THE former Roman Catholic Bishop of Derry, Dr Edward Daly, who was a curate at the time of the Claudy bombings in which a priest of the diocese, the late Fr James Chesney, has been implicated by an Ombudsman’s report, has come out of retirement to express disquiet at the media coverage and findings of the report.“Everyone takes the same unquestioning line and competes to write the most lurid headline. The once sacrosanct presumption of innocence has been dispensed with, and replaced with a presumption of guilt. I am not at all convinced that Fr Chesney was involved in the Claudy bombings. I may be mistaken, but I do not think so. I was a contemporary of his at school. I did not know him very well, but knew him reasonably well. Fr Chesney was never arrested, questioned, charged, or convicted. He cannot answer for himself. He has been dead 30 years.”
Dr Daly said that the report aired suspicions about the priest that were based solely on intelligence reports.
“But intelligence and evidence are completely different things. Why was the Ombudsman unable to find evidence against him after years of investigation? He found only these ‘intelligence reports’, and 1972-type RUC intelligence at that. In the 1970s, there was widespread scepticism about RUC Special Branch intelligence. Hundreds were interned on such intelligence.”
In a statement issued by the RC communications office on Monday, Dr Daly posed the question: “If police suspected Fr Chesney in the atrocity, they should have arrested him rather than closing the case, thus allowing all the perpetrators to go free. Can anyone believe that just because ‘Man A’, whom the RUC suspected of involvement in major horrendous terrorist crime, gave another major suspect [Fr Chesney] in the same crime as an alibi, that police could allow them both to walk free? “How did security forces became so coy whenever Fr Chesney came on their radar — even when they alleged that a dog detected explosives in his car? That was not my experience in South Derry then, when I was often terrified and humiliated by the treatment and delays I experienced at security-force checkpoints as I returned from confirmations and other pastoral duties late at night.”
Dr Daly described it as “a huge insult” to suggest he would knowingly “allow someone whom I knew to be a mass murderer to serve as a priest in my diocese. “I do not accept theories — voiced by several people in the aftermath of the report — about priests being endangered and a possible subsequent fallout in society if Fr Chesney had been arrested. Two priests were murdered by the British Army in Belfast just months earlier that year and there wasn’t exactly community uproar. Did anyone believe the mere arrest of an obscure priest in County Derry would worsen the already chaotic Ireland climate? Northern Ireland was a war zone in 1972. Some 500 people were killed.”
He rejected the Ombudsman’s suggestion to reporters that Fr Chesney continued his Republican activities when he was in Donegal.
“As bishop at that time, I was aware of his previous espousal of views, and he knew I was having him observed. There was never a complaint about him. I believe it possible that the RUC wanted Fr Chesney out of South Derry because of his publicly proclaimed Republican sympathies and a fear of the influence these might exert on young people in the area.”
Dr Daly said that Claudy had at last received its long-overdue recognition as one of the most despicable acts of terror in Northern Ireland. He would continue to pray that “the truth will out”.
“The families, the community, and Fr Chesney’s relatives need to hear it.”
SIC: CT/UK