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Edward Daly, the Emeritus Catholic Bishop of Derry who tended victims of Northern Ireland’s Bloody Sunday killings and became a defining image of the massacre, died on Monday aged 82.
The Catholic Diocese of Derry says Daly died peacefully on Monday after a long illness.
Daly was a priest in Londonderry when British paratroopers opened fire on a Catholic civil-rights protest march on January 30, 1972, killing 13 people.
The killings helped fuel Northern Ireland’s sectarian violence, in which some 3,000 people died.
Daly became a hero by administering last rites to victims on the streets amid the mayhem of the Catholic Bogside district. A photo of the priest waving a blood-stained white handkerchief as he tried to help a dying 17-year-old become one of the event’s iconic images.
“There’s scarcely a day that passes when I don’t think about that day. It’s haunted me all these years,” Daly said 25 years later.
An initial British inquiry outraged Northern Ireland Catholics with its finding that the British troops’ gunfire followed IRA firing and that the victims could have been armed.
A 12-year investigation found in 2010 that the soldiers were not under attack and fired without justification on unarmed civilians, many of whom were fleeing or aiding the wounded.
“Bishop Daly served, without any concern for himself, throughout the traumatic years of the Troubles, finding his ministry shaped by the experience of witnessing violence and its effects; through this dreadful period he always strove to preach the Gospel of the peace of Christ,” the current bishop of Derry, Donal McKeown said.
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