Forty years later, the amiable cleric from the Co Wicklow seaside resort of Bray found himself literally in the firing line while leading parents and young children past furious loyalist protests to Holy Cross Girls’ Primary School in Ardoyne.
“I was ordained in Dublin, but I became a priest walking up and down that road,” he says, reflecting on the trauma of the summer of 2001 in north Belfast.
He recalls real fear when police arrived at his door one Friday evening to tell him he was to be killed that weekend. But he refused to leave, because he couldn’t abandon the parents and children.
He also remembers the joy of finally reaching a resolution, describing the news that the months-long protest was being suspended as “one of the best days of my life”.
Fr Troy says the lessons learned still apply today.
Although the north is in a much better place now, “we still have a day’s work to do” – and the way human connections and trust were built in Ardoyne is an example of humanity succeeding.
Rewinding to 2001, three years after the Good Friday Agreement, the violent scenes at an interface in Ardoyne – with images of terrified children having to run a gauntlet of hate surrounded by riot police – were flashed around the world.
When it became known that loyalist protesters, citing various grievances, would try to stop Catholic pupils walking through the Protestant Glenbryn area to their school, the parents asked Fr Troy, parish priest and chair of the school board of governors, to lead them.
There was something providential about his involvement. A priest of the Passionist order, he’d been in Rome for seven years and was heading out to sit an exam when he noticed a news item in an Italian paper.
“Trouble at a Belfast school,” ran the headline.
Fr Troy recalls: “Being an optimist, I thought well, that’ll be nothing to do with me. But the next thing I discovered it was Holy Cross.”
He had already been notified that he was being given responsibility for the parish, but thought: “I’m not due there until August and it’ll be long over by then.”
But when he arrived in Ardoyne it was only getting started.
“That was a very difficult two weeks when they hadn’t got up the road to school. We had three and a half weeks to decide with the parents what we are going to do on the morning of the third of September.
“You know the cliché ‘hit the ground running’, well I hit the ground sprinting. We had two or three meetings every week with parents. The school was brilliant about filling me in on the background. Fr Gary (Donegan) had been there and he also filled me in. Other governors were tremendous, they were very experienced.
“I only had one question to ask the parents. What do you want to happen on September 3? No matter anybody else, what do you want to do?
“They said we want to bring our children to school and bring them home again. That’s all,” says Fr Troy, pointing out that they had a right in law to bring their children to school “without let or hindrance”.
Initially, he hadn’t considered walking with the children but on the first morning, parents asked him to lead them through the cauldron of abuse.
“Every step I took was a learning step and after three months I still had so much more to learn,” he says.
Fr Troy had already had several experiences of the north.
In 1963, he arrived at the Graan near Enniskillen, isolated “in the middle of a working farm”.
By 1971 he saw a very different Northern Ireland when he returned at the time of internment. He recalls being in Belfast the day of Bloody Friday when “bombs were going off everywhere”, as well as as the mass loyalist strikes of 1974.
His assignment at Crossgar as vocations director involved visiting schools and he used to do weekend cover in Downpatrick, Ardglass and Killough.
“I absolutely loved it. When I look back now I can truthfully say that was the beginning of a love affair with the north. It was extraordinary. I was terribly sad after three years that I was transferred back to Dublin,” he says.
He’d been away for some time by 2001 and was surprised in Rome when he was told he would be going to Holy Cross in north Belfast.
As the violence erupted, he says: “I can honestly say I was appalled by what I saw. It was incomprehension. I could not understand it and that’s why I worked so hard.
“I was blessed with the clergy from other denominations whom I could talk to to get some insight into this. It wasn’t a case of me saying I’m so angry. I was stunned. I had never seen anything like it.
“I felt these people were lost,” says Fr Troy. “In my heart I felt that.”
While publicly, the parish priest remained a calm presence as he negotiated with police and army and travelled to Stormont and Dublin to talk to politicians to seek a resolution, all the time standing with the parents and children, he says now that he didn’t realise at the time how much the turmoil took out of him.
He received “scurrilous” letters from people telling him he was a disgrace to the church and took physical and verbal abuse during the protests as balloons of urine and even pipe bombs were thrown at the families.
He and his family were particularly hurt when protesters held up a sign calling him a paedophile.
“You glanced up and saw it and felt oh my God that’s awful. Because I was a southerner, my family couldn’t understand why I was doing this. They said would you not come back, you’re going to be killed.
“But I didn’t join to be safe,” he says.
“I’ve never disguised that I felt fear. But my biggest terror was not that something would hit me. I thought I just hope it doesn’t hit a child. If it had’ve hit a child from Glenbryn I’d have been equally distraught.
“No child should ever see what they saw or suffered what they did.
“I could have ended up in court if a child had been killed; you were chair of the governors, you allowed this to go on under your watch.
“It didn’t worry me about going to prison, it was just the hurt to the families. I was thankful that no child was injured or killed. It was as bad as that. That was a great, great blessing and we came through it.”
Fr Troy remembers the Friday night when police arrived to tell him he was to be killed and they were to take him to a place of safety.
“I said I might as well hang a note on the gate that when I was under pressure I ran away. I couldn’t face that.
“I said OK, the worst that can happen is they kill me. But I hadn’t a wife or children. Supposing a parent was killed or a child killed. I couldn’t face that.
“Every night I went into the private chapel in Holy Cross and I used to say to God, don’t let me make too many mistakes tomorrow.
“I knew I couldn’t solve this. I knew I had to be humble about it, but I knew I had to be strong. That’s why I wouldn’t go away. It wasn’t because I was very brave, but I felt so committed to these parents.
“If I walked out and said, listen, I was under a death threat, they would’ve said, well we understand but what do we do now?”
After the picket was suspended, a private meeting was held with representatives of the protesters in the Lord Mayor’s parlour at the City Hall, when a protocol was worked out in case things broke down again.
There had been some initial contact and Fr Troy says “they weren’t stupid people and they had their own issues”.
“We had direct connection with each other, not because we needed to be friends but because we could not bear to see the children of any denomination suffer. I was conscious the children of Wheatfield were also affected,” says Fr Troy.
“We are in a better place now. I’m not in a position of leadership but I think there is a great window of opportunity.
“I would do anything to make a contribution again in the whole field of community building. People are open to it.”