CARDINAL Cahal Daly will step down at lunchtime today, on his 79th birthday, as Catholic Primate and Archbishop of Armagh.
Cardinal Daly will be succeeded automatically by the coadjutor archbishop, Dr Sean Brady, who has been assisting the cardinal since he was appointed coadjutor (archbishop in waiting) in December, 1994.
Dr Brady will be formally installed as archbishop in Armagh cathedral on November 3rd.
The news of Cardinal Daly's retirement, first leaked by Vatican sources to days ago, was broken this morning by the Irish News, despite an embargo until noon today placed the Catholic Press Office.
Dr Daly, then Bishop of Down and Connor, succeeded the late Cardinal Tomas O Fiaich in December 1990. At 73 he was the oldest bishop to be appointed Archbishop of Armagh for 170 years. He was made a cardinal the following June.
The Pope declined to accept Cardinal Daly's resignation when he submitted it, as required under canon law, on reaching his 75th birthday. It is thought he did not want the cardinal to step down at such a crucial and sensitive point in Irish history, barely a month after the 1994 IRA ceasefire.
However, in the past two years the Irish primate has seen the Irish church having to deal with an altogether different kind of challenge - the crisis of moral authority brought on by a series of clerical child sex abuse scandals.
In recent years the cardinal has suffered from painful bouts of shingles, but he is understood to have recovered well from that illness, which is not a major factor in his retirement at this time.
Cardinal Daly is widely recognised as the outstanding Irish churchman of the past 30 years. He first became a bishop in Ardagh and Clonmacnoise in 1967, and soon established himself as the Irish Catholic Church's leading thinker and its foremost spokesman on a wide range of social, political and spiritual issues.
Among the public debates he has made high profile contributions to have been those on abortion, divorce, social justice, unemployment, celibacy, women in the church, the future of Europe, the Third World, education, sexual morality, ecumenism and the media. He is known to have won the admiration of Pope John Paul II for his arguments in support of the Catholic Church's position on these and other issues.
He was particularly known for his forthright condemnations of IRA violence, and for his preoccupation with the need for peace, reconciliation and mutual acceptance by Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland.
Even though he has retired as Archbishop of Armagh, Cardinal Daly will continue to be a voting member of the college of cardinals until his 80th birthday. This means that if the Pope dies in that time he will be eligible to cast a vote for his successor.
Similarly, it follows that if the Pope names a new group of cardinals in the next six months as he probably will do in order to fill nine vacancies in the cardinals' electoral college - Archbishop Brady will almost certainly not be among those so named, because a country of Ireland's size would not be allowed more than one cardinal eligible to vote in a papal election.
The new primate is a 57 year old Cavan man who was rector of the Irish College in Rome from 1987-1994. In that year he was appointed parish priest of Ballyhaise, situated just south of the Cavan Fermanagh border.
A keen sportsman, he has played minor and senior football for Cavan and represented the county board on the GAA central council in 1980.