Francis Desmond Wilson (1925–2019) was an Irish Catholic priest and church dissident who in the course of the Northern Ireland Troubles embraced ideas and practice associated, internationally, with liberation theology.
[1] Sanctioned by his bishop, from the mid-1970s Wilson supported his community ministry and engagement with writing, broadcasting and lectures, including in the United States where he promoted the McBride Principles for American investment.
Alongside Fr Alec Reid, from the 1970s he facilitated discussions between republicans and loyalists, contacts which have been credited with helping prepare the ground for the Northern Ireland peace process.
He had seen barricades thrown up around Catholic districts during the deadly riots of 1935, and family members "run the gauntlet” of Protestant school children who might later (in the Unionist establishment) “grow into men and women with power”.
[10] After leaving St Malachy's, he criticised the school system for segregating, not only Catholic from Protestant, but also “parents from their children, boys from girls, and older pupils from younger ones”.
Wilson was distressed not only by the poverty he encountered, but also by the sense that, since their shoddy post-war construction by the city government, the projects had been the subject of “abusive propaganda” as a “problem area”.
[14][15] Encountering refusals to build small business units for those who wanted to create work, to follow up private investment offers, to help cooperatives desperate for capital and, in 1979, the decision of the British Army to commandeer the premises of the Whiterock Industrial Estate, Wilson found the state not merely indifferent to the task but hostile.
For all its international connections, money and “two thousand years’ experience dealing with political and economic regimes of every kind”, he suggested that for the distressed community in West Belfast the Church might as well have been “an impoverished, unconnected heap founded last Thursday”.
[18] Had the Church "rallied to the side of the oppressed nationalist people", Wilson believed it would have rendered "impossible" the developments from which violence was to flow in the coming decades: "internment-without-trial, the torture, the H-Blocks and the hunger strike".
[18] In a “highly volatile” situation requiring “all the resources we could get to heal the poverty and the hurt suffered by so many people”, Wilson found his church superiors more interested in “controlling what there was than creating something better.” Among the “damaging” results were policies that failed to give “adequate place to women”, “marginalised” others who should have welcome, and squandered the “potential of priests" to set society on a gentler path.
Fr Denis Faul, who campaigned against security-force abuses, argued that in failing to "understand the suffering of his own people", Philbin conceded leadership by default to the Provisionals[21] (described by the bishop as being "of the devil").
In Ardoyne, Holy Cross priest Myles Kavanagh, and parish sisters Joan Brosnan and Mary Turley, had set up the Flax Trust in 1977, and one of its first projects had been the transformation of the former Brookfield linen mill into a community business centre.
[31][32] In November 1984, the government decided to withhold public funding from the Conway development, and cautioned businesses and community organisations that if they moved into the Mill they would be denied support.
Sinn Féin's Gerry Adams noted that this came after the Mill had hosted a community-led public enquiry into the killing of a young man by a police-fired plastic bullet.
It was an initiative that, among others, attracted Catholics who, seeking to test the boundaries of liberal unionism (offered by the then Prime Minister, Terence O’Neill), had seen their applications to join the governing Ulster Unionist Party rejected.
[40] After his fall out with Bishop Philbin was made public, Wilson found, somewhat to his surprise, that he had new access to the pages of the leading nationalist paper, The Irish News, and to the studios of the state broadcaster, the BBC.
Given the "low intellectual level of political and religious discussion" in Northern Ireland, he suggested that "the idea of the Christian religion or philosophy could be a liberating force" had been essentially foreign.
Wilson had personally hosted Mother Theresa in 1972 and, until she withdrew them in 1975 under pressure, he believed, from his church superiors, had supported the continuing presence of her Missionaries of Charity from Kolkata.
Rather, as Dutch Green MEP Fr Herman Verbeek argued in a Conway Mill debate with the American Jesuit, it had to be one that recognised the predicament of those who had "a duty to protect others--their families their homes".
[59]In the mid-1970s, Wilson did "get close" to two leading West Belfast loyalists:[60] UDA spokesman Sammy Smyth, who as community worker had participated in a number of cross-community, and cross-border, projects and events;[61][62] and John McKeague, a founding member of the Red Hand Commando who, in prison, had mounted a hunger strike to protest the Special Powers Act.
[63] According to Wilson, in 1979, both loyalists had joined a Protestant delegation to Tomás Cardinal Ó Fiaich to assure him that should the Pope extend his visit to Ireland by crossing the border to the cathedral city of Armagh, he would "not only be left alone but would be treated with respect".
[64] Costello, a leader of the Irish Republican Socialist Party and of INLA, its armed wing, was assassinated in October purportedly by a member of the Official IRA from which he had originally split.
Speaking in 2004, at the funeral of Joe Cahill, Wilson explained that this had been the lesson the former PIRA Chief of Staff, and "the people of his tradition", had been taught by "a one-way history of horrors".
Nonetheless, together with his dissent from the Church on "divorce, the papacy and education", Wilson's in-principle acceptance of "the armed struggle" defined him for Sinn Féin's Danny Morrison as "a priest of the people" (An Phoblacht 22 April 1982).
[18][70] There was not the same embrace for fathers Denis Faul or Pat Buckley who, despite themselves highlighting the same injustices the republicans cited in their defence, condemned their violence, including the sacrifice of life in the 1981 hunger strike.
[71][72] Late in 1971, Wilson arranged for his colleague in PACE, Eric Gallagher, former President of the Methodist Church in Ireland, to meet in Dundalk with PIRA leaders Seán Mac Stíofáin, Rory O'Brady and Joe Cahill.
[73][74] Nothing transpired until the following June when, as a prelude to secret talks with the government (for which Adams was to join Mac Stíofáin in London),[75] PIRA began a "bi-lateral truce".
[81] When McKeague was assassinated by the Irish National Liberation Army (INLA) in January 1982,[82] Wilson attended his funeral: "John did a lot of terrible things but he was willing to talk to us".
[83] Wilson insisted that what was true for his relationship with McKeague and with Smyth, held for his friendship with Ronnie Bunting, the Republican Socialist, and Máire Drumm of Sinn Féin, both whom were also assassinated: no government was going to tell him how to behave toward those it proscribed as "terrorists".
In his 2005 autobiography, questioning the idea that we should "allow others to speak for us to God", Wilson called for a "democratising of churches", a theme of two ecumenical conferences he helped organise in Dublin and Belfast.