Of the countless stark images from The Troubles in Northern Ireland, few convey the brutality and senselessness of those years more than the image of Fr. Edward Daly on Bloody Sunday in 1972.
Waving a white handkerchief, covered in blood, the priest can be seeing pleading with British soldiers to show mercy as they massacred 14 unarmed Catholic civilians, shooting 26 in total.
Only a few months earlier, the same regiment had massacred 9 civilians at Ballymurphy, including Catholic priest Father Hugh Mullan as he did what Fr. Edward Daly did, waving a white handkerchief to beg for a cessation in the killings. The British soldiers did not listen and instead chose to murder him.
On the day in question, paratroopers opened fire on innocent civilians in the bogside area of Derry City, using some stones being thrown as a pretext to horrific violence. A 17 year old, Jackie Duddy, was running alongside Fr. Daly when a he was shot in the back. It was Jackie’s limp body that was photographed behind Fr. Edward Daly’s handkerchief, before he later succumbed to his injuries and died.
7 of the 14 who were murdered were teenagers when they were killed.
The selflessness of Father Edward Daly, later to become Bishop Edward Daly, is the real story of most people’s experiences of Catholics priests in Ireland in the Twentieth Century and throughout history. A priest has a particularly unique role, in repeating the sacrificial nature of Christ not only through the offering of the Mass, but also through their earthly lives, in service of his parishioners and of the Kingdom of God. The striking image of Father Daly, surrounded by death and danger as bullets fired around him, perfectly encapsulates priesthood at its very purest.
Father Daly’s love for his flock is of the sort that Irish priests were examples of most of their 1600 years on this island, no one else persevered with Catholics during the Penal Laws, even heroic men such as Daniel O’Connell come up short when compared to others such as Saint Oliver Plunkett, who were mutilated to the point of death for their love of Christ and for their flock. Father Edward was one of many who maintained the reminder that a priest is not merely a man in a cloth, but one ordained to act In Persona Christi, in the person of Christ.
Fr. Daly died in 2016.
May Bishop Daly, and all of the victims of Bloody Sunday, rest in peace.
