IT was time for the turbulent priest to come down to the city. Late last year, after over two decades out in rural Kenya, administering to his flock, and agitating for their rights, Father Gabriel Dolan wanted a change.

There were two offers for a parish in Nairobi. Typically, Dolan was only interested in slum parishes. In a country where 57% of the population survive on less than $1 a day, the Fermanagh-born priest knew where his duties lay.

The archbishop in Nairobi reacted with horror. He couldn't have a turbulent priest rising up the people, shaking at the status quo. "Nairobi would burn," he was reported as saying.

This, after all, was a priest whose activism had seen him elevated to a figure of huge respect among the dissident human rights groups within the country. On one occasion in 2005, he was all over the nightly news, the police kicking him on the ground as he protested the seizure of land by the state from local farmers.

That arrest prompted a street protest in Nairobi to have him released, which was something of an embarrassment for the hierarchy.

With Nairobi closed off to him, Dolan was at a loss, until the archbishop of Mombasa came to his assistance. He got his parish in the city, a major tourist destination which nestles on the coast of the Indian Ocean.

Now the Kiltegan father presides over a slum called Bangladesh, so named by the locals because it is overcrowded, and when the rains come, everything gets washed down the slopes on which it is built.

"I was very disappointed that I didn't get to go to Nairobi in the beginning," he said. "I had volunteered to open a new parish in one of the slums, but it didn't work out. I'm grateful to the archbishop of Mombasa, and now I'm as happy as could be here."

He arrived in Mombasa last January, and threw himself into establishing a new church in Bangladesh, where 20,000 people live in one-room mud huts.

Last month, the church was officially opened. Dolan noted a part of the church rite used for opening a new premises.

"The church is a place where the poor will come to fight injustice and the oppressed will find liberation," the rite reads. Dolan wryly noted that: "It must have been somebody from Latin America who sneaked that in."

Dolan arrived in the country 26 years ago. He quickly saw the injustices that pervade a society which is nominally democratic. He set up the Catholic Justice and Peace Commission in his area in northwest Kenya, pulling together a small staff, including a lawyer. The group investigated and reported on abuses committed primarily by the police, but also included in its brief the widespread corruption of politicians.

Mobilising the poor, or articulating the injustices suffered, can be a dangerous business in Kenya. Dolan was frequently the subject of death threats.

In 2000, an American priest, John Kieser, who had run a campaign against an MP, exposing the politician's rape of young girls and a land grab, died in suspicious circumstances. His body was found with gunshot wounds. His own gun was located nearby.

The FBI was brought in to investigate. It concluded that a suicide had occurred, but everybody who had worked with the priest knew different. Last year, an inquest was finally held which concluded that he had been the victim of homicide. There is little chance of ever fingering the culprit.

"There were a few things in the 1990s, when I was in Turkana, a remote area; I was going to a place and the police advised me not to travel. That evening a politician stopped a car with a gun. He thought I was supposed to be in it.

"But I haven't been in that much danger. I'm more a mobiliser than an activist."

He doesn't confine his agitation to his parish. He was invited to write a weekly column for the leading newspaper, the Daily Nation, but he found the work too much, so he writes on a fortnightly basis.

On the printed page he excoriates the various centres of power. Last month, the police were again in his sights as he laid out how they ignored or profited on the plight of the poor.

For Dolan, the abuse of human rights comes back time and again to the economics. In a country of extremes of wealth and poverty, the latter don't get a look in. The political classes are well padded; an MP is paid around €8,000 a month tax free. A teacher could expect to receive €250 a month, while 57% of the population live on less than €1 a day. In such an environment, Dolan sees a role for himself, interpreting the Gospel as he sees it, railing against injustice.

"Labour rights, housing rights, these are the things that are badly needed. The politicians don't have the trust of the people in these things," he says.

In such a culture, the police know on which side their bread is buttered. The poor neither expect nor receive much in the way of protection from them. Dolan gives an example.

On 1 October last, a five-year-old girl in Bangladesh was sent out for tomatoes by her mother. Her body was found in a bag the next day. She had been raped and strangled.

The police took away the body. There was no investigation. There was no post mortem, on the tenuous basis that the child had been the victim of witchcraft.

Dolan organised for a pathologist to do a post mortem, which definitively established the cause of death. A month after the killing, not one statement had been taken by the police.

"The poor don't matter," he says. "Unless you sit on the police and keep badgering them, they have absolutely no interest."

The offshoot of such a culture is that violence fills a vacuum. On 9 November last, a gang of robbers was apprehended by local people in one of the slums in Mombasa. They were stoned to death. "The notion that violence works is most depressing, it's very worrying," Dolan says.

The resort to violence was best illustrated by the fallout from last year's disputed election. Over 1,000 people were killed in the violence that followed. A third of the deaths were attributed to the police, according to the Waki Report, the official investigation into the violence.

Dolan believes the country was close to descending into another Rwanda at the time. He attributes the fragility of the democracy to the failure of politicians to establish solid institutions of state, which the citizens can believe in, since its independence 45 years ago. Instead, corruption has flourished, and impunity is a way of life in which people accept that high-ranking politicians or members of the police are effectively above the law.

The priest is not without hope. Last month, the election of a son of the old sod, Barack Obama, sprung a new well of optimism. "The political classes may not have learned a lot from him, but the people have," Dolan says. "The mood for change is there."