Father Brian D’Arcy will leave the Graan Monastery in Enniskillen at the end of this month to live and work with the Passionist community in Tobar Mhuire Retreat and Conference Centre, Crossgar.

As he finalises the “difficult but purifying” task of clearing out the small room he has lived in for the past 16 years, he insists that he wants “no fuss” and that he is “just another citizen in Fermanagh anyway.”

Speaking to The Impartial Reporter ahead of his departure, Fr. Brian 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, and said he would visit his beloved home county as often as possible.

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. He will be replaced by Fr. Charles Cross who was most recently based at Holy Cross Parish, Ardoyne. 

As his departure nears, the 72-year-old priest and journalist has been reflecting on the passage of time. His summer months have been spent packing and sorting thousands of CDs, paperwork connected to his media roles in the BBC and the Sunday World, signed books dating back to his ordination and around 10,000 letters he received after controversies such as when he challenged Cardinal Cahal Daly on the Late Late Show in 1995 about the Church’s handling of clerical child sex abuse allegations and the Vatican censure.

With tears in his eyes, he commented: “Leaving is difficult because it reminds you that leaving the earth is not that far ahead. A lifetime is a short time. I suppose I was so busy I didn’t have a lot of time to think about it. Getting ready to leave has been difficult but purifying too.”
His own mortality is weighing heavily on his mind and he recalls one occasion when he was sure he was going to die.

It was 1987 and a 42-year-old Fr. Brian, then based in Mount Argus in Dublin, was contacted by the family of Dublin dentist John O’Grady who had been kidnapped by Dessie O’Hare (aka ‘Border Fox’). O’Hare had chopped off Mr. O’Grady’s small fingers and was demanding a ransom of £1.5 million.

Fr. Brian was friendly with Mr. O’Grady’s father-in-law Dr. Austin Darragh, who had been the intended target of the kidnappers.
“The O’Grady family phoned to ask me to be the broker. They told me the guards said you might not come out of it alive. I replied: ‘That’s the only reason I’m a priest. If I can save a man’s life I will’,” Fr. Brian explained.
After a sleepless night, Fr. Brian went to an altar in Mount Argus and said prayed. “I said Mass and I truly believed that was the end. I did not expect to come back from that. I was 42,” he said.
He went to a vault in a bank on Dame Street and lifted seven bags containing £1.5 million in used 10 and 20 notes and covered them with a blanket in the back of his car. He then set off for Cork.

Meanwhile, a politician had told Dublin journalists about Fr. Brian’s involvement and the front page of The Irish Independent carried a story about the fact he was acting as a broker that day.
“It was twice as tense then,” said Fr. Brian. “There I was driving down with a million and a half in the car, the whole country knowing about it and I couldn’t get out even to go to the toilet.

“The guards had told me to fill up with petrol when I got to Cork. Then the cap wouldn’t come off the petrol. A fella came out of the station and said: ‘I see in the paper you’re trying to help the with the O’Grady kidnapping’ and me with a million and a half with a blanket over it! I was sweating!” Fr. Brian recalled.

Fr. Brian decided to bless the petrol cap in a frantic bid to release it and it opened.

“I had lost 10 minutes. If I had been on time I might have handed the money over to someone. When I arrived, the guards were there and told me John had been rescued from a house in Dublin,” he said.
Soon after that eventful day, Fr. Brian moved to Enniskillen, which was still reeling from the Enniskillen bomb.

He spent a number of years at the Graan, before moving to Crossgar in 1995 and back to the Graan in 2001.

Commenting on how society has changed, he said: “A lot of people have worked extraordinarily hard for peace. I was privileged to be one of those. Politics has moved on a lot since those dark days. I was lucky enough to be a confidante of Albert Reynolds when he was doing a lot of peace making. When I used to come down to Dublin from Enniskillen occasionally I would find a mysterious letter left at the Graan Monastery, ‘For Albert Reynolds’. I would bring it down quietly. He’d read it and an hour later when I was about to go home he’d give me another envelope ‘to be collected’. It was left at the monastery door. I have no idea who collected them but they always were.”

Fr. Brian “had no major plan” when he came to Enniskillen, where his annual Novena of Hope has offered solace to thousands of people over the years and has helped foster a friendship with the Protestant community, particularly parishioners from Rossorry parish Church.

“I just tried to be myself. I wasn’t doing anything I hadn’t done in Dublin before,” he commented. “I was going around dance halls and standing at the back smoking a pipe and hearing confessions. I was accessible and people approached me so I did it. They trusted you because you were there.

“I was pushing boundaries. I was writing for the Sunday World which nobody would dare write for.

“I was never one to look for the obvious ways of ministry.

“That’s the same to this day.”

He added: “My mother always had the best respect for her Protestant neighbours and that’s where the working with your neighbours came from. There was no big theological reason, I had no big plan. I just did it.”

Fr. Brian will continue his BBC ‘Sundays with Brian D’Arcy’ programme, his BBC Radio 4 Pause For Thought slot and his Sunday World column. He commented: “At my age, that’s a full-time job.”

He concluded: “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. 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.”

A service of worship from the Graan with the theme of Leaving, featuring Fr. Brian, accompanied by Daniel O’Donnell will air on BBC Radio 4 at 8am this Sunday and on BBC Radio Ulster at 10.15am.