IT IS difficult to avoid the personal then dealing with the retirement of Cardinal Cahal Daly. Indeed, in such a hierarchical institution as the Irish Catholic Church, personality and commitment are paramount. Cahal Daly succeeded Tomas O Fiaich: both owed more to the academy than the parish. There the similarity ends. Tomas O Fiaich was quintessentially a man of the people. He was in and of South Armagh. He possessed that peculiar de Valera like quality of being able to look into his own heart.

Cardinal Daly lacked the common touch. While he was comfortable among the more pietistic, you could not imagine him laughing it up with the boys at a GAA match in Cullyhanna.

Cardinal O Fiaich was an emotional man. We can still remember the sight of him outside the Maze Prison after visiting the IRA hunger strikers. Comparisons with the slums of Calcutta would have been lost the official mind at Stormont, but struck a chord within his wider community.

He was a simple man but that is not to say that he lacked an intellectual hinterland. Again we can turn to this expression of wonderment, describing conditions under which the prisoners struggled to study Irish. Here emotion and intellect joined hands.

Cahal Daly is a more cerebral and complex individual. His philosophical training gave him a sense of perspective which he was going to need in those long days since his appointment as Bishop of Down and Connor in 1982. Then, he had succeeded another cerebral bishop, Dr William Philbin. The latter had been incapable of coming to terms with the horror of the rising anarchy in Belfast.

Cahal Daly attempted to meet this head on, and in a way which suited him best: he mounted a philosophical challenge against the nationale for violence. It was an issue he had been addressing a decade earlier with the publication of the Inter Church Working Party's Report, Violence in Ireland, in 1976.

BUT it took on a more urgent quality in the period after the hunger strikes. Prior to Drumcree, nothing has had such a traumatic effect on the whole Catholic community as the hunger strikes, steeped as they were in religious iconography and martyrology.

They appealed to the deepest instincts in Irish Catholicism in their sense of timeless justice. They invoked Terence MacSwiney and the politics of suffering. They narrowed the distance between politics and violence and threw into sharp relief a fateful ambiguity which has been a mark of Northern politics. In short, the hunger strikes did enormous damage to politics as process.

Cardinal O Fiaich acted as a lightning conductor for the Catholic community. He represented the 19th century view of the Irish priesthood as being (to quote the historian Oliver MacDonagh) "the populist writ large".

Bishop Cahal Daly did not follow the same trend. He reflected rather ban reacted. In his writing and in his lectures, he examined just War theory in the context of contemporary Irish political violence. In particular, he concentrated on the issue of the disproportionality of the IRA response to state violence.

That may be his true legacy to the peace process. He offered an intellectual challenge. It had a much deeper resonance than the Pope's emotional outburst at Drogheda in 1979. Despite Dr Duly's very bad relations with the Republican community, their reflective political leadership could not ignore the thrust of his very powerful argument. It would have been factored into their thinking after 1984 and came into its own in 1994 with the ceasefires.

So, when Cahal Daly suddenly acceded to the See of Armagh in 1990, he had undergone an arduous apprenticeship. He appeared to be a man whose time had come, but what we didn't realise was that the times were changing. We, and he, should have known better.

One of the seminal moments in contemporary Irish politics had been the appearance of the Irish Hierarchy, led by Dr Daly, at the New Ireland Forum in 1984. The late John Kelly informed him, with only the slightest degree of hyperbole, that it was the first time they had been asked to think on their feet since St Patrick arrived in Ireland. Then, Mrs Mary Robinson (as she then was) grilled him on the minutiae of canon law and the rights of a minority in a new Ireland.

But that was a fairly straightfoward issue since it was about only the national question. One suspects that Cardinal Fiaich might have been prepared to adopt the liberal agenda in return for a nationalist one. The litany is well rehearsed the Bishop Casey affair, paedophile priests, the divorce referendum, celibacy and the slightly less timid Hierarchy and laity, all of it captured in the distressing light of The Late Late Show.

ONE feels that the Cardinal retires as a very disappointed man. His decision coincides with the announcement from UDA and UFF prisoners that they no longer support the peace process. He has presided over a church in fundamental crisis.

None of the issues was of his making, but he did not have the guile or the public relations patter to cover the cracks. The church in the North had lacked any real political or intellectual weight with the premature retirement of Dr Edward Daly in Derry. Society in the South had been moving on from the old verities. Unlike in the 19th century, the church stands apart from a considerable body of its people.

Cardinal Daly had an important contribution to make to the peace process. It has been unsung, but posterity will take note.