'Dad was such a hardened Born Again Christian — it took time for me to accept I didn’t believe in God'

Clem Cairns, co-founder of West Cork Literary Festival, talks to Helen O’Callaghan about how he had a great childhood but his strict moral upbringing led him to be deeply suspicious of anything evangelical so he instead embraced commonsense over ideology

Clem Cairns, co-founder of West Cork Literary Festival.

My father was a very proselytising, evangelical person who liked to influence. He loved preaching. He was a keen member of the Church of Ireland growing up, but when I was a child, the church we went to was 12C off Lower Abbey Street.

I remember it as a most extreme Baptist church — big open pit at the front, you could lift up the floorboards and fully immerse the person being baptised.