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Who Was Denis Faul?
When Monsignor Denis Faul died last week I have to confess as to now knowing who he was or why he was important. In fact it wasn't until Mick Fealty pointed out this piece in the Times and I then googled a bit until I came across his obituary in the Guardian.
Provo Priest?
If I'm honest, seeing Gerry Adams and (as if that wasn't bad enough) Rory O'Brady at the man's funeral made me seriously doubt the Monsignor Faul's integrity, wondering if maybe he was an anti-British republican sympathiser. Well as it turns out he was the latter, as he said himself he wanted to see Ireland united, but he was quick to add "but I am not going to kill anybody for it."
He earned the 'Provo Priest' nickname after causing some unease for the state earlier in his life, including when he was the chaplain of Long Kesh internment camp and later the Maze prison. In the 1970s, he and Fra Raymond Murray, compiled a dossier of ill-treatment of prisoners by the army. He felt that the treatment alleged constituted a stupid mistake by the British, which would only serve to prolong the violence. He was also outspoken against what he saw as prejudice against Catholics in the police, the army and the judiciary.
He was one of the first campaigners for justice for the Birmingham Six and Guildford Four, long before their causes became well-publicised and he was later vindicated by their release.
Follow up:
Though the IRA had tried to extract propaganda value from him, it he wouldn't go along with anything he didn't agree with. In fact he helped end the 1981 hunger strikes, a move which made him unpopular with republicans. Its reported that Bik McFarlane had to be physically restrained from hitting him at one point. He certainly doesn't seem to have been the priest in the provos' pocket that many believed he was, and many others wished he was. While he was headmaster at St. Patrick's Academy for Boys in Dungannon, he is said to have warned his pupils of the dangers of getting involved with the IRA.
"If you're lucky, you'll spend 20 years in jail. And if you're not lucky, your mother will be handed a folded tricolour at your graveside. And if you go to jail or die, it will sooner or later emerge that your commanding officer was a tout, and that his commanding officer was a tout too. And whilst you're rotting away, they will be getting off scot-free."
Recognising Reform
In 1999 hundreds Catholic 'worshippers', led by Sinn Fein's Barry McElduff, sought to have him removed from his strongly republican parish of Carrickmore in Co. Tyrone. His crime? He attended 2 meetings with the RUC to discuss how the safety of residents in the village could be improved. Unlike many of the more hardline republicans, Denis Faul lived through the worst of the troubles and experienced first-hand the environment in which Catholics lived and could therefore see how much things had changed by the turn of the century.
In reality it was probably as much to do with the fact that since the RUC and army had begun cleaning up their acts, more of the human rights abuses Faul would speak out against were perpetrated by republican paramilitaries. In his view the intimidation and environment created by these groups created a more oppressive atmosphere in nationalist areas than had ever existed during the pre-1997 period of British direct rule. While this kind of consistencey may lend some credence to his earlier claims of excesses by the security forces, it didn't win him any friends in republican circles. When he said that the name of the RUC should cause no great difficulty for Catholics and that they should join the police en masse to redress the religious imbalance, that may well have been the last straw.
According to Godson in the Times, what Faul saw happen in the Blair years was the selling out of ordinary decent Catholics by the British state, in the name of accommodation of republican fascists. When the British government gave in to the fashionable narrative of British 'oppression' they were selling themselves short considering the amount of reform they instituted in Northern Ireland in the last decade of the 20th century. Justice was as important (or moreso) to Faul than Irish unification.
Liberation Through Education
Of course as a fan of grammar schools, I can't not comment on Faul's desire to erect statues in nationalist areas to R. A. Butler, author of the 1944 Education Act and therefore father of Northern Ireland's grammar school system. Faul claimed that Butler had liberated far more poor Catholic children than any number of republican martyrs and I suspect he may have been right.
An Example To Follow
I'll not pretend that I think he was a saint or that he was infallible, certainly not. In fact when he said he wanted a united Ireland (his first mistake, obviously) but wouldn't kill for it, he did go on to say "I love the British people but they have no business in my country," which I think demonstrates a complete lack of understanding or empathy for the majority population in Northern Ireland, which was due in part, I'm sure, to the segregated nature of Ulster during most of his life. Being a priest, he was obviously also devoutly religious and campaigned against contraception and abortion reform in the Republic.
The impression I get though, is that he was in many ways a reasonable man who just stood up for what he believed in, whose consistency alone is enough to make him stand out from the crowd. What it boils down to, I suppose, is that a few more like him in Northern Ireland wouldn't be too bad a thing.
Sharp lessons from a turbulent priest, The Times, Friday 23rd June 2006
Obituary: Monsignor Denis Faul, The Guardian, Thursday 22nd June 2006
Portrait: Turbulent Priest, The Guardian, Wedensday 22nd December 1999