William Conway (bishop) - Cardinal Conway and The Troubles

Cardinal Conway and The Troubles

Conway presided over the Irish Church at the outbreak of the Troubles and, as a native of Belfast and a priest of the diocese of Down and Connor was well-placed to respond to the demands of the era. On 12 September 1971, after the introduction of internment, he and his fellow Northern bishops issued a statement in which they both criticised internment and denounced the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) as "the small group of people who are trying to secure a united Ireland by the use of force". In a much-quoted phrase of the Cardinal's the statement went on to pose the question, "Who in their sane senses wants to bomb a million Protestants into a united Ireland?"

Later that year, after the murder of an Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR) soldier by the IRA near Caledon, Cardinal Conway said: "This latest and most cruel murder will send a chill of horror throughout the whole community. The persons responsible for such a barbaric act have lost all sense of the sacredness of human life and have thereby become less than human." He was equally strong in his condemnation of loyalist paramilitaries who killed members of his diocese whose funerals he often attended.

In May 1974 when James Devlin, a well-known Gaelic Athletic Association player in Co. Tyrone was killed along with his wife Gertrude, around 2,000 people attended their funerals. On that occasion Conway said: "In the past three days I have looked upon coffins of seven utterly innocent people who have been ruthlessly cut down. During the past week eleven people have been murdered, one a member of the security forces, the other ten all Catholics. One must raise one's voice to high heaven against this slaughter of the innocent, irrespective of the religion of the victim."