No stranger to flesh and blood

PROFILE
"HE'S a great man." The voice came from behind me. I turned to see an elderly gentlemen grasping a walking frame and nodding towards Mgr Raymond Murray, sitting next to me.
"My youngest daughter was only 21 when she was shot ... during the troubles, you know..." He shuffled off, yet another Catholic in Armagh whose own personal nightmare had somehow been alleviated by Fr Murray. We were at a Gaelic football match, Crossmaglen versus Harps, at the Armagh ground.
As cathedral administrator in Armagh, Fr Murray knows everyone and everyone knows him. But so does every Catholic in Belfast. Yet this side of the Irish Sea few have heard of him. So who is this priest who is a household name in Northern Ireland but about whom we know so little?
The first time 1 met him was in Dusseldorf last year. He had been one of his regular visits to Germany. I recognised him immediately. a small, bespectacled man with a grave expression, looking more like a German university professor than an Irish priest. His wonderful smile surprised me.
We exchanged life stories. While he told me his I remembered seeing his name on a pamphlet which had been handed to me outside Westminster Cathedral in 1970s. He was indeed the same Raymond Murray, the human rights campaigner who had worked with Fr Denis Faul and Fr Patrick Campbell for over 20 years for justice towards Catholics in Northern Ireland. Fr Faul's high media profile since tht release of the Birmingham Six and the Guildford Four, for whom they had both campaigned unceasingly, has tended to overshadow Raymond Murray's part in the campaign.
His own interest in publicity is that it should serve the cause which it did last autumn on the publication of his latest book, SAS in Ireland. So too did his TV appearance in January 1991 on the Late Late Show in discussion with members of the SAS. In June 1990, both priests were subject of a TV documentary on RTE 1 entitled British Justice in Northern Ireland.
Raymond Murray, born in 1938 in Newtownhamilton, Northern Ireland, was one of five children, three boys and two girls. The Christian Brothers gave him his primary and secondary education.
As a boy he wanted to be a priest so he was sent at 13 to junior seminary. Following his training at Maynooth, he was ordained at the age of 23 for the Armagh diocese. His interest in history later earned him in MA in Celtic Studies. He now edits the journal of the Armagh Diocesan Historical Society.
As a curate he served in West Belfast, Clonoe, Newry and Louth, Eire. His appointment in 1967 as curate in the cathedral parish of Armagh should have left him a little time for himself to pursue his studies of Irish history and language, and to write poetry, but he was to be overtaken by events which entailed sacrificing his inclinations for the next 20 years.
One of the duties of a curate in Armagh was being chaplain to the women's prison, Raymond Murray was there in 1971 when the emergency laws were introduced which gave the security forces wide powers of arrest, interrogation and enforced detention without trial.
Hundreds of Catholics, innocent and guilty, were interrogated and interned in places whose very names, Long Kesh, Castlereagh, Palace Barracks (Hotywood), Girdwood Park Barracks (Belfast) became synonymous with bestiality, brutality and degradation.
Internment meant prisons were overflowing and in December 1971, 130 men were transferred to Armagh gaol from the Crumlin Road, the main Belfast prison, all on remand. All had been tortured. "It was the turning point in my life".
The experience transformed the quiet inner light of a gentle Irish intellectual into a laser beam which was to pierce the facade of British "justice" in Ireland and destroy the lies beneath.
Raymond Murray systematically interviewed all the men over several weeks. "Each of them had been previously interviewed by RUC and British Army intelligence officers at interrogation centres. They had been kicked, beaten and stripped. As each man told me his story I had him strip ...black buttocks, black forearms ...black, purple, red... one had been held over an electric fire and his stomach burnt. One had a congenital deformity of an ankle. it had been kicked and the flesh was raw."
For two decades Raymond Murray, outraged by state complicity with institutional violence, campaigned for human rights. He and Denis Faul produced over 30 books and scores of pamphlets documenting the torture and killings of Catholics, and lodged thousands of complaints. Single-handed he brought about the end of the use of plastic bullets.
The Castlereagh File preempted the first two Amnesty International reports published in 1978. The Irish government then brought a case against the UK for ill-treatment to Strasbourg. The European Court of Human Rights pronounced the UK guilty of inhumanand degrading treatment.
Raymond Murray has shared a mountain of suffssing. He has seen families destroyed, mothers and fathers dying of sorrow. In 20 years 3000 people have been killed in Northern Ireland; 50006000 were imprisoned. Every Catholic has been affected. He has known every human emotion, anxiety, sorrow, and occasionally joy. "I have been helped by the prisoners who were despised. They taught me a lot in an unknown world."
In Belfast I met a warm hearted woman who had spent three years in Armagh gaol. She told me how he himself had been ridiculed by the prison guards who made a point of calling him "Mr Murray". She then fell silent, tears in her eyes. "He's a saint," she whispered.
If he has a weak point (and it was difficult enough to spot!) it is his irritability at having his depressing political views challenged. His doom and gloom assessment of the chances for global peace and justice sends his voice into sombre tones. But moments later he is roaring with laughter at his colleagues' jokes.
I shall remember him in his booklined study, hunched over his desk working on an ancient Irish text, an unpretentious, brilliant Irish scholar whose witness to truth in the shadow of Goliath places him firmly alongside the great among the saints of our times.