Des Wilson
(aged 94)
Promoting community-based education and enterprise in West Belfast; criticism of church hierarchy; facilitating republican-unionist dialogue
Priest and community organiser
1949
Views on the role of the Church in education[edit]
After attending grammar school at St Malachy's College, Wilson entered the college's seminary while studying English and Philosophy at Queen's University. He proceeded to St Patrick's College Maynooth and was ordained in 1949 for the Diocese of Down and Conor. After serving as a hospital chaplain, in 1952 Wilson was appointed as his former school's Spiritual Director.[8]
During his 14 years in post, Wilson's aversion to St. Malachy's “strict and sometimes vicious” disciplinary regime[9] developed into a broader questioning of the Church's presence in schools. He hoped for a “radical review” that might persuade the Church to withdraw from the formal education of children (those with special needs excepted). Their instruction in religious devotion, he concluded, was little value as it induced young people to “to leave it as if it were just a part of their childhood”. “Worship of God is a matter for adults” and it was on their lifelong learning needs that the Church should concentrate its educational resources.[10]
After leaving St Malachy's, he criticised the school system for segregating, not only Catholic from Protestant, but also “parents from their children, boys from girls, and older pupils from younger ones”. As an alternative he proposed a system of community education under which “the primacy of the parents in the education process is restored, the elderly of the community can share their knowledge, and the child is exposed to many different traditions”.[11]
Springhill Community House and Conway Mill[edit]
Barred from officiating in church, Wilson said Mass in his Ballymurphy home, and with help from Quaker and Presbyterian friends (and a course in community relations at Queens University) concentrated on supporting local community initiatives.
In January 1972, Wilson had moved out of his church accommodation to live among his parishioners in public housing. Wilson operated 123 Springhill Avenue as an open Community House. An admirer, Fr Gerry McFlynn, found the house "reminiscent of the Catholic Worker houses set up by Dorothy Day in the US in the 1940s for feeding people, providing liturgies and, interestingly, Clarification of Thought sessions following talks by invited guests".[25] Noelle Ryan, a former nun drawn to the house, saw Wilson as a worker priest after the model of those clergy in France[26] who, freed from parochial duties, sought connection with the working class by living and working among them.[27]
With Wilson's support, Ryan helped launch education classes tutored by volunteers from the Workers Educational Association and the Ulster Peoples College. Conceding to local demand, these were soon joined by outreach to children expelled, or truant, from school—the "school refusers project". The Community House also experimented in different forms of public discussion, inquiry and theatre.[28]
In 1983, the adult education classes were rehoused and expanded as the Conway Education Centre in a vacant mill of the same name off the Falls Road.[28] Consistent with Wilson's priorities, the new Conway Mill project, also sought to incubate small indigenous economic enterprises.[29] Business start-ups, especially those attempted by young people and by cooperatives, were offered low rent facilities.[30] The initiative was not without precedent. In Ardoyne, Holy Cross priest Myles Kavanagh, and parish sisters Joan Brosnan and Mary Turley, had set up the Flax Trust in 1977, and one of its first projects had been the transformation of the former Brookfield linen mill into a community business centre.[31][32]
In November 1984, the government decided to withhold public funding from the Conway development, and cautioned businesses and community organisations that if they moved into the Mill they would be denied support. Sinn Féin's Gerry Adams noted that this came after the Mill had hosted a community-led public enquiry into the killing of a young man by a police-fired plastic bullet.[33] State papers point to the suspicion that Conway Community Enterprises was “a front organisation for Sinn Fein in the community” and that armed republicans might be the beneficiary.[34] In 1989, the Mill association sued the British television company ITV whose Cook Report , "Blood Money", alleged that the Conway Mill was "the financial nerve centre of the Provisional IRA".[35][29]
Wilson suggested that the underlying motive for denying of government support (a decision reversed in 1995)[36] was a policy of deliberately de-industrialising Catholic areas.[18]
Protestant and Catholic Encounter[edit]
