Requiem Mass for rights campaigner Faul

Hundreds of mourners will today pay their final respects to one of the towering figures of the North's peace process.

Human rights campaigner Monsignor Denis Faul, 74, died on Wednesday at the Bon Secours Hospital in Dublin after a long battle with cancer.

Politicians, church and community leaders will attend his Requiem Mass at St Columcille, Carrickmore, Co Tyrone to remember a man whose vocation spanned the Troubles.

Mgr Faul first rose to prominence when he marched with the Civil Rights movement in 1968, to demand equality for Catholics.

In the 1970s he protested against human rights abuses by the British Army and Royal Ulster Constabulary, but also spoke out strongly against republican and loyalist paramilitary violence.

The outspoken priest will best be remembered for his intervention in the 1981 republican H-Block hunger strikes in a bid to save the lives of the 10 men who died in the Maze Prison.

He argued that Margaret Thatcher would make no concessions and nothing would come of more deaths.

Following a phone-call with the priest, Gerry Adams told prisoners the republican movement would welcome an end to the fast, which made headlines across the world after the death of Bobby Sands.

When they refused, families acted on the advice of Mgr Faul and intervened.

Mrs Thatcher announced prisoners could wear their own clothes within three days of the strike being broken, but some republicans accused the priest of having undermined the campaign.

Mgr Faul campaigned tirelessly for the release of the Birmingham Six and the Guildford Four who had been wrongly imprisoned in England for bomb attacks before their cases reached wider prominence.

He also called on the IRA to reveal where it had buried the bodies of the Disappeared.