Denis Faul

Denis O'Beirne Faul (14 August 1932 – 21 June 2006), was an Irish Roman Catholic priest best known, in the course of the Northern Ireland Troubles, for publicising security-force abuses and, controversially among Irish republicans, for his role, with the families of prisoners, in bringing to an end the 1981 Irish Hunger Strike.

Born on 14 August 1932 in the village of Louth, County Louth, in the north of the province of Leinster, he was the son of Joseph and Anne Frances Faul.

He was educated at St. Patrick's Grammar School, Armagh, and thereafter studied for the priesthood at St Patrick's College, Maynooth (where he recalled not being allowed to ask questions: "everything was very straightforward").

He was ordained in 1956.

After a year studying theology in Rome, he joined the staff of St Patrick's Boys' Academy in Dungannon, Co Tyrone, to teach Latin and religion.

As a schoolteacher of young Catholics ill-treated by the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), Faul became involved in the early Northern Ireland civil rights movement, and in 1968 participated in its marches.

With onset of the Troubles, he protested vigorously against rights violations by the RUC and, after they were deployed in August 1969 on the streets, by the British Army.

He was also to protest the impunity seemingly enjoyed by loyalist-paramilitary death squads.

For his criticism of the security forces and of the judiciary, Faul was publicly rebuked by Cardinal william Conway concerned lest the church be seen as aligned with republicans.

In failing to "understand the suffering of his own people", he suggested that William Philbin, Bishop of Down and Conor, had conceded leadership to the Provisional Irish Republican Army (described by the bishop as being "of the devil". Among his fellow priests, Faul was not alone: in West Belfast Fr Des Wilson suggested that had the hierarchy "given the same measure of recognition and protection and a sense of dignity to those people as the small guerrilla groups have given them, then they would have as much loyalty". Fr Pat Buckley proposed that had Philbin, in 1969, "led two hundred thousand people up the Falls Road demanding civil rights, the Provos might not have been necessary".

From the introduction of internment without trial (Operation Demetrius) in 1971 to late 1980s, Faul produced in excess of 150 leaflets and pamphlets detailing security force abuses and calling for reform.

Most of these were in collaboration with Fr Raymond Murray, prison Chaplin in the women's prison at Armagh.

In 1974, in submissions to the Lord Gardiner inquiry into the human-rights context of "counter-terrorism" measures, the two priests documented the use of a wide variety of torture techniques in the interrogation and treatment of IRA suspects.

When riots broke out at Long Kesh, Faul and Murray circulated The Flames of Long Kesh (1974) to explain and present the prisoners grievances.

This they followed up with The RUC:The Black and Blue Book (1975), an indictment of police abuses and of selective justice.

In Triangle of Death (1975) Faul and Murray highlighted the possibility of security-force collusion in a spate of killings by the loyalist Glenanne Gang of Catholics in the countryside between Portadown, Dungannon and Armagh.

They repeatedly raised their concerns with the British and Irish governments.

But Faul was not set on the same paths of radical dissent: in what Philbin took as an act of defiance, Wilson resigned his parish duties in 1975, and Buckley's defiance was such that he was suspended from the priesthood in 1986 and excommunicated in 2016.

On many of the issues that exercised the Church in the decades following Vatican II, Faul was orthodox and conservative.

In contrast to Wilson, he defended the priestly rule of celibacy and Church control of schools ("people accuse us of being in the business of brainwashing children. Well, I make no bones about it – we are").

He also opposed divorce, abortion and contraception.

Critically, and again in contrast to Wilson (embraced by the Provisionals as a "priest of the people"), Faul joined his bishops in morally condemning republican campaigns of targeted killings and bombing.

Of himself, Faul said: "I want to see Ireland united but I am not going to kill anybody for it. I am not an IRA man. I am a real republican. I love the British people but they have no business in my country."

Beginning in 1976, before their causes became well-known, Faul and Murray campaigned for the release of the Birmingham Six and the Guildford Four and Maguire Seven.

In 1981, as a visiting priest assisting the formally appointed chaplain in the Maze Prison Faul was seen to play a critical role in ending a republican hunger strike.

Faul had understanding for Bobby Sands and those of his fellow republican prisoners who joined him in refusing food.

"They came from a very oppressed class of people who suffered ferocious discrimination, and the burning our in the Falls Road in August '69 was a very big thing with them ... They felt that their people were defenceless and they had to do something about it. .... There was internment first of all, ill-treatment, torture, sensory deprivation techniques ... and that didn't end until '79. They felt they were representing their people in all of that."With a sense of that "these men were beating us at our own game", as a priest he also appreciated, within a faith that worshipped a "crucified criminal" and gloried in the "passions of the martyrs", the emotive power of the prisoners decision to starve themselves.

After some hesitation, Faul concluded nonetheless that the hunger strike was not "a valid political protest".

It was not a negotiating lever to win the restoration of Special Category Status for republican prisoners.

Rather, for the Provisional leadership, it was "about drawing attention to death and big funerals" in the hope of maximising Sinn Féin's electoral gains.

Persuaded that a previous hunger strike had been 24 - 48 hours from a British capitulation, Sands, had been "conned by his own crowd".

After he and three other men had died in May 1981, and the "Brits" had conceded to one of the demands, that in recognition of their special status republican prisoners be allowed to wear their own clothes, Faul regarded Sinn Féin as being "gravely at fault":"They were having a good time, Sinn Féin. The money was rolling in, political support was building up. They were getting members elected to the Dáil. They had the big funeral for Sands. They were having a great time politically. They could feel it building up and they had a bye-election coming up in Fermanagh/South Tyrone, They wouldn't stop it."In July, after a further five strikers had died, Faul organised organised a meeting of prisoners' relatives.

He argued that Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher had shown she would not be moved, and the families agreed with Faul to meet with Gerry Adams in the hope of finding a way to end the protest.

Adams, however, was to report that the remaining strikers rejected the terms on offer from the British government as a betrayal of those who had already sacrificed their lives.

After four further deaths, Faul persuaded the next of kin to take their men off the strike when they became unconscious.

In 1982, they highlighted the lethal use of purportedly crowd-control plastic bullets.

Those stung by Faul's accusations viewed him as a "Provo priest".

Faul was not uncritical of his church's response to the Troubles.

He was appointed principal in 1983.

In 1995, his church awarded him the honorific title of Monsignor.