Fergus Finlay: Creeslough’s Fr Duffy is my choice for outstanding person of the year

Fr John Joe Duffy lights 10 red candles at St Michael’s Church in Creeslough Co Donegal, for the 10 victims of the Applegreen service station explosion. Picture: PA

I love a game that makes 9-year-olds giggle. Mikey is 9, and he introduced us to a card game on Christmas night called Kids Against Maturity. It’s a kind of “blankety bank” game where the chairman reads out a sentence with a blank in it, and the contestants have to fill in the blank from a set of cards they’ve drawn randomly from the box.

Lots of rude words appear on the cards — words like “butt” feature prominently, and there’s a lot of infectious giggling.

At the quiet end of a smashing family Christmas Day, I fell to wondering about the year we’d had. Another one of those strange years, wasn’t it — half in and half out of Covid; politics that ranged from the pretty dull and boring here (thank goodness) to the completely insane elsewhere; a whole series of challenges that never seem to end — in healthcare and housing, and a new cost of living crisis that dominated our year and caused immense hardship to families here and elsewhere.

To mark the year here are a few of my personal awards. You mightn’t agree with all of them, but hopefully there will be some that will resonate.

I know that many people, and some prestigious media outlets, have named Volodymyr Zelenskyy as the international person of the year, and I get that. He has been a truly inspirational leader of a battered and still proud people.

Tyrant of the year

But for me, it’s a different person who has shaped the entire world. His brutal decision to invade Ukraine and the way he conducted that invasion has changed the world we live in, perhaps forever.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has reshaped geopolitics.

 The invasion of Ukraine effectively changed the history of the world at a stroke. It has had a major effect on the world’s economies and has reshaped geopolitics in a way not seen for forty years. Not many people can say they’ve done that, so my International Tyrant of the Year — now and for a long time to come — is Vladimir Putin.

At the other end of the scale, I’m really struggling to name an International Gormless Eejit of the Year. Earlier on in 2022, Boris Johnson and Donald Trump were struggling mightily for the title. But then Johnson fell, brought down by a succession of scandals so numerous that nobody can remember the one that finally did him in.

That left Trump, who spent the year endlessly whining about the election he had lost and succeeded in dragging his Republicans deep into the mud with him. Thankfully, it cost them victory in the US mid-term elections. By year’s end, Trump was hawking a set of mad digital trading cards and tweeting a happy Christmas to “the radical left Marxists that are trying to destroy our country”. He meant Joe Biden.

But in the middle of the year the world’s most hapless politician came and went in a flash. She succeeded Johnson and lasted barely a month — but it was a month in which she almost single-handedly brought the British economy to its knees and guaranteed the eventual destruction of the Party she led. 

Former Prime Minister Liz Truss almost destroyed the British economy.

On a more serious note, the Not-Enough Reported Event of the Year was the Government’s long-overdue apology to Dónal De Róiste. He has fought for half a century to clear his name after being drummed out of the Irish Army in the late ‘60s, and effectively tarred as a Provo sympathiser without ever being charged with a single crime. He had very few supporters, apart from the indefatigable and brave journalist Don Mullan, but the truth won through in the end. In his own words, at last, he can now hold his head high.

Another who can hold his head high is Micheál Martin. Over a lifetime I’ve watched politicians grow in office and I’ve watched them shrink. If I’m being honest, I was prepared to accept that Micheál Martin would be an inconsequential holder of the highest office in our government.

He was anything but. I don’t know if he will ever get another chance to be Taoiseach — but he deserves one. 

Tánaiste Micheál Martin was calm and authoritative when he needed to be in his role as Taoiseach.

That had barely eased off — and it hasn’t gone away, you know — when we were hit by the consequences of the war in Ukraine, leading to the overwhelming need to man a lot of different barricades.

Throughout it all, he was calm, authoritative when he needed to be, and modestly inspirational when it was called for. Sometimes, in a crisis, we’re like children who need a stern uncle looking after us. More often we respond better to being treated like adults. Micheál Martin was an adult dealing with the rest of us as adults, a calm manager who grew into leadership, and for that, he earned certainly my respect and my nomination as Irish Politician of the Year.

Other things never go away either in Ireland, it seems. We seem to have to endure a scandal in Ireland every year, and this year the Scandal of the Year involved posh schools and the Spiritan Order.

The posh schools made it different — so did the courage of the men who came forward, after living in secret with the effects of abuse for years. So did the quality of a lot of the journalism around the scandal, including outstanding radio journalism from Joe Duffy among others.

 Finally (and I admit this might seem a bit strange in light of the last few of paragraphs), my Outstanding Irish Person of the Year Award goes to a Catholic priest. When he woke up on the morning of October 7 last, Fr John Joe Duffy could have had no idea of what lay ahead of him and his community, and no way of preparing for the appalling tragedy that was about to unfold.

But in the middle of that afternoon, a terrible explosion rocked the little village of Creeslough. First responders rushed to the scene, and all night long the search continued for bodies.

By the following morning, it had been established that 10 people had died in the accident. They included a little girl and two teenagers, and all of them had full and long lives ahead of them.

For the next week or more, Fr Duffy shouldered the grief of a community and managed somehow to reflect the feelings of the whole country.

Shock and horror were replaced by pain and an awful sense of bereavement. He seemed, with amazing grace and considerable strength, to be able to offer comfort and to make sense of the inexplicable.

An ordinary priest in a quiet little place, the last thing he would have wanted, I’m sure, is to be recognised by anyone as the most outstanding Irish person of the year. But we — all of us — owe him that.