Desmond Allen, who received the Order of Distinction for sterling contribution to journalism in the 2014 National Honours and Awards, won the Jamaica Broilers Fairplay Award for his 2004-05 Sunday Observer series ‘The Desmond Allen Interviews’. Here are excerpts of some of his most popular stories:

Rev Dr Aaron Dumas: ‘Dear Pastor’ fearlessly tackling the pain and trauma of the burning beds

Rev Dr Aaron Dumas must be the best example of what they tell me is a man of vision. When few, if any, pastor — or few of anybody at all — would openly face painful, traumatic issues such as fathers impregnating their daughters or women yearning deeply for fulfilling sex from impotent partners, he went back to school and prepared himself. Today he is loved and revered as a man for the broken-hearted and the lovelorn.

That’s not to say it was easy. Colleague pastors were among his harshest critics. They expected him to diagnose every sexual problem as caused by sin and the prescription to be that the sinner need only go to church, refusing to accept even the biblically acknowledged fact that the heart is willing but the flesh is weak. His refusal to declare wholesale condemnation on a church member who masturbates, or a sister who desires oral sex, has earned him the wrath and urgent prayers of other men of God.

“I have come under heavy fire. I have endured much criticism from people who are really just ultra-conservative, ultra-fundamentalist and who are so heavenly-minded that they are no earthly good,” Dumas shoots back. His body language betrays that this is a bitter-sweet victory.

More sweet than bitter though, he says now. With one of the most widely read newspaper columns running four days a week and a radio show on air four nights a week as well, Aaron Dumas’ alias ‘Dear Pastor’ is a household name in Jamaica. And among the large Jamaican population overseas. He is sought after as a speaker, a marriage officer, Justice of the Peace and, of course, a counsellor.

A tall man who nowadays sports thick, greying beard that he says his wife finds “sexy”, Aaron Mervyn Dumas might well have been born in Jamaica, instead of Tobago, the tiny sister island of Trinidad. After 40 years here, it’s hard to tell the difference. Even the sing-song Trini accent is Jamaicanised. Not that it matters, mind you. He loves Trinidad and Jamaica equally. He is a happy Caribbean man.

Dumas came in at number seven in a large family of 11 children — seven boys and four girls. His family was known for the twins it produced. His mother had a twin sister, his eldest brother had twins and his eldest sister also gave birth to twins. “So when my wife was pregnant with our child, I was a little nervous,” he jokes.

Senator A J Nicholson: Dispensing justice with a strong voice and an even hand

We can start, dear and learned reader, by admitting that there is just cause for the great and abiding cynicism about the motive of politicians for offering themselves in the service of kin and country, noble though the very notion is itself. And greater still is the cynicism about how well they perform in their assigned role in the time allotted to them by a demanding people.

It is, therefore, refreshing to find that Arnold Joseph Nicholson, son of Rock River, Clarendon, can credibly make the claim to have put country above self, to have run his course so far, taking the moral high ground and to have done so in all good conscience. It must be for that reason that PJ Patterson — wanting to ensure that his administration is defined for the quality of justice it brings, especially to the ordinary man — removed Nicholson from the partisan cut and thrust of representational politics and assigned him guardian over the justice portfolio.

Combative character

Seized now with the critical importance of the mandate, Nicholson spends most of his waking moments dispensing justice with an even hand. The combative character with the booming voice in the nation’s Parliament and the vigorous defender of the Government’s record against human rights accusers is at heart a true man of peace.

His has been a path of challenges but of great blessings too, beginning with an education by scholarship, selection for training by Barclays Bank as an accountant in England and becoming a pioneer in the first local bank, the Jamaica Citizens Bank (JCB). But there have been painful moments such as the death of his eldest sister, and later his father which forced him to become the man of the house in the midst of his quest for education.

And then came the disillusionment with banking over the treatment of blacks, causing him, in a moment of temporary folly, to resign without having a job to go to. Yet typical of AJ, that too was turned into an illustrious career in law. And so as a member of the elite band of outstanding lawyers titled Queen’s Counsel (QC), he recalls the years working and learning at the feet of the late great Ian Ramsay, one of the undisputed icons of legal history in Jamaica.

