Kelly, now 59, spent much of his childhood living in institutions run by Catholic orders in Ireland. The abuse he remembers most vividly took place at a reformatory in Daingean, in central Ireland.
"It was a very significant night for me," he says. "I'd been raped and buggered previously by these religious brothers, and I'd been physically beaten and psychologically tortured for months -- I spent two years in the place."
But Kelly reached a breaking point as one
Catholic brother held him down, another whipped him and two others looked on, he says.
"I begged God to take me away. I just wanted to die to get away from the pain. And God wasn't there for me," he says.
Kelly's "crime" that night, he says, was to have been named by another boy at the reformatory, falsely, as an accomplice in a plot to escape.
But Kelly did manage to escape from Daingean soon after, and spent more than 30 years in London before returning to
Ireland. Now he is campaigning on behalf of victims of
child abuse.
Those victims number in the thousands -- possibly tens of thousands -- three major investigations in the past five years suggest.
The most recent, the Murphy Report, found the Archdiocese of Dublin and other Catholic Church authorities in Ireland covered up child abuse by priests from 1975 to 2004. Child sexual abuse was widespread then, the report found.
Liam McGlynn, a retired public official, thinks that it was no accident that so many child abusers found their way into the priesthood in Ireland.
The prevalence of the problem, he says, suggests that there were "people who were aware that the best place to abuse children was under the cover of the church. What better cover could you hope for?"
He emphasizes that that's only his personal opinion, but he observes that an entire generation has been turned off by the scandal.
"Virtually no young people go to church. The main churchgoers would be my generation, still, and older," says McGlynn, who is 57. "The church has lost an entire generation."
"I haven't been to church for quite some time. My faith has been seriously damaged," he adds.
He's part of a much broader trend, says Patsy McGarry, religious affairs correspondent for the Irish Times newspaper.
More than 90 percent of Irish people attended mass at least once a week in the 1970s. Today the figure is about half that, he says.
"The church has lost working-class urban Ireland," he says.
