Diarmuid Ó Peicín SJ

The obituary of Fr Diarmuid O Peicin SJ, printed in full below, appeared in Saturday's IrishTimes.

Those who feel marginalised and rejected please read what the late Mr Haughey and the then Bishop of Raphoe Dr Seamus Hegarty had to say about this great man. The relevant paragraphs are highlighted in bold.

Indeed the comments of both of these men are a wonderful parable.


It is a salutary comment on the really great and the charlatans and spoofers. Why do we give so much obeisance to people in positions of power?



Turbulent priest who saved Tory Island

Fr Diarmuid O Peicin: ONE Of the many lasting images of Fr Diarmuid Ó Peicín is when last year, old and frail, he attended the Dublin premiere of the film about his island exploits, called Fear na nOileán.

The award-winning film, subsequently broadcast on TG4, was made by Frenchman Loïc Jourdain and his partner Anne Marie Nic Ruaidhrí, a native of Tory Island, Co Donegal, where the priest served controversially but ultimately successfully in the early 1980s.

When Anne Marie visited him in Dublin five years ago to moot the idea for the film his response was, "You took your time."

Fr Ó Peicín knew his standing in the world.

As the film, depicting how he spearheaded the campaign to save the island, rolled, the couple's then three-year-old daughter Kilda was happily running up and down the aisle.

This was a double satisfaction and validation for the priest because not only was he being honoured in his lifetime but through Kilda he could see that he had preserved Tory for another generation, at a time when it could so easily have been stripped of its people.

It was fitting therefore that at his funeral yesterday Anne Marie was invited to do one of the requiem Mass readings in the Jesuit church in Milltown while Kilda, now 4, carried the gifts.
Fr Ó Peicín was a Dubliner who, close to retirement and after years teaching and working with Irish immigrants in England, travelled to Tory Island in 1980 to learn Irish.

While there he was angered by the lack of facilities, the official indifference to the place, and the fact that such were the conditions that 10 families felt they had no option but to accept houses in Falcarragh on the mainland.

He suspected this was part of an insidious plan to gradually destroy Tory as a living island, to transform it into another Blaskets.

This suspicion was reinforced when journalist Gerry Moriarty unearthed an official paper suggesting that the 150 people on Tory should be relocated and the island used as variously a holiday home for American tourists, a high-security prison, a quarantine centre or a firing range for the Army. This astonishing official mindset triggered a ruthless, single-minded Old Testament fury and zeal in Fr Ó Peicín, who had a simple biblical take on his mission: if you weren't for Tory you were against Tory.

Those who were so negatively inclined - and there were many - were regularly subjected to the venom of his tongue.

He campaigned throughout Ireland, Britain, Europe and the US. He also campaigned for all of Ireland's coastal islands.
He died on Tuesday, aged 91, the day that Ian Paisley announced he was resigning as First Minister and DUP leader.

What was curious here, perhaps even unique, is that Dr Paisley - no lover of the Jesuits - was a firm supporter of the priest, and lobbied on his behalf in Brussels.

"He has lit a fire that has never gone out in Europe and Europe must look after its island people," said Dr Paisley on Fear na nOileán.

Charles Haughey, in opposition and as taoiseach, was supportive, although at the time in the recession-hit Ireland of the 1980s the money was not available to meet all of the priest's ambitions.

Still, when in 1984 the then Bishop of Raphoe Dr Seamus Hegarty instructed that Fr Ó Peicín leave the island because, the bishop argued, his presence was proving so divisive, Mr Haughey spoke in favour of the priest.

"While I don't want to interfere in diocesan affairs," Mr Haughey opened to the interviewing journalist, before doing just that by contending that removing the valiant priest from Tory was bad for the island and its people.

At the end of the interview Haughey looked up from under his hooded eyes and, off the record, growled, "You know, he's mad."

And so he was but in the positive John Healy sense where in his book Death of An Irish Town he urged people to "get mad" in order to halt the depopulation of rural Ireland. In Fr Ó Peicín's case it was to save Tory. Which, against the odds and with the support of the islanders, he did.

Fr Diarmuid Ó Peicín, SJ, born Dublin, October 16th, 1916, died March 4th, 2008.