The concerns of the late Cardinal William Conway, Primate of All Ireland, about the actions of the Northern security forces, the creation of Catholic "martyrs" and fair employment are revealed in cabinet papers released in Belfast.
On September 17th, 1970, in the wake of the Falls curfew and the shooting dead of a Catholic youth in north Belfast by the British army, the minister of community relations, Dr Robert Simpson, and an official called on Cardinal Conway in Armagh to discuss the situation.
Referring to the violence in Belfast, the cardinal said he hoped that 12 months of peace would be possible and that there would not be an overreaction by the security forces to incidents, although he realised how difficult a job the army had. In this context the cardinal instanced the curfew in the Lower Falls and the shooting of Danny O'Hagan, a Catholic youth, in the New Lodge area at the end of July.
In these cases he said there was a very strong feeling among his people that errors of judgment had been made in high places. He was very perturbed about O'Hagan's death because earlier he had pleaded with the authorities not to make a Catholic "martyr". Yet, if one had tried to pick out a name calculated to produce a martyr situation and a reaction to it, one could not have picked a more telling one than "Danny O'Hagan".
In the cardinal's view, the reaction to this shooting had been so sharp because it had occurred in an incident which had begun from stone-throwing, which he could not condone. He emphasised that there had been no corresponding reaction to Catholics who had been shot in a situation where the armed forces had come under fire. He had received reports from several quarters that there was doubt about the warnings which the army had given at the time of O'Hagan's death.
Cardinal Conway voiced his concern over the shootings at St Matthew's Catholic Church in east Belfast in June 1970 and suggested that there were reasonable grounds for believing that the church was going to be attacked on that occasion.
The cardinal said he felt dismayed by an apparent drift to the right in the Unionist Party, particularly in rural areas, which he felt could eventually provoke trouble. While the Reform Programme had been a great step forward, he was disappointed in the way some matters had turned out and in the rate of progress generally. He had hoped for something much closer to the Race Relations Act in Britain. He was also critical about declarations of equal opportunity, which he felt were qualified so as to detract from their impact.
On housing, Cardinal Conway said he was bitterly disappointed in the Housing Executive Bill. It seemed to him that the new executive was going to be frustrated by a huge council continually breathing down its neck. He was especially concerned that this council would contain few minority representatives.
The cardinal was critical of a BBC programme, Christians at War. He felt that no good could come from this programme and he had done his best to assure people that "we were not engaged in a religious war, but that social questions, such as housing and employment, came into it".