He lived life honestly, energetically, courageously and compassionately, writes Gerry Moriarty
Monsignor Denis Faul died yesterday aged 73 in his golden jubilee year as a priest, ordained out of Maynooth. He lived life honestly, energetically, courageously and compassionately. In one of the last major interviews he did for this newspaper earlier in the year he said he had much work to do, but was not afraid to die.
He wasn't too concerned about his personal legacy but offered a sort of self-authored epitaph nonetheless.
"I hope I could say I helped the poor when they were in trouble, that I gave them money and help, that I got them away to England when they had to get away, that I helped the prisoners." Not even his most serious detractors can deny that he did all that, and more.
We were aware he was seriously ill with cancer and the purpose of the interview in his parochial house in Carrickmore, Co Tyrone was to hear him speak about the highlights of his life, and also to ensure, in a sense, that there could be no accusation he was not honoured in his lifetime.
Typically though he wanted to zoom in on his main concern that day, the plight of the exiled - the alleged informers, petty criminals and general innocents who were forced out of Northern Ireland by the policing writ of republican and loyalist paramilitaries.
A native of Co Louth, he came from a middle-class professional family. He was an orthodox, conservative Catholic cleric and always his own man. He worked as a teacher for 40 years at St Patrick's Academy in Dungannon, 15 years of them as principal.
He ended his priestly career as parish priest of Carrickmore, where he was generally respected, despite some republican efforts to force him out of the town because of his support for policing.
He was involved in the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s and in 1969 Cardinal Conway made a vain effort to "carpet" him for accusing the Northern Ireland judiciary of being complicit in discrimination against Catholics. He condemned violence from all quarters, but at that period and through the 1970s he was chiefly seen as a campaigning priest against human rights violations by the RUC and British army.
With Armagh priest Fr Raymond Murray he catalogued and publicised the "inhuman and degrading treatment" (as found by the European Court of Human Rights) to which many of the early 1970s internees were subjected.
With Fr Murray and Sr Sarah in London he also worked tirelessly for the Birmingham Six, the Guildford Four and other Irish prisoners he believed were wrongly imprisoned.
This earned him vilification from unionists and the British establishment, but did not deflect him from his work. He was equally single-minded in opposing the H-Block hunger strikes in 1981 when he was the Catholic chaplain at the Maze. This in turn prompted the enmity of the provisional republican movement. In the continuing controversies over the strikes, Msgr Faul generally held with the claims of former hunger striker Richard O'Rawe that the republican leadership prolonged the strike beyond the period when four or six men died to ensure the election of Owen Carron to Westminster, which effectively marked the rise of Sinn Féin as a political force.
One quote from his Irish Times interview in January encapsulated the man. "It's important to bear witness," he said. "The quality Irish people most admire is courage, and not just physical courage, but moral courage as well; that you can stand up, speak your mind, even though you're getting lambasted from all sides. You have to stand up."