An off-hand remark from his mother leads Brendan to seek it out, which means a trip to Belfast in the middle of the situation surrounding the hunger strikes...so that may not be feasible. We'll see. But I can still put a hint of it in this first section, something Brendan doesn't remember or think much of.
The reason I don't think this will happen before his return is because he still hates the man and is angry about anything that puts him in a better light. It's not till he's been in Houston some years that he grows willing to accept his father was not a monster but hurt and angry at the world, and had no way to handle it except through drinking and violence.
This also brings in Brendan being told his aunt Mari has met with a couple who claim to be his grandparents. Initially, he shrugged them off, since they had cut his family out of their lives. Now he will want to meet them...and they inadvertently give him more of his father's background. They worked at an orphanage just outside Belfast, run by the Catholic Church, where boys were treated hideously by the priests and nuns, and some even molested. They won't actually admit that happened, but there will be enough to read between the lines for Brendan to figure it out.
The Catholic Church's administration of orphanages and unwed mothers homes was really vile, up till the 80s and maybe even 90s, when it all started to come out. The Magdalene Sisters were notorious for selling off the babies of girls who gave birth but weren't married, and they treated the girls there like slaves. It was even called an asylum. Once stories like this got out, it started the collapse of the Catholic Church's influence in Ireland, to the point the country has finally codified the right to abortion into law.
Better than America is doing...
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