CARDINAL CAHAL Daly, the former Catholic primate of Ireland, was last night seriously ill with heart trouble in a Belfast hospital.
He was taken from his south Belfast home to the Belfast City Hospital yesterday morning and was last night being treated for a coronary problem in a specialist unit.
He was visited by his successor as Catholic primate of All Ireland, Cardinal Seán Brady.
It is understood to be the second time in a month that the 92-year-old former archbishop of Armagh has been treated in hospital.
Cardinal Daly was born in the village of Loughguile, on the edge of the Glens of Antrim, on October 1st, 1917, the third of seven children. His father was a primary school teacher originally from Keadue in Co Roscommon while his mother was from Co Antrim.
The cardinal was educated at the local national school and at St Malachy’s College, Belfast, where novelist Brian Moore was a contemporary.
He took a classics degree at Queen’s University and then moved to the national seminary at St Patrick’s College Maynooth. He 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
He received a doctorate in divinity from Maynooth in 1945 and in the early 1950s did post-graduate studies in philosophy at the Institut Catholique in Paris. He has had a lifelong affection for France and has spent 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 hold for 21 years. He became bishop of Ardagh and Clonmacnoise in 1967 and was appointed to the diocese of Down and Connor, which includes Belfast, in 1982.
He was made archbishop of Armagh in November 1990 and elevated to cardinal the following year. He retired from Armagh in 1996 to be replaced by Archbishop Brady. Cardinal Daly took part in the conclave to appoint the current Pope Benedict in 2005 but did not vote on account of his age.
He has written extensively on philosophy as well as on the conflict in Northern Ireland and continued to study after his retirement. He was prominent in the Irish Catholic bishops’ delegation to the New Ireland Forum in 1983 and contributed to the work of the Forum for Peace and Reconciliation, established after the first IRA ceasefire of 1994.
He is also believed to have been the author of Pope John Paul’s Drogheda speech in September 1979 appealing to the IRA to end its violence.
Father Edward McGee of the Down and Connor diocese told UTV last night that Cardinal Cahal Daly was “seriously ill”.