Dr Edward Daly: The Bogside priest who didn’t want to rock the boat
‘Ironically, given his profile during and after Bloody Sunday, Daly was wary of political involvement’
A mural depicts the late Bishop Edward Daly (right) waving a white handkerchief in the Bogside area of Derry. Photograph: Paul Faith/AFP/Getty Images
In the aftermath of the death of the former Catholic Bishop of Derry, Edward Daly, much has been rightly made of his devotion to pastoral work, his denunciations of violence and the degree to which he became inextricably linked with Bloody Sunday as the “handkerchief waving” priest in images that became iconic.
Daly’s experiences, however, amounted to a lot more than that. His life and career revealed much about the dilemmas facing the Catholic Church as it sought to react to the enormity of the Troubles and define where politics ended and morality began. In the midst of a competition for legitimacy between the IRA and the church, a multitude of tensions and power and class struggles emerged.