From Ardoyne to Crossgar – still forging peace at the front line

From Ardoyne to Crossgar – still forging peace at the front line

26 July 2017

ALONGSIDE his many prayers for others Father Gary Donegan remembers to put in a personal request. 

He prays for energy. 

And it seems God is listening.

Anyone who thought this priest — at the coalface of some of the most disturbing incidents in Belfast’s troubled history — was taking his foot off the pedal with his move to Tobar Mhuire is mistaken.

The Crossgar monastery may be an idyllic setting but Fr Gary has never really considered abandoning the community work he has carried out in north Belfast.

In September last year he announced that he was leaving his beloved Holy Cross parish behind for the move to Crossgar, but he made it very clear that his work in the interface area of Ardoyne would continue.

Nearly a year later and it seems to be working.

He maintains an office in his old parish – where he once escorted frightened schoolgirls to school in the notorious Holy Cross dispute and faced-off extremists in his own community — and has discovered the joys of the A7 commute.

“I soon realised I had to leave at seven for Belfast if I was going to beat the traffic,” he says.

“Sometimes I may not be home to midnight. The only company I have is the rabbits.”

When he does get to come home at a reasonable hour to Tobar Mhuire it offers tranquillity and community with his fellow Passionist priests in what is a big change to his routine. Because until recently, every night for two-and-a-half years the 53 year-old patrolled the streets to help keep calm following the establishment of the loyalist Camp Twaddell, set up in protest at a contested Orange march.

Then last October he hit the headlines after an ugly on-street confrontation with Greater Ardoyne Residents Collective spokesman Dee Fennell. Fr Gary faced a barrage of verbal intimidation as Fennell and some other residents took against him when the three Orange lodges were finally allowed to make their return journey along Crumlin Road. 

It was on the streets that he also stood in support with the young widow of Michael McGibbon who was gunned down in Ardoyne by a dissident republican group calling themselves ‘the IRA’.

Ahead of this interview in his Belfast office Fr Gary had just driven five hours from visiting bereaved friends in the south, and with only a coffee and a Kitkat to sustain him talks non-stop for the next two-and-a-half hours.

“I do pray for energy,” he says. 

“I’m hoping to maybe get a break in September.”

Originally from Newtownbutler, County Fermanagh, his lively conversational style means he starts to answer your question but is usually quickly off-course. It’s always interesting, though.

The small office, in a former convent, is coming down with photos, awards, family memorabilia, and his JFK collection – that one’s just a hobby. There’s also a picture of him receiving an honorary doctorate from Ulster University earlier this month in honour of his community work, his proud parents beaming on. And if he gets any ideas above himself, he says, there’s a coffee mug nearby imprinted with the title he is most proud of — ‘Mrs Donegan’s Son’.

Pointing to the various chairs in the office he tells of the great, the good, and not-so-good who have sat there as he has tried to help in tense political times. Though, as with many of his good stories, they are — for now — sadly off the record.

He admits there is an element of his personality that thrives in dangerous situations.

“I once did the Myer-Briggs personality test,” he says. “I asked the tester, ‘What would you advise me to be?’ regarding work. “She answered, ‘A fire truck driver. But you’d have to be the commander. The more danger there is, that’s for you’.”

After last October’s historic deal between the loyal orders and nationalist residents’ group the Crumlin Ardoyne Residents’ Association, Camp Twaddell has been abandoned. This year’s Twelfth also passed off peacefully. There’s a sense though that more 

work was done behind the scenes than was perhaps portrayed in the news reports and that things remained on a knife edge.

“You’re only one stone away from a riot,” Fr Gary reflects. “My mission when I patrolled in that area with my wingman, Brian McKee, was to nip problems in the bud. Young people can have their lives ruined by a criminal 

record. With one boy, I remember nudging Brian, and saying, ‘He is going to Maghaberry. Someone is going to put something in his hand and they won’t go to Maghaberry, but he will’. Sure enough three years later he was.”

He acknowledges many difficult evenings on the streets.

“Yes, you’re over at Twaddell being called a paedophile and other things every night. One police officer said to me one night — ‘Would you go to Fusco’s and get yourself a hot chocolate? I’m a Protestant policeman and what you are being called is upsetting me’. Ironically also when Twaddell  got sorted I was walking through Belfast airport I got high-fived by all these Northern Ireland supporters who might normally have been giving me the middle finger.”

Whatever abuse he may have taken at Ardoyne and Twaddell, Fr Gary has his many supporters who have sustained him and he clearly loves the people there who would “give you the clothes off their back”.

“Post conflict is where the real peace comes in,” he says. “This thing of a fair and equal society is what we are struggling with today.

“We have a situation where in areas of social deprivation it is still being played out — they are going to be the ones facing the extortion, for example. The big thing is to awaken the middle minded people, the ones who are saying, ‘I’m alright Jack — let it be played out in the streets of Ardoyne or the equivalent in the Shankill but as long as I’m OK’.

“The very people who benefited least from the Good Friday Agreement are the ones who suffered most. Two years ago I spoke in the UN, which is obviously a massive honour, to put into context the loss of life in Ardoyne which had the largest casualty figures for any parish in the Troubles. The equivalent loss in LA would be 50,000, 250,000 in the state of New York.”

He may be the people’s champion, but he says he’s no hero and that some of trauma caught up with him four years ago on an enforced sabbatical in San Francisco following a bout of pneumonia — brought on by water canon.

His intensive, on the ground community work, however, is just something he considers part of his calling.

The calling itself as a young man was originally fought. He had been shocked at how God could allow his friend Fergal to die of cancer at age 14. But he was also hugely inspired by the peace and comfort a priest gave to his aunt when she was seriously ill.