In 1969, Wilson was a founding member of PACE (Protestant and Catholic Encounter). It was an initiative that, among others, attracted Catholics who, seeking to test the boundaries of liberal unionism (offered by the then Prime Minister, Terence O’Neill), had seen their applications to join the governing Ulster Unionist Party rejected.[37] After a few years Wilson “slipped away”. PACE had talked about removing the stigma from mixed marriages, and ensuring equality in the workplace. But, in Wilson's view, they were “clobbered by two things. First the [Protestant] evangelists, such as [Ian] Paisley, and second by the clerics and hierarchy who took control and turned [PACE] into a ecumenical movement without real significance”.[38]
It had been a mistake to imagine that if only Catholics and Protestants could be brought together, political solutions could be found, and to underestimate the determination of the regime to drive them apart whenever their coming together becomes “politically inconvenient”. In the PACE journal of December 1970, Wilson argued that “the first stepping stone to better community relations” was not, in any case, integration. It was the “development of communities which are accepted at their own evaluation”. What matters is not whether they regard themselves “totally Protestant” or “totally Catholic”, but whether they believe they can manage their own affairs and, fearing neither themselves or others, that they have “something to offer”.[14]
From his experience with PACE, and with other encounter groups, Wilson was also to conclude that there had been arrogance in the “assumption that Christians have some sort of privileged leadership to offer”.[39] In Ireland, it was they, not "atheistic Marxists or agnostics", who created most of the oppressions people have experienced. It was doubtful whether they could "solve the problems of any nation".[40]
The McBride Principles[edit]
After his fall out with Bishop Philbin was made public, Wilson found, somewhat to his surprise, that he had new access to the pages of the leading nationalist paper, The Irish News, and to the studios of the state broadcaster, the BBC.[41] The increased exposure, together with republican endorsements, led to invitations to speak in the United States. There he took the opportunity to help promote the McBride Principles.
The 1984 MacBride Principles were a set of fair employment guidelines for US firms in Northern Ireland. To help redress a history of anti-Catholic discrimination, companies were called upon to increase job opportunities for underrepresented religious groups, to ban political and religious symbols from the workplace and to ensure safe travel for employees.[42]
Wilson seconded the efforts of a panel of sponsors that prominently included two other Irish priests, Brian Brady and Seán McManus. But their adoption was opposed not only by the British government, but also, according to Wilson, by senior Catholic churchmen. With Wilson giving much credit to Brady, a long-time human rights campaigner, and to the Northern Ireland trade unionist Inez McCormack, the campaign successfully pressed the British government to introduce fair-employment legislation.[43] In 1998, the Principles, having already been adopted in numerous U.S. jurisdictions, were signed into U.S. federal law by President Clinton.[44]
Mediator[edit]
Late in 1971, Wilson arranged for his colleague in PACE, Eric Gallagher, former President of the Methodist Church in Ireland, to meet in Dundalk with PIRA leaders Seán Mac Stíofáin, Rory O'Brady and Joe Cahill. The republicans wanted the churchman to convey to the British government (through Opposition leader Harold Wilson) the offer of a two-week truce, during which British troops (deployed on the streets since August 1969) would be withdrawn to their barracks.[73][74] Nothing transpired until the following June when, as a prelude to secret talks with the government (for which Adams was to join Mac Stíofáin in London),[75] PIRA began a "bi-lateral truce". The talks were inconclusive and the truce lasted barely two weeks.[76]
In 1975, with Clonard-based Redemptorist Fr Alec Reid, Wilson sought to intercede in the increasingly deadly feud between the Provisionals and the Official IRA. Brought together in Wilson's Springhill home, representatives of each organisation eventually agreed a ceasefire, with the clergymen chairing regular incident meetings.[77]
In 1977, Wilson helped set up meeting between Gerry Adams and Desmond Boal QC. Boal was a unionist barrister (and the former Stormont MP for Shankill) who in court had represented republicans as well as loyalists[78][79] At the time, Boal was co-operating with Seán MacBride as joint mediator in confidential negotiations between the Provisionals and the Ulster Volunteer Force about a federal settlement for Ireland.[80] A short time later Wilson drove Adams to a meeting with McKeague, then flirting with the idea of an independent Ulster. Inasmuch as they were "frank", Adams found the meetings "constructive", but could find no common political ground.[81]
