The worst suspicions of loyalists were confirmed this week when Fr James Chesney’s involvement in the 1972 Claudy bombing was revealed. But his case should not be seen as proof of a more widespread collusion between the Catholic Church and the IRA.NEWS OF the PSNI Ombudsman’s devastating report on the Claudy bombing of July 1972 had barely hit the airwaves last Tuesday when the loyalist activist Willie Frazer was putting into words on his website what many Northern Ireland Protestants were undoubtedly thinking.
The revelation that Willie Whitelaw, Cardinal Conway and the RUC’s top brass had colluded to conceal the involvement of the Catholic priest Fr James Chesney in the car bombings that killed nine villagers will, Frazer wrote, “only confirm what we have been saying for many years now; that many Roman Catholic priests were involved in helping, supporting, sheltering and, in cases, training IRA terrorists”.
It has been one of the enduring themes of the unionist and loyalist perception of the IRA and the Troubles that the Catholic Church, either as a body or through individual clerics, basically shares the same ideological outlook as the republican movement and has often thrown in its lot with the gunmen.
One only has to go back to the place where the Provisional IRA was born for evidence of this, to Bombay Street in west Belfast on August 14th, 1969, when loyalist rioters burned down much of the street.
The rioters’ real target was the adjacent Redemptorist monastery from whose tower, according to loyalist folklore, IRA snipers could pick off Shankill Road Protestants at will in an arrangement facilitated by the monks.
It was, of course, one of the myths of the Troubles, but firmly believed nonetheless. The reality in Bombay Street that day was that the IRA was so poorly organised and armed that it was unable to stop the rioters tossing petrol bombs into homes, much less send snipers to the belfry of the monastery. In fact, the failure of the IRA to protect Catholic homes that day led to a split in the organisation and the emergence of the Provisionals.
The truth about the Catholic Church and the IRA during the Troubles is, equally, both complex and prosaic. As with the rest of the nationalist population of Northern Ireland, the full spectrum of opinion could be found among Catholic clerics, from those bitterly opposed to everything the IRA stood for, such as Cardinal Cahal Daly, through to those who took their sympathy for the nationalist cause to a violent conclusion, such as Fr Chesney.
The vast bulk of clerics, like their parishioners, played no role at all in the Troubles. On either side of them were some turbulent clerics, some of whom, such as Fr Denis Faul, agitated on issues from which the IRA gained sympathy and support, while others spent their lives mediating for peace and reconciliation.
It is actually from the ranks of the latter group, from Redemptorists such as Fr Alex Reid and Fr Gerry Reynolds, that much of the origins of the peace process can be traced.
Given the length and intensity of the Troubles, the remarkable feature of the violent, pro-IRA category of priests is that so few of them actually did take up the gun or bomb. Even Willie Frazer cannot name more than five who did, and there are striking aspects to their involvement.
Most of them became, or were, active outside of Ireland and their first involvement can usually be dated back to the early 1970s, when politics in Northern Ireland was etched in black and white and when nationalist ambivalence about the use of violence was pronounced and widespread.
Although Fr Chesney is no longer around to tell his own story, those who knew him say it was Bloody Sunday, when 14 uninvolved civilians were killed by British paratroopers in Derry in January 1972, that pushed him over the edge.
In that respect he was no different from scores, if not hundreds, of other angry nationalists who flocked to the IRA in the wake of that day and helped make 1972 the bloodiest year of the Troubles. It does not excuse what he (and his IRA unit) did in Claudy in July of that year, putting aside his priestly vows to take human life, but it does help to explain it.
The tangled, troubled interaction of Catholic Irish immigrants with the Presbyterians of Scotland provided the background to the next case of an Irish priest’s involvement with the IRA.
In March 1973 police in the Clydebank district of Glasgow followed a suspected three-person IRA unit to the parochial house of St Teresa’s Church, in one of the poorest sections of Clydebank.
The three were met at the door by Fr Bartholomew Burns, a 38-year-old curate, originally from Sneem, in Co Kerry. One of the unit returned to the car and fetched a case, which was left in the house. The three IRA members left in the car, in which, shortly afterwards, they were arrested.
Fr Burns had returned inside the parochial house, and the police, lacking a search warrant, let him go. By the time they obtained a warrant the curate had fled. Inside the house Clydebank police found almost 70kg of gelignite, detonators and IRA intelligence documents.
While Fr Burns’s three co-conspirators were convicted of IRA offences, Fr Burns himself returned to Ireland, where a court dismissed an effort to extradite him.
Meanwhile, in Glasgow, some in the Catholic hierarchy were less than eager to see the curate brought to justice and did little to assist the authorities, as the Scotsman’s Stephen McGinty explained: “The church’s attitude towards alternative authorities such as the police had always been distant in Scotland. The ghetto mentality from which the church was beginning to emerge at the time meant it viewed police . . . as sectarian and anti-Catholic; any co-operation was minimal and reluctant.”
Thanks to the intervention of the Scottish primate, Cardinal Winning, Fr Burns did not serve as a priest in Ireland. His whereabouts are unknown.
A month later, in April 1973, police in England arrested an alleged seven-person IRA unit based in the Coventry area. Among the seven were Frank Stagg, a brother of the Labour TD Emmet Stagg, and Fr Patrick Fell, a curate at All Souls Church in Coventry.
Fr Fell fitted no known template for IRA involvement. Born in England in 1940, he converted to Catholicism and became a priest before meeting Frank Stagg.
Fr Fell and Stagg were convicted. Stagg got a 10-year sentence but died three years later on hunger strike, while Fr Fell served out his sentence and returned to Ireland, where, according to the Guardian, he became, like Fr Chesney, a parish priest in rural Donegal.
There is little doubt that the most controversial of all incidents involving a Catholic cleric and the IRA concerned the Tipperary-born former Pallottine priest Fr Patrick Ryan. Although Fr Ryan has always denied any links to the IRA, British security sources claimed he was an important figure from early on in the IRA’s quartermaster’s department, based mostly in mainland Europe.
In June 1988, two months after the IRA had killed three off-duty British servicemen in the Netherlands, Belgian police arrested Fr Ryan and found large quantities of cash and bomb-making equipment in his home.
While Fr Ryan embarked on a hunger strike, the British attempted to extradite him from Belgium. But the authorities there sent him instead back to Dublin, where he was soon at the centre of a huge diplomatic row between Ireland and Britain.
After a formal request for his extradition was lodged in Dublin, Margaret Thatcher, who was British prime minster at the time, stood up in the House of Commons and effectively called the priest a terrorist, while Fr Ryan threatened to resume his hunger strike if he was sent to Britain.
In December 1988, taoiseach Charles Haughey announced that because of Thatcher’s remarks the priest could not get a fair trial in the UK and would not be extradited.
Instead the case was turned over to the Irish director of public prosecutions, who decided a year later to drop all proceedings.
In 1989 Fr Ryan stood as an independent in the European elections, with Sinn Féin’s support. Although he failed to get elected, he ended up with some 30,000 votes.
SIC: IT