He was wrong. Ten men starved themselves to death and Father Reid, blaming himself, suffered a nervous breakdown.

But in recent years the 74-year-old Redemptorist priest from Tipperary has more than earned the sobriquet, playing a key role in persuading two of Europe’s most ruthless terrorist groups to abandon the gun and embrace politics.

The Basque separatist group, Eta, that will today begin a ceasefire it promises is permanent, having accepted the message brought from Ireland by the priest who laboured for more than a decade to convince Gerry Adams that the only solution to conflict lay in political negotiations.

Speaking from Bilbao, the Basque commercial capital, Father Reid was reluctant to take credit, but acknowledged he had “been here almost continuously for the past four years or so”, preaching the lessons of Northern Ireland. He had been “explaining especially that the only way you can solve such conflicts is through dialogue between all participants.

“There are no military solutions and we would say that the first thing you have to do is to take the violence away from the streets. You can’t solve it while it is on the streets. You have to bring it to the conference table.”

Self-congratulation is not the style of a man who, in spite of his sometimes controversial empathy with the Irish Republican movement, has demonstrated on many occasions the humanity at the core of his Christian mission to end violence.

When, in 1987, he delivered the last rites to two Signals corporals murdered by the IRA after they accidentally drove into a Republican funeral, the image of his stooping frame bent over their bodies went around the world.

A shy man, usually dressed in a black leather bomber jacket and jeans, Father Reid has been described as the inspiration of the Irish peace process.

The author Ed Moloney, an astute observer of the Provisionals for more than 30 years, credits him with having “initiated, devised and nurtured” the IRA away from the cycle of killing and down the road that eventually led to the Good Friday Agreement of 1998.

Fr Reid’s Basque mission began four years later when priests there invited him over in the hope that he could help to end their conflict as well.

A meeting in 2003 with the widow of a journalist murdered by Eta was a turning point. “She told me that every day when she wakes up and realises her husband is dead she does not want to go on living,” he told The Times yesterday. “At that moment I realised that we must act here immediately. As we said in Ireland, every second could cost another life.”

It was an encounter that echoed his decision to approach Gerry Adams in 1982 and plead with the Republican leader to intervene on behalf of the family of a British soldier who had been kidnapped by the IRA in South Armagh.

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