CARDINAL Cahal Daly will be remembered as one of the outstanding Irish religious figures of the 20th century, but one who had to face deep crisis and disappointment at the very end of his career.
Long before he was appointed to Armagh in 1990, he exercised a considerable intellectual dominance over the hierarchy. The absence of anyone in the hierarchy who could begin to match his resourcefulness and strong mindedness in defence of the church's often unpopular positions persuaded the Pope to keep him in Armagh long after his official retiring age of 75.
He will go down in Irish history as probably the only Catholic Primate of the modern era who had a real insight into the fears and hopes of Northern Protestants, and courageously attempted to reach out to find some modus vivendi with them.
His upbringing in the relatively untroubled atmosphere of a village on the edge of the Glens of Antrim, where Catholics and Presbyterians mixed easily, was an important influence. In later years he recalled surviving traces of the liberal Presbyterianism of J.B. Armour.
Unlike his predecessor, Cardinal O Fiaich, he saw the Protestants as the core of the Northern Ireland problem, rather than the British. According to one admirer quoted in David McKittrick and Eamonn Mallie's classic study of the peace process, The Fight for Peace, Cahal Daly believed violence in the North was wrong because the conditions laid down by St Thomas Aquinas for legitimising it did not exist there. "He and Gerry Adams are engaged in a public dialogue for hearts and minds Cahal might say souls. They're competing."
There was little recognition among Northern Protestants of his courageous stand in going against many of his fellow Northern Catholics in condemning IRA violence from the first days of the Troubles.
These condemnations sprang from his concern about the spiritual damage he saw the IRA wreaking on that Catholic community. It was the same deep concern which made him so uncharacteristically furious at what he saw as the stupidity of the authorities during the Drumcree stand off last summer.
His ecumenism was based on a deep belief, as he said in an open letter to Northern Protestants in 1979, that "Irish Catholics and Irish Protestants can and must help one another to stay faithful to Christ in a world where more and more people walk away from Him."
The fearfulness and fundamentalism of too many of those Northern Protestants made it difficult for them to see that in Cahal Daly, they had the most sympathetic and ecumenical Irish Catholic Primate of the century.
"Sometimes I wish his pastoral letters could be sent to all my fellow Protestant ministers," said the Rev Ray Davey, the Presbyterian founder of the Corrymeela Community, who has known the Cardinal for nearly 35 years. "There is little that is narrowly Roman Catholic in them. His whole theology is firmly based on the Bible."
As a religious leader, Cardinal Daly's three outstanding characteristics were his deep piety, his willingness to take on all comers in debate, and his unquestioning loyalty to Rome. Whether the subject was clerical celibacy, contraception or integrated education, he was never afraid to incur liberal odium by saying the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church were the divinely inspired truth and he would defend them as such.
For, above all things, Cahal Daly was always a loyal servant of Rome. "In the end the churchman always wins out over the intellectual, and he will go through the hoops to say the Church must be right," said one liberal fellow priest after his appointment to Armagh.
In this he was a man of paradoxes. While reconciliation in the North was always one of his most passionately espoused causes, when it came to a gesture like appointing chaplains to integrated schools, his belief in education as above all Catholic "faith formation" inevitably won out.
In the Republic, his image as a stern and authoritarian defender of the church's positions, particularly in the debates on socio sexual issues which so consumed Southern society in the 1970s and 1980s, made him a somewhat distant and to many an increasingly irrelevant figure in western Europe's fastest changing society.
This was seen most graphically in his interventions during the last two years, when the clerical sex abuse scandals were beginning seriously to undermine the church's long unquestioned moral authority.
The most graphic recent memory for many Irish Catholics will be of watching the Primate on The Late Late Show in November 1995. Here, on the TV programme which has exercised such a dramatic influence on modern Ireland's attitude to matters sexual and cultural, the Cardinal took on an audience, itself made up largely of committed Catholics, which heckled and hissed and seemed largely at odds with its spiritual leader on issues ranging from clerical accountability to women priests.