Nicholson’s memories cover his participation in some of the great legal moments, such as the Green Bay case in which several young men were allegedly lured to their deaths by soldiers; the Claudie Massop case, featuring the killing by police of the feared Tivoli strongman; the trial of Charles Johnson for allegedly plotting the overthrow of the Michael Manley Government in the 1970s; and further afield the trial of the Grenada 17 charged with the murder of their prime minister, Maurice Bishop and three of his ministers.

It might be more than co-incidence — and who’s to know it — that the interview is published a day after the inauguration of the Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ) for which he has fought these many years, losing some battles, winning others but at the last painfully deprived of the joy of attending the historic ceremony in Port of Spain.

Fay Tortello and Jean Anderson – The high price of bearing the Seaga brand name

Fay Tortello

Recognising that she would make a heck of a talk show host, Wilmot Perkins recommended Fay Tortello, the eldest of Edward Seaga’s four sisters to his radio station, to fill a vacant slot. The suggestion was swiftly shot down in the boardroom. “No Sir,” one director summed it up. “We’d get sued everyday!”

On the two occasions that Tortello applied for membership in the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP), she was flatly rejected. You’d think that with her big brother being party leader and a former prime minister, her application would be a cinch. But they simply wrote her off as “a loose cannon”.

In her 73rd year now, Tortello looks anything but a loose cannon. She just doesn’t subscribe to the tyranny of the majority, meaning that she likes to call things as she sees it and doesn’t “believe that if I have a different view, I should have to subject it to consensus, even when I don’t share that majority view in any way, shape or form”.

That is why Tortello applauds Portia Simpson Miller, the local government and sport minister. In her position, she probably would also have abstained from voting on the wrist-slapping JLP resolution calling on the Government to put more money into the fire service, she says. Simpson Miller has portfolio responsibility for the broken down fire service. And, Tortello strikes you as genuine when she says she is fond of Omar Davies, the finance minister. She thinks he has “a good personality and is very kind”.

The voice that lit up the Perkins show, from Straight talk to Perkins on Line — dubbing him “Willy” because ‘Mutty’ sounds “too much like a dog” — is quieter these days. And in a moment of recollection, she weeps with a quiet dignity as she recalls that, on his deathbed, her husband had assured their daughter, Rebecca, that he would not die, but would turn into a butterfly. It’s a scene that broke Edward Seaga’s heart then and he too cried when he recalled it for his niece at her recent wedding.

Jean Anderson

Don’t let the outgoing, cheery persona of Jean Anderson, the second of the Seaga sisters fool you. It masks, if tenuously, the eternal pain of a mother who has lost a cherished daughter. It hides the anguish of a woman whose life would be defined, not for her girlish charm and caring nature, but by the fact that her brother is a politician, and a former prime minister at that.

Anderson musters bravado, sure enough, but she knows she can’t fix the yawning gulf, left by the passing of her beloved Jacqueline Jean…robbed of her tender teens and cut down at the height of flowering womanhood. It’s a gulf that can’t be filled, no matter the tears, or the passing of the years.

Anderson has spent her life fighting these two terrors: the futile battle to save Jacqueline Jean, watching as disease ravaged her innocent body, the tenacious but fruitless search that covered “every major medical centre in the world” to find that one elusive cure that would save the child of her womb; and the second, to extricate herself from perceived political victimisation, the price of bearing the famous Seaga name, and trying to determine whether the glare of the publicity it brought was a blessing or a curse.

Even though their lives inevitably separate into their own tributaries of fate over time, the story of Fay Tortello and Jean Anderson is inextricably linked, and woven into the larger history of the coming of the Lebanese to Jamaica, but more importantly, the rise to prominence of Edward Seaga, their beloved brother. It covers his unlikely journey to Jamaica House by way of Boston, United States; in a land where descendants of former slaves, brutally stolen from Africa, form an overwhelming majority. For eight years, Seaga walked proud and ruled supreme over that same land as prime minister, and they basked in the glory of it all. But there was a sting in the tail. Ponder, therefore, the arrogance of the interviewer, to think that these pages could be enough to contain the combined story of Fay Tortello and Jean Anderson. Because it is this enduring tale which we must now try to tell in the small confines of these columns.

Next week: Cliff Hughes; Gary Allen; Dr Leahcim Semaj