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Monsignor Denis Faul, outspoken critic of violence and human rights abuses in Northern Ireland for over 30 years, died on Wednesday at age 75. He first came to prominence in the 1960s and early 1970s speaking out against judicial anti-Catholic prejudice, excesses by the British Army and Royal Ulster Constabulary, and ill-treatment of prisoners. Later, he denounced, often with even greater vehemence, IRA brutality that created an atmosphere of fear in Catholic ghettos.
In 1977, he provoked intense anger among republicans when he stated that the IRA’s campaign was “directly contrary to Catholic teaching on the sacredness of human life”. At a republican funeral in 1982, he urged mourners against joining paramilitary organisations.
For much of his life, Msgr Faul was a schoolteacher and headmaster of St Patrick’s Academy for Boys in Dungannon. He taught his students to beware the temptations of the republican paramilitaries.
Faul knew his charges and frequently told those teenagers who seemed seduced by the lure of violent republicanism: “If you’re lucky, you’ll spend 20 years in jail. And if you’re not lucky, your mother will be handed a folded tricolour at your graveside.”But the kicker was to come: “And if you go to jail or die,” Faul often would tell them, “it will sooner or later emerge that your commanding officer was a tout, and that his commanding officer was a tout too. And whilst you’re rotting away, they will be getting off scot-free.” If only more imams in Britain today spoke like that to young Muslims tempted by jihad.
Faul’s warning was only mildly hyperbolic. He was vindicated when it emerged that two leading Provisionals, Denis Donaldson and Freddie Scappaticci, had been on the British payroll — the tip of an iceberg. And he would have been unsurprised by allegations that Martin McGuinness was a British agent: he had claimed as much to me more than five years ago.
Msgr Faul was troubled by the 1994 ceasefire because he perceived that the Blair government had sold out ordinary Catholics to appease the Provisionals. Among Britain’s concessions to Sinn Fein, he particularly objected to the closure of Northern Ireland’s grammar schools. He said there should be statutes erected in honour of R.A. Butler, author of the 1944 Education Act, because he had done far more good for ordinary Catholic children than all the republican martyrs combined.
