Fr Reid named Tipperary Person of Year

BELFAST-BASED priest, Fr Alex Reid, who witnessed IRA arms being decommissioned last year, was last night named Tipperary Person of the Year.

Fr Reid, who played a long-time role in the Northern Ireland peace process since the 1980s, will receive the honour from the Tipperary Association in Dublin next month.

Association chairman Michael Fenton said Nenagh native Fr Reid has been acclaimed both at home and abroad for his pivotal role as a peacemaker.

“In fact many people on the inside of the discussions credit Fr Reid as being the person who started the process,” Mr Fenton said.

Fr Reid is believed to have brought former SDLP leader John Hume and Sinn Féin president Gerry Adams together for dialogue in the late 1980s.

Based in Belfast’s Redemptorists’ Monastery in Clonard, Fr Reid witnessed at first hand the violence and suffering caused to both sides in the conflict.

His initiatives with the Hume/Adams talks led initially to the 1993 Downing Street Declaration and eventually to the Good Friday Agreement in 1998.

Fr Reid worked through this period with the Irish Government’s representative Dr Martin Mansergh, now a Government senator.

Methodist Minister Rev Harold Good and Fr Reid were asked to witness the decommissioning of IRA arms in September 2005.

However, a month later he had to apologise for remarks made comparing unionists to Nazis.

He had said that unionists had politically persecuted Catholics in Northern Ireland for more than 60 years, and added that he believed they were in the same category as the Nazis.

Fr Reid has spent time in Spain in the past four years having been invited to lend his expertise from Northern Ireland to the problems in the Basque region.