While womanising ex-bishop Eamonn Casey was attending first Communions as a Catholic curate in England in 2001 – the year Limerick diocese received an allegation that he had sexually abused a child – another man of the cloth was enhancing the church’s battered image. For weeks on end Fr Aidan Troy walked Belfast’s Ardoyne Road with children too scared to go alone to Holy Cross primary school through a gauntlet of whistling, jeering, missile-throwing loyalist protesters. The daily barrage of bile began to dissipate after the Passionist priest invited a Presbyterian minister to join him and the children in a recitation of the Lord’s Prayer at the school gates.

The sight of Troy with his black robe defiantly fluttering in the tensed air became etched in the iconography of the troubled North. It joined film footage of Fr Edward Daly waving a white hanky in Derry on Bloody Sunday and of the peacemaking Redemptorist Fr Alec Reid praying the last rites over a dying soldier in Andersonstown. Pope John Paul II himself intervened to try to end the IRA’s hunger strike.

Now, thanks to Casey and his fellow princes of the church, their power to exert influence for the greater good is dead and gone. It’s with Casey in the crypt of Galway cathedral.

Proof, were it needed, was supplied by the rioting against accommodation for Ukrainian war refugees in Coolock last weekend. Men wearing balaclavas hurled bricks, bottles, chunks of pavement and petrol bombs in scenes reminiscent of the Troubles. Compounding the impression was the ubiquity of the Irish flag, appropriated........

© The Irish Times