Alec Reid, priest who helped broker peace accord in Northern Ireland, dies at 82

Douglas Dalby
New York Times
November 25, 2013

The Rev. Alec Reid, an unassuming Roman Catholic priest who played a quiet but crucial role in clandestine negotiations that led to the historic Good Friday peace accord in Northern Ireland in 1998, died here on Friday. He was 82.

Rev. Alec Reid was also a confidant of influential pacifist nationalists like the Nobel laureate John Hume.

The Redemptorist Order, a missionary society of priests to which he belonged, announced the death without specifying the cause.

Father Reid was virtually unknown to the wider public until 1988, when he was captured in a photograph kneeling over the bloodied, spread-eagled corpse of a British soldier whom he had tried but failed to save minutes earlier from execution by the Irish Republican Army. It remains one of the most haunting images of “the Troubles,” the violent struggle that tore at Northern Ireland for three decades.

Few people knew at the time, however, that Father Reid had served as a secret peace broker between Gerry Adams, the leader of Sinn Fein, the I.R.A.’s political wing, and Father Reid’s contacts in the British and Irish governments. Father Reid was also a confidant of influential pacifist nationalists like the Nobel laureate John Hume. Father Reid and Mr. Adams frequently met at the Clonard Monastery in the nationalist heartland of urban west Belfast.

But he was no mere messenger. Martin Mansergh, a former negotiator for the Irish government, said Prime Minister Charles Haughey of Ireland regarded Father Reid as the “most important person in the entire peace process, bar none.” Mr. Haughey died in 2006.

Father Reid, who abhorred violence, convinced the parties in the struggle that Mr. Adams had a genuine interest in seeking an end to the I.R.A.’s paramilitary campaign against the British government in pursuit of a united Ireland, and that he had the wherewithal to deliver on a peace agreement.

In a statement on Friday, Mr. Adams described Father Reid as “the chaplain to the peace process” and Clonard Monastery as its “cradle.”

“There would not be a peace process at this time without his diligent doggedness and his refusal to give up,” Mr. Adams said.

The agreement, signed on Good Friday in April 1998, sought to put an end to the old hatreds between Northern Ireland’s two main groups, the predominantly Protestant, pro-British unionists and the largely Roman Catholic republicans, who remain committed to a united Ireland. The pact was a blueprint for the present power-sharing government formed by Sinn Fein and the Democratic Unionist Party.

In 2005, Father Reid was one of two independent witnesses to the decommissioning of the I.R.A.’s arsenals. In a recent interview, he recalled an I.R.A. member turning in an assault rifle for destruction.

“The man handed it over and got quite emotional,” he said. “He was aware this was the last gun.”

The other independent witness, the Rev. Harold Good, a Methodist minister, characterized Father Reid as someone who “was prepared to go into no man’s land.”

“It can be a very lonely place; it can be a dangerous place,” Mr. Good told the Irish national broadcaster RTE, “but Alec knew somebody had to go into that place. He was no innocent abroad, but he knew what had to be done.”

Alec Reid was born in Dublin in 1931 and grew up in the Republic of Ireland, in Nenagh, in rural County Tipperary, where he had moved at age 6 after his father died. He joined the Redemptorist Order in 1949 and was ordained a priest in 1957. He was sent to the Clonard Monastery in Belfast, the order’s base, four years later and remained there for 44 years.

He caused a furor in 2005 when, speaking at a public meeting, he compared the way Protestant unionists had treated Catholic nationalists in Northern Ireland to the way the Nazis had treated the Jews. He apologized almost immediately, saying he had been provoked by a baying crowd.

Father Reid, who is survived by two sisters, lived out his last years in Dublin, but he spent a significant amount of time in Spain, where he won praise for helping to persuade the Basque separatist group ETA to declare a short-lived cease-fire in 2006. The group has since declared a permanent cessation.