A “symbol of Christian dignity” amid the Troubles

On 30 January 1972, Bloody Father

Sunday, British troops opened Edward Daly

fire on unarmed civil rights 1933-2016

demonstrators in the Northern Irish city of Derry, said The Times. Father Edward Daly, a local priest who was accompanying the protesters, only realised they were firing real bullets, rather than rubber ones, when a 17-year-old named Jackie Duddy, who was running beside him, was struck. He tried in vain to staunch Duddy’s bleeding with his handkerchief, then escorted the men who carried the dying boy in search of an ambulance. “They call themselves an army,” Daly later exclaimed. “It was utterly disgraceful. There was nothing fired at them. I can say that with absolute certainty because I was there.” Captured on TV cameras, the sight of the balding priest leading the group, holding up his blood-stained white handkerchief, became “a symbol of Christian dignity amid the sectarian hatred of the Troubles”.

Edward Kevin Daly, who has died aged 82, was born in Ballyshannon, County Donegal, the son of a grocer. His father had fought in the IRA in his youth, but Daly chose a different path, said The Irish Times. Having trained at the Irish College in Rome, he became curate to St Eugene’s Cathedral in Derry, where he counted among his achievements the introduction of bingo to the city. Bloody Sunday wasn’t the only atrocity he witnessed over the years, said The Daily Telegraph. A few months earlier, he administered last rites to a 14-yearold girl who had been shot, while eating an ice cream, in crossfire between the IRA and the Army. Yet it was Bloody Sunday that, for better or worse, defined him. As a result of his involvement, he became a familiar commentator on TV and radio. (“I lost my anonymity,” he later recalled. “It was dreadful.”) This, in turn, influenced the decision to appoint him bishop of Derry at the comparatively young age of 40.

Over the next 20 years, he proved a fierce critic of injustice on either side of the conflict. He lambasted the IRA for turning the funerals of those who had died for the cause into propaganda events. But he also took a strong stance against abuses by security forces, campaigning for a second inquiry into Bloody Sunday after the whitewash of Lord Widgery’s 1972 report, which he dubbed “the second atrocity”. His wish was granted by Tony Blair, and when the Saville Report appeared in 2010, it was a crushing indictment of the conduct of British troops. Daly, who had retired in the 1990s due to ill health, declared it “a good day for truth and justice”.