As he leaves Ardoyne for Paris, Fr Aidan Troy reflects on his role in a sectarian conflict that made headlines across the world, writes Dan KeenanNorthern News Editor
IN JUST OVER seven years at the Holy Cross parish in north Belfast he has confronted political and social problems big enough to scare anyone. He has survived violent anti-Catholic protests and personal death threats. He has worked to quell sectarian interface disturbances and vicious rioting. He has helped tackle the disturbing phenomenon of teenage suicide and a host of other social ills suffered by the 7,000 or so souls that live in the enclave of Ardoyne, 80 per cent of whom, he says, don't bother much with Sunday Mass. For all that, he refuses to criticise them and, instead, wishes some day to return to live there again.
The middle child of a family of three, Fr Aidan Troy reflects the glow of his mother's compassion and simple faith and his father's decency and social justice politics.
Dan Troy, a railway worker told him: "Never forget your cloth cap," while his mother, Elizabeth, told him it was okay by her if he quit the priesthood if he was unhappy with it.
He was to lose them at key times in his life. His mother, a TB sufferer, died shortly after he had gone to study for the priesthood. His father died at the height of the Holy Cross school protest - the issue which has come to define the priest in most Irish eyes.
He's had an eventful time as a Passionist priest since his earliest days as a student at The Graan in Enniskillen in 1963 where he overlapped for a time with that other media darling, Fr Brian D'Arcy.
He has been based in Dublin and later in Crossgar in Co Down, travelling around Northern schools at the height of the Troubles giving retreats and parish missions.
He has also spent many years abroad, in San Francisco, where he earned his MA in Pastoral Ministry, and in Rome working for the central government of the Passionists. This work meant he travelled widely throughout Latin America, Africa and Indonesia as well as across Europe.
"What I liked about that was not so much the travel but the insight it gave me into how different the church can be in different parts of the world."
It was during a year back in Dublin in 2000 that he got the telephone call to go to Holy Cross. "I was quite shocked because I had been outside Ireland for years. But I realised that at that stage - I would have been 56 - this could be my last real assignment. I saw it as the first step towards retirement."
He wasn't the best person for the job, he reckons. "I wasn't a Northerner. I thought I didn't fully understand what was going on." But, in the relative calm of the post-Belfast Agreement era, he figured he would probably be "a good enough caretaker".
It was during the course of his preparations for leaving Dublin on June 20th that summer that he happened across an internet news story under the headline "Trouble at school in Belfast".
"I remember seeing it was Holy Cross and thinking 'that's where I'm going'. But being hugely optimistic, I said to myself that will be long over by the time I get there." It wasn't, and Fr Troy found himself at the sharp end of a conflict which quickly became a global news story. His innocence was, in retrospect, a virtue he believes.
"I knew nothing, not being from the North, not having lived in Ireland [for some time]. I had to learn from the people, the police, the teachers, the parents, the media and wider society - from the criticisms. If I had been here maybe five or six years before that event, I might have had views that probably would not have been very helpful. Naivety was playing on my side big time."
It's this that explains his determination to deal directly with the RUC under chief constable Ronnie Flanagan at a time when most in Ardoyne would have shunned the police, convinced they were partial.
"The parents almost became protective of me because there was a naive streak in me and they almost had to look after me as well as look to me to lead them." He recalls in detail standing at the bottom of Ardoyne Road, which crosses loyalist Glenbryn and leads to Holy Cross girls' school, on the first morning of the new school year. Ahead were the loyalist protesters who believed they were facing some kind of threat from their more numerous Catholic neighbours, while all around were legions of soldiers, police and camera crews.
Fr Troy was wearing his habit, having just said Mass when he was asked to join the walk to school by some parents.
"You know you could end up being our insurance," they said to him. "Because if you walk with us, you could end up being the one who distracts some attention from the children." Having walked once, he says, he then walked every day - twice in the morning and twice in the afternoon.
On the seemingly nihilistic loyalist protest he is both sympathetic and damning. "They were doing this because they honestly believed they had issues. I believe they were 100 per cent wrong to engage children and I'll never stop saying that."
His objective all along was to remove the schoolgirls from the dispute. "If we could get the children out of the mix, then let the adults, as adults, sort it out," he said. "That's how we got some meetings going very quickly between governors and protesters - but they were so painful, so difficult."
In the end, a package of measures was agreed to facilitate the suspension of the protest, while the protesters' grievances were addressed in a manner that allowed some face-saving. The protest remains "suspended" to this day. Earlier this year, five children from Holy Cross and another five from Beechfield school, attended by Protestants, went together to Boston for a basketball tournament.
When news broke in August that Fr Troy's transfer to Paris was imminent, one of the first text messages he received was from someone in Glenbryn.
Were he staying in Ardoyne, he says he would work to address some of the "many horrible things" that still go on the area - enduring paramilitarism and criminality, social problems and an alarming rate of teenage suicide.
Yet for all that, there is no blanket condemnation of a community which some outsiders are inclined to see as dysfunctional.
"People have done brilliantly well to be as good as they are today," he insists. "There are people here who do not know the centre of Belfast at all. They have drunk, socialised, married and died in Ardoyne. That has influenced the society here enormously. There are people here who almost need the oxygen of conflict to deal with normal life. Therefore I have a boundless sympathy for the people here, they have lived an unreal life for so long."
This week he is taking a little time off to see the wider Troy family in and around Bray, Co Wicklow, where he was reared.
Of his departure, he says: "There has been an outpouring of love, affection - almost terror . . . Now, that doesn't come from a totally dysfunctional society. That comes from a society that has a reservoir of love and affection and respect and all the qualities that are normally attributed to other parts of Ireland. These people are normally seen as the toughest of the tough, the most awful in many ways and yet something as irrelevant as a priest being moved has brought them out onto the street, signing petitions, phoning radio stations. I have done nothing that would merit that, but I have received back - I would honestly say that the last seven years have been the only real priesthood. The other 30 - well, it was as if God was preparing me."