When McKeague was assassinated by the Irish National Liberation Army (INLA) in January 1982,[82] Wilson attended his funeral: "John did a lot of terrible things but he was willing to talk to us".[83] Wilson insisted that what was true for his relationship with McKeague and with Smyth, held for his friendship with Ronnie Bunting, the Republican Socialist, and Máire Drumm of Sinn Féin, both whom were also assassinated: no government was going to tell him how to behave toward those it proscribed as "terrorists".[84]
Wilson and Reid continued what Adams described as "an outreach programme”: they "spoke to unionist paramilitaries and facilitated meetings between republicans and loyalists". Without this work, Adams suggested there would have been "no peace process".[85] However, it was primarily Reid who brokered the higher-level contacts contributing to the republican ceasefires of 1994 and 1997, which in turn facilitated the 1998 Belfast ("Good Friday" Agreement). In contrast to Wilson, Reid enjoyed the confidence of the church hierarchy in the form of the express support of Cardinal Ó Fiaich.[86]
Call for Church reform[edit]
In the 1990s there was a degree of reconciliation between Wilson and Church hierarchy. From 2000 he began to receive the modest Church stipend he believed he had been due since retiring from his parish duties in 1975.[87] He did not, however, moderate his dissent from Church doctrine or criticism of the "Vatican apparatus" (which he proposed should be made "irrelevant", if not dismantled). In his 2005 autobiography, questioning the idea that we should "allow others to speak for us to God", Wilson called for a "democratising of churches", a theme of two ecumenical conferences he helped organise in Dublin and Belfast.[88]
In 2010, Wilson was one of 72 signatories to the “first statement” of a new Association of Catholic Priests. It described the association as "a voice for Irish Catholic priests at a time when that voice is largely silent and needs to be expressed” and as an opportunity to seek “full implementation of the vision and teaching of the Second Vatican Council”. Special emphasis would be laid on "the primacy of the individual conscience, the status and active participation of all the baptised [and] the task of establishing a church where all believers will be treated as equal” and on a culture of transparency "particularly in the appointment of church leaders”.[89]
Members of the association were subsequently censured by the Roman Curia. The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith placed restrictions on the association's founder, Fr Tony Flannery who is a member of the Redemptorist Congregation.[90] He was advised by Rome to go to a monastery where he might "pray and reflect" on his heterodox views and his role with the association.[91][92]
Death and commemoration[edit]
Fr Des Wilson died on 19 November 2019 in Belfast. Instead of wreaths, he asked mourners to donate to the Ballymurphy Massacre Memorial Garden.[2] The garden was dedicated to the victims of the Ballymurphy massacre of August 1971, which saw the killing in the district of eleven civilians by soldiers of the 1st Battalion, Parachute Regiment.[93] The victims included Fr Hugh Mullan, who had been a student of Wilson's at St Malachy's.[6] He was shot while going to the aid of a wounded man.[94]
Following a requiem Mass at Corpus Christi Church in Ballymurphy, Wilson was buried in Milltown Cemetery. Senior Sinn Féin politicians Gerry Adams and Michelle O'Neill were among those who took turns to carry his coffin.[95]
Des Wilson was predeceased by his brothers James, Kevin, Liam, and Gerard.[2]
In August 2021, prior to the film premiering at the 2022 Galway Film Fleadh,[96] the West Belfast festival, Féile an Phobail screened a cut of Fr Des – The Way He Saw It, a documentary on Wilson's life and legacy by director Vincent Kinnard. Narrated by Wilson's friend, the north Belfast-born actor Stephen Rea, the film features contributions from Rev Brian Smeaton, a Church of Ireland minister who was a trusted interlocutor for Wilson in loyalist West Belfast, adult and continuing education specialist Eilish Rooney, and veteran civil rights campaigner Bernadette Devlin-McAliskey.[97]
In 2022, events marking the 50th anniversary of Springhill Community House saw the display of Wilson's personal archive, thousands of items relating to his clerical life and to his political and community engagement, collected with National Lottery funding by UCD sociologist Tiarnán Ó Muilleoir.[98]