“Prepare for the worst, hope for the best and accept what God sends” is the motto under which 78-year-old Father Brian D’Arcy lives.
As we celebrate this Christmas period and look ahead to 2024, the Fermanagh priest and broadcaster reflects upon his hopes for his home country, the Church and for society.
Like the majority of people who live in Northern Ireland, Fr D’Arcy is hoping for an end to the political impasse and the restoration of Stormont.
“My hope for 2024 is that we will begin to see that we shouldn’t have to look to others to help us in Northern Ireland. It’s time we began to help ourselves and not be dependent on outsiders to come and solve our problems.
“All you have to do is to look at the health service and the education system, and you know that politics is failing badly and the people are suffering.
“I want politicians to realise that life is short, and they’re making life shorter than it should be.”
Brought up in the countryside at Bellanaleck, near Enniskillen, Fr D’Arcy attended the Christian Brothers’ school in Omagh before starting his training to become a Passionist priest in 1962, later transferring to Mount Argus in Dublin.
Now living back in Enniskillen, he is passionate about providing for the people of his home county and this includes access to proper medical care.
“There’s no point in closing hospitals like the South West Acute Hospital in Enniskillen, and leaving 85,000 people in danger of death,” he adds.
Although trying to remain hopeful, Fr D’Arcy admits that he’s “beginning to despair”.
He admits he truly believed that following the Good Friday Agreement 25 years ago, the next generation of young people would “change things”, as would the advancement of integrated education.
“Sadly, education on its own will do nothing when you are sending these kids back to ghettoised families and communities.
“I want politicians to realise that life is short, and they’re making life shorter than it should be.”
“The biggest difficulty with Northern Ireland is elections. We are broad-minded people, but as soon as there are elections, we go tribal. We will get nowhere until we have some way of having an election where people vote for what is right.”
Perhaps a united Ireland will provide a better future?
“That will evolve or not evolve, as the case may be, but unless you have a united people, there’s no point having a united Ireland,” he sighs.
During his long and at times controversial career, Fr D’Arcy has been an outspoken commentator on the issues of the day, religious, social and political.
He has been censured by the Vatican, criticised the Church’s handling of clerical sexual abuse and mandatory celibacy, had a near-death experience during a paramilitary kidnapping and provided the inspiration for Dermot Morgan’s comic character Father Ted.
Would he do it all again?
“Nobody knows that. It hasn’t always been easy, but I have no regrets. I’m still terribly enthusiastic and have things to do,” says Fr D’Arcy, who still travels weekly to Belfast to record his BBC Radio Ulster programme.
“I do it because I want to. It’s not a pious thing. It’s a privileged position to be in with people at their happiest and saddest moments, and my job is to let them find a merciful and loving God when they need it.”
The world, with all its technological advances, is a very different place than when he started in the priesthood 60 years ago. But Fr D’Arcy believes the key to his work is his ability to “communicate with changing people”.
“Pope John XXIII in the 1960s said that the job of any Church was to do everything in their power, and to use every means they can, to make the love of God relevant to the generation they are in.
“You can’t do that if you put yourself in a monastery away from people. You can’t do that if you become a parish priest and don’t knock on doors.”
Fr D’Arcy, who is known as the chaplain to the world of Irish showbusiness, praises his friends in the showbands for helping him learn how to communicate with people.
“Joe Dolan, Brendan Bowyer and Dickie Rock went out every night and gave the people what they wanted. They would love to have sung all sorts of songs, but they weren’t there to entertain themselves.”
In order to keep up-to-date with what people are talking about, Fr D’Arcy makes sure to watch the latest movies and TV shows.
One of the films which touched him most this year was Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, which starred Cillian Murphy as the ‘father’ of the atomic bomb.
“It asks a lot of questions and makes you think about who has power. Scientists can have great ideas and expectations, but it’s politicians who control what they make.
“Oppenheimer made the atom bomb to end wars, and actually it became the world’s biggest threat.”
Fr D’Arcy has appeared on almost every season of The Late, Late Show since 1981, most recently on the country music special in October, alongside new host Patrick Kielty.
“Paddy is very intelligent, he’s funny and The Late Late needed a change. But I think he will have difficulty being accepted by some, simply because he’s a northerner,” observes Fr D’Arcy, who spent 27 years working in Dublin.
What Fr D’Arcy refuses to partake in however, is reality TV shows. “I’ve been asked over 100 times, but I won’t. I have enough to do without wasting my time on that. It is the exact opposite of reality; Gaza is reality.”
NEW BOOK
This winter, Fr D’Arcy published his 17th book, The Best of Brian, a collection of short reflections on a wide range of topics including hope, worry, anger, coping with death by suicide, Alzheimer’s, parenting, peace and war.
“They are presented in readable bites. People can agree or disagree. Just like the parables and the Gospels, the story lasts forever, but everybody interprets it differently in their own age.”
His hope is that his book will not only inspire and uplift readers, but also help them see their worth as “cherished human beings”.
“It’s important to help people recognise goodness in themselves and to encourage that goodness to bloom,” says Fr D’Arcy, stressing how young people are especially vulnerable.
“It doesn’t matter how much parents or teachers tell children they love them, if some of their contemporaries slag them off on social media, they can disintegrate.
“Jesus wasn’t a bad psychologist when he said ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart… and love your neighbour as yourself’.”
Of these, Fr D’Arcy believes the last is the hardest. “You can’t love others until you show respect and love for yourself. It’s the same with forgiveness.
“One of the saddest things in modern society is that there’s no forgiveness. God wants you to be happy. St Paul says: ‘All I want is your happiness. I repeat, your happiness is what I want’.
“I can tell people God has forgiven them, but confession is not magic. They need to come to terms with the fact they have made a mistake and forgive themselves.
“People get shocked when I ask them to tell me all the good things because they’re only concentrating on the negative.”
ABUSE
In his 2019 memoir, It Has To Be Said, Fr D’Arcy revealed he was sexually abused in the church as a young boy, and again as a teen, and he has struggled all his life to deal with the trauma.
“The road to healing is a long one, and it’s not necessarily a moment either. It can be a daily thing. It’s an attitude rather than a decision,” he tells me.
Whilst many of the excerpts in The Best of Brian have been taken from his sermons, columns and broadcasts over the years, others, including those one on Sinéad O’Connor.
“Sinéad’s views and attitudes are the soundtracks to modern Ireland. Personally, I admired Sinéad even though she challenged my role and my opinions,” he said of the late singer, who like himself was a victim of abuse.
One of his most stark chapters is entitled Cocaine. In it, Fr D’Arcy asks why Ireland, having the fourth-highest rate of cocaine abuse in the world, continues to turn a blind eye to its drug problem.
“We are a nation in denial. So many abusers are professionals – including medics and lawyers - who in their daily work condemn drug pushers and may even help to prosecute them. In their off-time, they support them. Where’s the integrity, ethics or morality in that behaviour?”
THE FUTURE OF THE CHURCH
Discussing the challenge of church attendance and the future of the Catholic Church, Fr D’Arcy says we shouldn’t be asking how many we can get back to Mass, rather taking a wider look at how to make the love of God relevant in today’s world.
“There’s no point in having a religion if there’s no faith. We are at that stage now where people go through a ritual of First Communion, First Confession and even marriage.
“Religion ought to be a mechanism whereby, as individuals and community, we can be helped to know God and to love God and to love our neighbour.”
While the festive period is a very busy time for Fr D’Arcy, he says he loves the peace of Christmas Day.
“I enjoy a walk and then go visiting around hospitals. I meet family and friends the next day and can have that happiness, but I like the quietness and silence of Christmas when places are closed.”
