The man who SLOWLY brought PEACE to Ireland
He was the priest who took Martin McGuinness’s statement of an IRA ceasefire in 1993 – though he believes the Troubles could have stopped decades earlier. Meet Denis Bradley...
IT WAS the beginning of the end. In late 1993, in a room with three other men, Martin McGuinness started to dictate a statement to the British government, insisting that not a single word be changed.
After a brief preamble, it read: ‘It is clear we are prepared to make the crucial move if a genuine peace process is set in place.’
It was the offer of an IRA ceasefire to allow meaningful talks to proceed. For Denis Bradley, the man who took the statement, it was a defining moment.
‘I wanted to stand up, clench my fist and shout “yes!”, the way golfers and winning football managers do,’ he writes in his memoir, Peace Comes Dropping Slow. ‘I didn’t. I just smiled inwardly, and I think, although this might be retrospective and wishful thinking, I said a quiet prayer of thanksgiving.’
For three decades, Denis and the others, businessmen Brendan Duddy and Noel Gallagher, were part of the so-called backchannel, trusted intermediaries passing information between the IRA and the British intelligence services.
Following a meeting arranged between McGuinness, Gerry Kelly and a British agent called ‘Fred’, this meeting with McGuinness was the culmination of their work, and it led eventually to the 1998 Good Friday Agreement that brought hostilities to an end.
Denis Bradley was ideally placed to play this role, because when he started, he still was a priest in Derry, a trusted community worker who was present on Bloody Sunday for the massacre of protesters by the British Army’s Parachute Regiment. Later, he would become laicised and marry, but he continued on his clandestine mission.
He was one of eight children — a sister, Frances, died in childhood — born in Buncrana in Co Donegal, where his mother ran a guesthouse. Academically capable, he became a boarder at St Columb’s College in nearby Derry, where John Hume was one of his teachers. Though there was ‘no blinding insight or divine intervention’, he continued on to Maynooth College to study for the priesthood.
After a period at a seminary in Rome, he was ordained and posted to Derry, where his vision of priesthood with a social role allied to religious ministry was formed.
‘The Troubles were really only beginning to break out,’ Denis tells me. ‘I suppose I was around for the first few killings. It was the beginning of the end of the civil rights movement, and the beginning of the beginning of the Troubles as we know them, so I was there for that.
‘I think I was introduced to it, not in some kind of massive, dramatic fashion, but it was the beginning of the deaths. The first was a person that I had gotten to know a little bit in the parish, Billy
McGreanery. The massive, transformative, significant, signal issue was Bloody Sunday, I suppose, but there was a black lead-up.
‘They weren’t all harrowing times, though. There was an excitement, a kind of feeling that people were being noticed, that we were off our knees.
‘There was an interest in us, and when I say us, I mean all the people in the area, the Bogside, the Brandywell, Creggan. When you were living in the north-west, you were fairly neglected politically anyway. It was mostly about unemployment and social and economic injustice, and there was a way in which the civil rights movement had thrown us right into the attention not just of Ireland, but of the world. That lasted for a period of time.’
Denis’s views were heavily influenced by the actions of people such as US labour leader and cofounder of the United Farm Workers Union, Cesar Chavez. These notions didn’t quite fit with the views of the hierarchy, who viewed him with some suspicion.
Bishop Edward Daly, he writes, ‘was certainly more open and empathetic to priestly engagement with street issues, but I had little sense of him ever encouraging or facilitating discussion and exploration.
‘This unwillingness to talk and debate was one of the reasons that the Church’s main contribution towards solutions for societal problems came from individual clergy rather from the institution itself, from individuals who would probably have been considered by their fellow priests as mavericks.’
Nor was there much opportunity to discuss many matters beyond the superficial at all in the parochial house.
‘I don’t think men are particularly good at talking, and I think clerics at that time were particularly bad at it,’ he writes. ‘I don’t know if they have improved all that much, really, over the years, but they certainly were particularly bad then because of the quite stifling nature of that hierarchical
‘My own ego was going to be tested to some degree’