CARDINAL Cahal Daly, who stood down as Catholic Primate and Archbishop of Armagh yesterday, was born in Loughgiel, a village on the edge of the Glens of Antrim, on October 1st, 19 17, the third of seven children.
His father, a primary schoolteacher, came from Co Roscommon his mother was from Co Antrim.
His family background was a happy and devoutly religious one, with a strong commitment to education. He was educated at the local national school and at St Malachy's College, Belfast, one of the North's foremost Catholic schools, where the novelist Brian Moore was a contemporary.
He took a classics degree at Queen's University under a man he greatly admired, the Presbyterian nationalist Professor of Latin, R.M. Henry. He moved to the national seminary at Maynooth and was ordained in June 1941 for the Down and Connor diocese. He has said he does not remember any time when he did not want to be a priest.
Dr Daly received a doctorate in divinity from Maynooth in 1945 and in the early 1950s did postgraduate studies in philosophy at the Institut Catholique in Paris. He has had a life long affection for France and spends most of his holidays there.
Back in Belfast he became classics master at his old school, St Malachy's, for a year before being appointed lecturer in scholastic philosophy at Queen's University in 1946. It was a job he was to do for 21 years.
In the early 1960s, he attended the Second Vatican Council, first as an adviser to Bishop Philbin of Down and Connor, and then as theologian to the then Primate, Cardinal Conway.
Already he was establishing himself both as an authority on Vatican II and as one of the Irish church's foremost intellectuals, with a particular interest in social studies and moral philosophy.
In 1967, he was appointed Bishop of Ardagh and Clonmacnoise, a diocese covering parts of seven counties in the midlands. Here he started to become one of the hierarchy's most outspoken and widely quoted members. He produced a stream of public addresses on subjects as varied as emigration, industrial disputes, socialism, abortion, education and the gap between rich and poor.
However, with the outbreak of communal strife in Northern Ireland in 1969, he turned to the theme which would dominate the rest of his career political violence in Ireland.
In 1972, in his New Year's Day address, he urged a more balanced reading of history which would do greater justice to the contribution made to Irish freedom and democracy by peaceful and constitutional movements for change.
In May, he turned to a related theme that he was to emphasise over the years the impossibility of coercing nearly a million Northern Ireland unionists into a united Ireland. He believed, however, that they could still be persuaded, although this task would be "demanding, slow, difficult".
In August, he said that British and world opinion, which in 1969 had been convinced of the injustice of the Stormont regime, were now sickened and alienated by the ruthlessness and intransigence of the IRA's campaign of violence. Such forthright denunciations of the IRA were to make him something of a hate figure among republicans during the next quarter of a century.
In the same address, however, Dr Daly also showed the strict orthodoxy of his position on the socio sexual questions in the Republic. He rejected the arguments for removing the constitutional prohibition on divorce and opposed any change in the law banning contraceptives.
It was becoming clear that when it came to any controversy involving the faith and practice of the Irish Catholic Church, Dr Daly would stand out as its most forceful and coherent spokesman. He was anxious to stress that his primary concern, in his condemnations of both republican violence and sexual permissiveness, was for the dangers of moral degeneracy and corruption among his flock.
Thus, in 1974 he said there was "probably no greater factor of deChristianisation at present at work in Ireland than the continuing violence", adding that the Provisional leaders were dragging Irish republicanism into the gutter and making it a synonym of shame".
Another important strand in Dr Daly's message has always been the importance of ecumenical dialogue. In 1976, he was co chairman, together with former Methodist president, Dr Eric Gallagher, of the inter-church working party which produced the report Violence in Ireland.
However, he spoke with the authentic voice of Roman Catholic conservatism when he restated in the firmest tones the Church's opposition to women's ordination at the world Anglican Lambeth Conference in July 1978.
DR Daly was now widely recognised as the intellectual force behind, and usually the actual writer of the Irish hierarchy's most important statements. Many in the Church believe it was he who wrote the Pope's appeal to the IRA to lay down their arms during his Mass in Drogheda in September 1979.
In February 1982, his apparently endless capacity for work caught up with him and he suffered a heart attack necessitating several months rest and recuperation.
This did not prevent his appointment the following September to succeed Bishop William Philbin at the head of one of the Irish church's most demanding dioceses, Down and Connor, which takes in most of the Belfast region.
At his first press conference he said ecumenism would be one of his dominant preoccupations. The All Children Together group, which advocated shared schools for those Catholic and Protestant parents wanting them, expressed the hope that he would see the need to provide a Catholic chaplain to the North's first integrated secondary school, Lagan College. They were to hope in vain.
Bishop Daly's most publicised political intervention came in 1984 when he presented the Hierarchy's submission to the New Ireland Forum. He told the forum that the bishops did not seek "a Catholic state for a Catholic people", but re-emphasised the hierarchy's opposition to divorce and again rejected the view that joint schooling could contribute to a solution in the North.
At one point Dr Daly raised cheers from the assembled nationalist politicians when he said the bishops would resist any constitutional proposals which might endanger the civil and religious liberties of Northern Protestants.