His old headmaster, who he is now friends with, gave a pretty harsh assessment of his proposed career choice.

“‘You wouldn’t make an altar boy,’ he told me.

“So I thought I would get this out of my system and I started training for it. I went over to St Gemma’s hospice in Leeds. In the hospice was a British soldier, a young guy, who had been abandoned by the army and his family. He was dying alone.”

Fr Gary’s memories of soldiers growing up and border checkpoints are not fond ones.

“But here I was, this young culchie from Fermanagh, sitting beside him, stroking the back of his hand to give comfort, talking in his ear. The moment he died was a seminal moment in my life, faith wise. When you are with someone who dies, and I have been privileged to have had five die in my arms, you end up almost counting their breaths. All this technology in the world that exists and there’s nothing you can do. You can do nothing at that point. 

“I lost my fear of death because God was tangible. I could almost feel Him in the room. I knew then nobody dies alone. This is God meeting the soul.

“At that moment God was bigger than any faith or religion.

“I was ordained for everyone, no particular creed, and some of my best friends are atheists. I have seen them do more Christian things than so-called Christians. Everyone on life is on a journey. I happen to be where I am in mine because I have this love for what I believe in. I want to try to share this, and make someone experience even a little of the contentment and fulfilment that comes at a personal cost.”

The personal cost is one that this priest has openly reflected on. He had hoped life was to be about “five snottery kids, the Audi 80 and playing for Fermanagh”. But it’s worth it, he feels, if you are really making a difference.

“If you’ve given up what I’ve given up, a significant other, if you’ve given up children, if you’ve given up what I would consider normality, why would you give that up just to do funerals, baptisms and weddings? If you can’t do those with a smile on your face, with love in your heart, then you’re not worthy of the habit that you don or the colour you wear. Because that’s what you’re meant to do. Priesthood is about service.

“I’m known as the ‘Priest with the Jeans’ and my inspiration is very much Pope Francis. He said pastors were not meant to be hiding behind their desks, their institutions. Get out there if you’re the shepherd and smell the sheep. And he, of course, is the ultimate example of that. What he has done has made me mainstream.

“When Christ washed the feet of the disciples it wasn’t like the re-enactment on Holy Thursday night where you’re coming in with your painted toes and Chanel thrown round them so as not to offend father’s nose or half a bottle of Lynx sprayed on your feet. The feet were rotten then because in those days there were dirt roads and open toed sandals, they would have been filthy. So Christ’s face was right in the mire and the muck and that’s where we should be.”

Fr Gary is clearly at the liberal end of the Catholic Church but says he doesn’t feel overly constrained by what is a very conservative institution.

“I believe in the Eucharist, the Trinity, and Our Lady,” he says simply. “I believe Christ showed his solidarity with human suffering in his crucifixion and we are to help those crucified today on this earth.”

There “should be a debate” on priests marrying, he says, not just because the numbers are pretty critical, but because St Peter himself was married.

He also has short shrift for some of the more hardline evangelical religions.

“If He’s going to condemn someone for some ordinary human trait I don’t believe in him,” he declares. “I believe in a merciful God.

“There’s a phrase, ‘A little education is a dangerous thing’ and a little religion is also a dangerous thing. One of the greatest evils is fundamentalism in our society.”

He adds: “Inspiration doesn’t come just from ure for me but from other witness.

“My brother has MS, he is trapped in a wheelchair. He is my hero and is more content than anyone I know.”

Emotionally he recounts how one day when his father was out his brother needed the toilet. His mother, he said, went to lengthy efforts, to help her adult son.

“That was the only time I knew he ever cried. He looked up to my mother and he said — ‘You’ll get to heaven for looking after me’.

“He, trapped in a wheelchair, humiliated that his mother had to take him to bathroom, and seeing him as he would have been as a child. He had to surrender everything to her. He looked at her and saw God in her and she in him.

“I’ve spoken at the UN, at the Eucharistic Congress, with theologians and intellectuals and graduates and I have never delivered a better line than what he did when he was trapped in a wheelchair.”

Sometimes seeing the best of human nature, though, can understandably make you a little irritated with the banal.

He recounts, half laughing, how he has married couples at glittering, high society weddings and been slipped £20 for his trouble. Or one black tie wedding in which he received “nothing”. “Really, nothing.”

“Or maybe you’ve gone to the cinema one evening and and you’ve just come from a neonatal unit or a road accident or a broken marriage, and you hear, ‘Is that all you’ve time for father, you’ve the quare time of it’. Or you go for a Chinese and you hear, ‘So that’s where the money is going’.”

How does he reply?

“You’re right. Fair play to you.”

Driving into Tobar Mhuire, he says, can often be balm for the soul.

“You drive into this beautiful retreat centre and it’s gorgeous and the guys are absolutely lovely. I miss morning prayers but I take my turn at doing the public masses and help with the confessions at Christmas and Easter.

“Some of the diocesan priests, I’ll say to them give, ‘Yourself a break and I will cover your masses’. I was in Crossgar 28 years ago as a novice and then came back at various times to give talks. It’s a big change now at Tobar Mhuire. You have these three kilometres of beautiful walkways, lovely grounds, as is the house — it is now state-of-the-art. Years ago the joke is you went to retreat centres and asked where the oratory was. Now it’s, ‘What’s the wifi code?’

“There is certainly an ethos about this place and the staff are an absolute delight. I don’t get to see them often during the day so when I do they are always excited to chat about stuff.

“There is always a great welcome in the place and the guys here are very gentle. 

“It is a deeply spiritual place.”