The Most Reverend Edward Daly
December 5 1933-August 8 2016
Edward Daly may be best remembered as the priest holding up a blood-soaked handkerchief who brought a dying teenager through Army gunfire in search of medical help on Bloody Sunday 1972, but for 19 years as Roman Catholic Bishop of Derry he was a ferocious critic of the IRA, condemning its gunmen from the pulpit as “followers of the gospel of Satan”.
The carnage Daly saw in Derry that day, when a march against internment ended in 13 deaths, convinced him that violence in pursuit of political goals could never be justified. Nevertheless, his insistence that the dead had been shot in cold blood fuelled persistent and ultimately successful demands for an impartial inquiry. His involvement with the most controversial event of the ‘Troubles’ was the main reason why he was made the city’s bishop two years later … news film of his attempt to save Jackie Duddy made an impression worldwide.
Daly was a prominent witness at Lord Widgery’s whitewash inquiry soon after the event, which exonerated troops from the Parachute Regiment, concluding that they had come under attack from gunmen and bombers. “He found the guilty innocent, and the innocent guilty,” Daly complained. “It was the second atrocity.”
When Tony Blair in 1998 set up a second inquiry under Lord Saville of Newdigate, Daly reiterated that the demonstrators had posed no threat to the Army. When Saville reported in 2010, placing the blame squarely on the troops, Daly hailed “a good day for truth and justice – we’ve waited all these years.” Saying the process of forgiving could now begin, he particularly welcomed David Cameron’s “powerful statement” underpinning the findings.
Edward Kevin Daly was born in Co Fermanagh. He boarded at St Columb’s College in Derry, then studied for the priesthood at the Irish College in Rome. His first curacy was at Castlederg, Co Tyrone; then in 1962 he was appointed to St Eugene’s, Derry. Horrified by conditions in the Bogside, Daly raised morale by putting on amateur theatricals. Four months before Bloody Sunday he administered the last rites to a 14-year-old girl shot in the head in crossfire between the Provisionals and the Army as she ate an ice cream.
As a bishop, Daly used the weight of his office to condemn terrorism and to urge the authorities to abandon counterproductive security policies. Internment of terrorist suspects had, he observed, brought “the replacement of men suspected of violence with a new, younger and evidently more irresponsible breed of extremist”. He worked to bring Ireland’s churches together for peace, and played a part in securing the IRA ceasefire of 1975. He invited prayers in his church for British soldiers, and told Americans that dollars sent to the paramilitaries were “helping to inflict further suffering and continued injustice”.
Daly played a major part in trying to resolve the dispute over IRA prisoners’ demand for “political” status that culminated in the hunger strike of 1981 in which Bobby Sands and nine others died. His efforts to negotiate with the government were complicated by inflammatory comments from his superior, the ultra-nationalist Cardinal Tomás O Fiaich. In May 1981, with Sands on the point of death, Daly called for a compromise on political status; Fiaich blamed the government. The next month Daly told the strikers their actions could not be morally justified; the strike collapsed that October, after further deaths.
Daly visited IRA prisoners and pressed for improvements in their treatment, but was cautious over pursuing claims that they were innocent. His decision to campaign for the release of the Birmingham Six, convicted of the pub bombings in 1975 that killed 21 people and injured nearly 200, was thus significant.
Daly became increasingly outspoken over the IRA’s activities in Derry. In 1980 he accused the killers of a soldier home on compassionate leave after the stillbirth of his child of “an inhuman and criminal act of the lowest order”. And when two years later two soldiers were shot close to his cathedral, Daly – one of the first on the scene – put out 15,000 leaflets urging Catholics to turn the killers in.
In 1986 he angered the IRA by telling Catholics who condoned terrorism that they had effectively excommunicated themselves. The next year, after shots were fired at an IRA man’s graveside, he barred their funerals from any church in his diocese.
However, he reopened contacts with Sinn Fein on prospects for ending the violence; Martin McGuinness said he now recognised that Ireland could not be reunited by force. Despite having called the IRA “enemies of Derry and its people, enemies from within, the most despicable of them all”, Daly confessed to a “sneaky respect” for McGuinness. He considered him “an exemplary father, an exemplary husband and a good churchgoer. I respect his ability generally, his ability as an organiser, and his ability politically”.
