Brian D’Arcy to return to Crossgar’s Tobar Mhuire

Brian D’Arcy to return to Crossgar’s Tobar Mhuire

23 August 2017

ONE of Ireland’s best known clerics is to make a new home at Tobar Mhuire in Crossgar.

Fr Brian D’Arcy will return to the monastery and retreat centre where he was once Superior at the end of this month.

Fr D’Arcy served for many years as parish priest at Mount Argus in Dublin, before returning to his home town of Enniskillen in 1989 as Superior at St. Gabriel’s Retreat, The Graan. He then left for Crossgar in 1995 and returned to The Graan in January 2001.

A well-known broadcaster and television personality, his other career in journalism began in 1967 when he wrote regularly for various pop magazines at home and abroad. He was the first priest in Ireland to be admitted to the National Union of Journalists and his weekly column in the Sunday World has been running for the past 27 years. He is also a regular broadcaster on BBC Radio Ulster and has his own show ‘Sunday with Brian D’Arcy’.

Never afraid to speak his mind, he became a well-known figure after controversially challenging Cardinal Cahal Daly on the Late Late Show in 1995 about the Church’s handling of clerical child sex abuse allegations.

Speaking to The Impartial Reporter ahead of his departure, Fr D’Arcy thanked the Fermanagh community who got him though the darkest period of his life, when he was censured by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in the Vatican in 2012.

“My message as I enter this new chapter is thanks to so many people, old and young; the hospitals where I’ve spent endless nights; the sports people; to my staff at the Graan; to all sections of the community, those of all religions and none who made it possible for me to wander up the town and talk to 10 or 50 people and everybody made me welcome and were kind to me,” he said. “It was the kindness of locals in Fermanagh during the very severe time in my life when my own church had rejected me that kept me going.”

News of the popular cleric’s departure came last year following the Passionist Province of St. Patrick’s Provincial Chapter which is held every four years and can result in reshuffles across their monasteries in Ireland, Scotland and Paris.

It is a reshuffle that has also recently seen Fr Gary Donegan — known for his high profile community work in north Belfast — posted to Tobar Mhuire.