During his time in Belfast, Dr Daly was also the mover behind a Catholic Church inspired initiative to try to bring jobs to the unemployment black spots of north and west Belfast. Taking advantage of the Northern Ireland Office's anxiety to channel money into community employment projects with no republican involvement, he encouraged priests and Catholic businessmen to set up a network of job creation and training schemes.
In December 1990, Dr Daly became Archbishop of Armagh and spiritual leader of Ireland's 3.7 million Catholics in succession to Cardinal Tomas O Fiaich. At 73, he was the oldest Catholic primate for 170 years, and was only two years away from the usual retiring age for bishops and archbishops.
However, his stature as the Irish church's most outstanding leader meant that most people expected the Pope to keep him in Armagh well beyond that date. In June 1991 he was made a Cardinal, and his high standing with the Vatican was underlined by his appointment to three of its congregations those dealing with evangelisation, ecumenicism and the clergy.
In the event, he was to preside over the Irish church's most testing and difficult period this century. The two developments which would dominate that period would be the IRA ceasefire and its aftermath in the North, and a series of scandals starting with the resignation of Bishop Casey and continuing with a rash of clerical child sex abuse cases throughout the island.
The Belfast priests who were involved in mediation efforts with Sinn Fein and the IRA in the early 1990s kept Cardinal Daly informed of the changing attitudes of the republican leadership. By early 1992 he was starting to change his tune about the republican movement, saying that if the IRA called off its campaign of violence, Sinn Fein would be entitled to a place in talks about the future.
In December the following year, two weeks before the Downing Street Declaration, he told British parliamentarians that for the first time in 20 years a realistic peace was attainable in Northern Ireland.
The following August, his intelligence appeared again to be superior to that of the politicians when, on the eve of the IRA ceasefire, he said that the goal of taking the gun out of Irish politics "may now be very near".
A bomb-shell which Cardinal Daly knew nothing about until days before the story broke.
Some two years later came the jailing of Brendan Smyth, a Norbertine priest, on charges of sexually abusing children for 24 years, and revelations that the head of his order had known about Smyth's propensity to molest children for many years. Although Dr Daly, as Bishop of Down and Connor, had approved the rapid reporting of the first allegations against Smyth to the RUC, there remained a public perception that more could have been done by senior churchmen to bring him to book.
In January 1995, he made his own striking gesture to the cause of reconciliation between Britain and Ireland. Invited to become the first Irish Catholic leader to speak from the pulpit of Canterbury Cathedral since the Reformation, he used the occasion to ask the British people for forgiveness for the wrongs and hurts inflicted upon them by the Irish people. However, he also warned British politicians that political expediency should not be allowed to jeopardise the peace process.
Despite the end of the IRA ceasefire the following month, Cardinal Daly continued to strongly urge the politicians to engage in dialogue. Similarly, he urged the IRA to reinstate its ceasefire so that Sinn Fein could enter the talks.
However, his frustration was evident after the failure of the church leaders to mediate a solution to the Drumcree Orange parade stand off in July. Using the language of anger and betrayal which he has always tried to avoid, he said the decision to force the parade down the Garvaghy Road had "totally shattered" mutual trust and confidence between Catholics and the RUC.
In parallel with the rise and fall of hopes for peace in the North, the Irish Catholic Church was experiencing its own deep crisis. It started with the May 1992 resignation of Bishop Eamonn Casey following revelations that he had a teenage son in the US, a bomb been done by senior churchmen to bring him to book.
At Maynooth, in November 1994, Cardinal Daly said he did not remember in his lifetime "a more painful, a more worrying and distressing time. We feel the" hurt of all those who have suffered, who have been hurt, and all those whose trust in priests or religious has been abused."
A series of court cases and media revelations about priests sexually abusing children were to follow. The hierarchy admitted that up to 60 Irish priests had been the subject of child sex abuse allegations. Cardinal Daly issued public apologies and expressed his distress and horror at the crimes of a small number of priests. Twelve months later, the Cardinal was warning that experience abroad showed that the Irish church could expect another two or three years of "very, very difficult and distressing experiences".
THE summer of 1995 had seen another blow to the traditional and usually unanimous moral authority of the Catholic hierarchy with an unprecedented public clash between Bishop Brendan Comiskey of Ferns and Cardinal Daly over the former's comments about the need to keep open the debate about clerical celibacy.
For many Irish people their last memory of Cardinal Daly will be his unprecedented extended appearance on a Late Late Show on RTE which had been devoted to the problems of the Catholic Church, in November 1995, when he was subject to hostile questioning from a largely Catholic audience.
If Cardinal Daly's numerous public interventions made him by far the country's best known cleric, the private man is hardly known at all.
His spare time pursuits are entirely intellectual. His single minded early devotion to his studies set a workaholic pattern for life. He has no hobbies. His idea of relaxation is a serious intellectual conversation or to settle down with a book of philosophy, poetry or a novel by Dostoyevsky or John McGahern.
He eats little, keeping to a rigid regime based on boiled chicken and fruit prescribed by his doctor after heart surgery in the early 1980s.