Suffering a stroke in February 1993, Daly retired as bishop that autumn; thereafter he worked as chaplain to a hospice. In 2004 he published Do Not Let Your Hearts Be Troubled, a guide to ministering to the terminally ill. (Ian Hernon)
Sir Robin
Chichester-Clark
January 10 1928-August 5 2016
The former Ulster Unionist MP for Derry served as a minister in Edward Heath’s government but was forced out of office during the upsurge in sectarian violence in the early 1970s.
He supported the efforts of successive Stormont administrations to address the demands of nationalist civil rights campaigners through gradual reform. But as violence escalated Chichester-Clark came under attack from extremists on both sides of the political and religious divide, and from hardliners within his own party. By 1972 he was forced to recognise that his fellow moderates at Stormont had lost control, but he also believed that the introduction of Direct Rule would undermine what influence for good they still possessed. He continued to argue that “only the work of moderate people on both sides can maintain the hopes of those who yearn to see the scars of history vanish”.
As Direct Rule was imposed and the Government tried to find a solution to the crisis through all-party talks at Sunningdale, as a government minister Chichester-Clark found himself compromised in the eyes of many Unionists. When it became clear that he was unlikely to win his party’s nomination to fight the subsequent election, he stood down before he was pushed.
Robert (Robin) Chichester-Clark was born into a well-known Northern Ireland political family; both his grandfather and his father had represented Londonderry at Westminster, while his maternal grandmother, Dame Dehra Parker, had been elected to the first Ulster Parliament in 1921, sat there for 35 years and became Stormont’s minister for Health. His brother James (the late Lord Moyola) was a member of the Northern Ireland Parliament from 1960 before becoming prime minister. He was educated at the Royal Naval College, Dartmouth, and Magdalene College, Cambridge where he read History and Law. After working briefly as a journalist, he became public relations officer for Glyndebourne Opera in 1952-53, then worked for two years for Oxford University Press.
In 1954 he was chosen by the Ulster Unionists to succeed William Wellwood as their candidate in Londonderry and entered Parliament the next year as the youngest but one MP, after beating his Sinn Fein opponent with a majority of 16,000.
After leaving Parliament, Chichester-Clark worked as a management consultant and became a director on various company boards. From 1988 he was chairman of the Restoration of Appearance and Function Trust (RAFT) and, from 1997, of the Arvon Foundation. He was a trustee of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra Development Trust from 1993 to 1995. (James Douglas)
Joao Havelange
May 8 1916-August 16 2016
The president of Fifa from 1974 to 1998 oversaw the transformation of football into into one of the wealthiest industries in the world, and both he and the institution became bywords for corruption on a massive scale.
He modernised the administration of an almost moribund organisation after a coup with the backing of Fifa’s African, Asian and North American delegates, a deal that led directly to the doubling of World Cup finalists from 16 in 1974 to 32 by 2002. His other initiatives included his championing of women’s and youth competitions; funding for development of the game in the world’s poorer regions; and the return of China to the sport’s fold. In 1988 Havelange was even nominated for the Nobel Peace prize by the Swiss government.
He realised football’s potential for commercial exploitation, underlined by his urging that the World Cup be staged in America and later Japan – countries that were rich but which lacked substantial domestic audiences for the game. It was not until Havelange’s autocratic reign came to an end that his full venality was exposed. While head of the Brazilian FA, Havelange plundered some $6.6 million of its funds to finance bribes to national associations to vote for him. There were also rumours that insurance companies, part-owned by Havelange, had been given the million-dollar contracts for World Cups, and that though Havelange drew no salary as president of Fifa, his annual “expenses” bill amounted to more than $1 million.
Jean-Marie Faustin Godefroid de Havelange was born in Rio de Janeiro, the son of a Belgian mining engineer. He qualified as a lawyer and joined the board of one of the country’s huge interstate bus companies. He became a member of the IOC in 1963; his assumption of office coincided with the flowering of a generation of exceptionally talented footballers in Brazil, most obviously Pele, and as the national side went on to win the World Cup in 1958, 1962 and 1970 Havelange’s standing soared. Typically, he took much of the credit for the team’s success, and cosied up to the military regime that controlled the country for much of that period. (Ian Hernon)