MONSIGNOR Denis Faul, who died on Wednesday, was not merely the best-known Roman Catholic parish priest of the Northern Ireland Troubles; his life also contains profound lessons for democracies on how to fight, and not to fight, terrorism.

Faul vaulted to prominence in the British press in the 1970s, acquiring the soubriquet of the “Provo padre”, for his exposure of security force excesses. In recent years, he incurred the wrath of Sinn Fein-IRA for relentlessly criticising republican human rights abuses — which in his view created a more oppressive atmosphere in the Catholic ghettos than had ever existed during the pre-1997 period of British direct rule.

There was total consistency between these different phases of Faul’s life. Cruelty was unconsciuable, whatever direction it came from. He was fond of quoting Pastor Martin Niemöller’s famous remark about the rise of Nazism: “First they came for the Communists, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist. Then they came for the Jews and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew. Finally, when they came for me, there was no one left to speak up . . .”

The consistency in Faul’s approach was also organisational. Faul was one of the key hidden hands behind Families Against Intimidation and Terror, set up in the early 1990s by Henry Robinson, a former Official IRA activist, to highlight republican punishment beatings and exilings.

Faul supplied Robinson with the blueprint that he had employed in exposing the British Army: taking photographs and witness statements and then giving them the widest possible audience. Thanks to his work on “the Disappeared” — mostly Catholic victims abducted by the Provisionals and whose bodies were then secretly disposed of — the culture of omertà began to erode. It was a masterpiece of political warfare, exposing “freedom fighters” for what they were, and was often subsidised with his own private money. There was more than one way of skinning the Provo cat, Faul believed — and “soft power” with a cutting edge was far superior to having suspects beaten to a pulp in some holding centre.

For much of his career, Faul had been a schoolmaster, most famously as headmaster of St Patrick’s Academy for Boys in Dungannon. Faul knew his charges and frequently told those teenagers who seemed seduced by the lure of violent republicanism: “If you’re lucky, you’ll spend 20 years in jail. And if you’re not lucky, your mother will be handed a folded tricolour at your graveside.”

But the kicker was to come: “And if you go to jail or die,” Faul often would tell them, “it will sooner or later emerge that your commanding officer was a tout, and that his commanding officer was a tout too. And whilst you’re rotting away, they will be getting off scot-free.” If only more imams in Britain today spoke like that to young Muslims tempted by jihad.

Faul’s warning was only mildly hyperbolic. He was vindicated when it emerged that two leading Provisionals, Denis Donaldson and Freddie Scappaticci, had been on the British payroll — the tip of an iceberg. And he would have been unsurprised by allegations that Martin McGuinness was a British agent: he had claimed as much to me more than five years ago. “One thing about the Brits,” he would say. “Just remember, they play cricket. Nice and long and slow.”

This observation brought him little pleasure: he felt that though the British State was clever, it had cynically sold out the ordinary decent Catholics for sake of an accommodation with republican fascists. Faul believed that the British State, by unthinkingly accepting trendy narratives of British “oppression”, had actually underrated its own reformist achievements in Northern Ireland. Justice mattered as much, if not more, than Irish unity.

He believed passionately in Ulster’s superlative grammar school system, and wanted to erect statues in nationalist areas to R. A. Butler, author of the Education Act 1944, on the ground that he had liberated far more poor Catholic youngsters than a host of republican martyrs. He deplored the Blair Government’s decision to phase the local grammars out as another sop to Sinn Fein-IRA.

The point about justice and opportunity mattering more than the national question was illustrated by Faul’s typically humorous prank: shortly after the signing of the Anglo-Irish agreement in 1985, he told his nationalist pupils: “Thatcher and [Garret] FitzGerald have signed a secret protocol giving some of the border counties back to the Republic.” There was silence and some of the boys tearfully asked. “But what will that mean for my British university scholarship?”

Yet Faul was rather unappreciated by the British authorities. This was particularly odd, since Whitehall has traditionally liked working with conservative clergyman across the world to “stabilise” conflict zones. But too many of the chosen clerical partners of the British state in Ulster were far more Anglophobic and subversive than Faul.

There is a lesson here as the British State is again embarked on a strategy of working with religious reactionaries to becalm the Muslim ghettoes. Who is the real moderate and who is the bogus moderate? Faul, who had not a bigoted bone in his body, was easy to read but hard to control. That may explain why he was undervalued. But it also explains why his memory will live on — long after all the bishops and cardinals who outranked him are forgotten.

Dean Godson is research director of the Policy Exchange think-tank

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