Defrocked Limerick-born priest Oliver O'Grady (60) describes in the film how he preyed on up to 25 children in Stockton, California. He was jailed for seven years for sex abuse in 1993 before being deported to Ireland in 2001.

Director Amy Berg spent eight days last year filming O'Grady in Dublin, where he is now believed to be living. One interview is conducted at a playground in a central Dublin park where O'Grady is chillingly seen studying children playing there.

Berg admitted she had difficulty listening to much of what the ageing paedophile had to say in her movie Deliver Us From Evil.

In the film - which won the best documentary award at the LA film festival last week and is expected to be shown at the Cork Film Festival this autumn . . . O'Grady declares that he wants to give "the most honest confession" of his life.

The director of the One in Four group for abuse victims, Colm O'Gorman, said the documentary would be quite frightening in that it showed how O'Grady was able to move around unmonitored.

"He is very forthright of how he went about abusing children and he is an example of how measures need to be put in place so that there is international cooperation on the monitoring and treatment of sex offenders, " he said.

O'Gorman added that he hoped that the film would not provoke national hysteria and would instead encourage objective debate.