AFTER the Rev Ian Paisley, Monsignor Denis Faul was perhaps the best-known figure to wear a clerical collar in Northern Ireland.

It was not a comparison for which either man would have cared, but Faul, like his Protestant counterpart, was renowned for his outspoken views on the violence that blighted the Province for so long.

Like Paisley, he was an energetic and charismatic man who came to prominence in the late 1960s, though his place, of course, was on the oppposite side of those early “Troubles”. Faul’s concern at that time was to campaign for the civil rights of the Province’s Catholics, and in so doing to expose the inequities of Northern Ireland’s Protestant State and the brutality used to enforce British rule. The judiciary in particular he felt to be biased against Catholics at this time. A passion for justice would remain with him to the end of his life.

“A notorious Republican priest with a fertile imagination” was how one British newspaper described him in 1975; to most contemporary detractors he was simply known as “the Provo priest”.

Faul, however, was always a thoughtful and unpredictable man, and far more ready to change his mind than his Protestant counterpart. His position had in any case always been nuanced, and free of personal animosity. “I love the British people,” he once remarked. “I admire them immensely and love their country but they have no business in my country.”

With time, his politics might even be said to have undergone a transformation. He became as critical of republican violence as of British misrule, and he was a force for moderation and mutual accommodation in a land where such attitudes were in lethally short supply.

Perhaps the most dramatic manifestation of his belief in compromise came during the IRA hunger strikes of 1981, when Faul urged the families of those fasting to visit the Maze prison in an attempt to convince the hunger strikers to abandon their protest. He believed that no good could come from such a waste of life.

The hunger strikes marked a time of great bitterness in the Catholic community, and took the strife and tensions of the Troubles to new extremes.

Against such a background, Faul’s decision to speak out caused much resentment. It brought him opprobrium from the IRA and its supporters, whose trust he had previously enjoyed thanks to his record in the fight for civil rights.

In fact, although he had no emotional attachment to the British State, nor to the soldiers and police who enforced its laws in Ulster, Faul was always in some respects a pragmatist. He saw the financial benefits of the Union to all the people of the Province, particularly in free healthcare and education.

He became increasingly impatient with attempts to enforce a ghetto mentality among the Catholic community even after some of the worst injustices of the old Stormont regime had been put right. By the 1990s his tirades were often as much directed towards the “fascist” IRA as they were towards the British.

This was particularly true during the IRA ceasefires, when punishment beatings and even “executions” of Catholics by republican paramilitaries continued unabated and unpunished.

One of seven children, Denis Faul was born in Louth, ten miles into the Republic of Ireland. He decided at the age of 9 to become a priest and spent seven years at Maynooth before becoming a teacher of religion and ancient history at St Patrick’s Academy in Dungannon, Co Tyrone.

Faul became absorbed by the civil rights question in 1963 after a friend had brought to his attention clear evidence of the discrimination against Catholics in Northern Ireland. He set up a partnership with a fellow priest, Father Raymond Murray, and together they began to write and publish booklets and leaflets denouncing the brutality of the security forces and the corruption and discrimination institutionalised by the Northern Ireland government.

On the introduction of internment in 1971, Faul put an advertisement in the nationalist Irish News with his telephone number, declaring himself available for 24-hour advice.

By 1972 he was spokesman for the Association for Justice, a left-wing umbrella group (including the Marxist Official IRA), campaigning against brutality by the British Army. In 1975 he helped to bring a documented case before the International Commission of Jurists in Geneva and the European Convention on Human Rights in Strasbourg.

As a result of this record as a campaigner and activist, Faul was chosen as a go-between for the authorities and Republicans when IRA prisoners embarked on a campaign of hunger strikes in 1981 in support of their demands for the right to political status. He had been a frequent visitor to the Maze and a staunch advocate of prison reform. Faul tried to talk Bobby Sands out of going on his fast, though without success. Faul recalled: “He finished up saying to me, ‘Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends’. I said to Bobby, ‘I won’t argue with you after that’.”

The fallout from Sands’s death was enormous. That of every subsequent death was arguably less so, and Faul believed the prisoners were being sacrificed for political purposes, and for the sake of untenable demands. Eventually he was dismissed as a go-between by the IRA after he passed on messages from Catholic church leaders, urging the relatives of ten hunger strikers to put pressure on the prisoners to end the strike and authorise medical treatment that would save their lives.

For helping, as they saw it, to break the hunger strike, he was condemned by the IRA as “a conniving and treacherous priest”, and IRA men would now walk out of his Mass in protest.

Faul in fact remained a fierce critic of most aspects of British rule, and particularly of anything he regarded as an abuse of power by the security forces. He was outspoken in his denunciation of the supergrass tactics used by the British in the early 1980s and was prominent among those campaigning to right the miscarriages of justice suffered by the Guildford Four and the Birmingham Six. His view was that if the Royal Ulster Constabulary and the British Army had been made to behave properly in the 1970s and 1980s “we could have wiped out the Provos long ago”.

At the same he spoke out increasingly against the IRA. At one republican funeral in 1982 he urged the mourners not to join the paramilitaries. That same year he argued that men of the cloth, of all denominations, should not simply condemn terrorism with words, but should take direct action themselves to bring it to an end, even if it meant risking their own lives.

He himself was without fear in this regard. His denunciations became more frequent and outspoken when the first IRA ceasefire of 1994 failed to bring about a cessation of violence towards ordinary Catholics. Faul said he had received numerous death threats, and he believed firmly that it was only his clerical collar that prevented their being carried out; the outrage generated by the murder of a priest would be too much even for the IRA. He also maintained that his celibacy was a positive advantage in this regard; he had no family who could be threatened or harmed.

For all his opposition to the violent manifestations of sectarianism, Faul remained a fierce opponent of integrated schooling in Northern Ireland, believing firmly that Catholic parents, in accordance with canon law, were obliged to send their children to Catholic schools.

For his work on behalf of the Church in Ulster he was given the title of Monsignor in 1995. He was appointed parish priest of Carrickmore in 1998.

Monsignor Denis Faul, priest, was born in 1932. He died on June 21, 2006, aged 74.