReplyDelete