Father Sean McManus had little to say when he appeared before Resident Magistrate John W Adams in Enniskillen Court in September 1971, charged with obstructing the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC).
Days before, the Redemptorist priest had attended an anti-internment rally in the Fermanagh town, subsequently swearing an affidavit that the RUC had badly beaten a protester.
When the charge was read out, Fr McManus, then serving in Perth in Scotland, replied: “I am not pleading at all. I am not recognising the court.”
Fined £20, he left with his brother, Frank, a nationalist MP for Fermanagh and South Tyrone, telling reporters outside that he would not pay it.
The incident brought him to the attention of the IRA’s leadership, which led the organisation’s chief of staff, Sean Mac Stiofain, to meet him shortly afterwards in Navan, Co Meath.
A year later, Fr McManus was back from Scotland to visit his family in Kinawley, Co Fermanagh, ahead of making his way to the United States on the direct orders of his church superiors.
In the decades since, the strongly pro-republican Fr McManus has been a prominent figure in Irish-America as head of the Irish National Caucus, where he been a loud critic often of both the Irish and British governments as well as an active lobbyist on Irish and Irish-American interests.
“I was being ‘transported’ by the Church and [in effect] by the State because I would not ‘give a solemn promise without equivocation or mental reservation’ never again to criticise England’s oppression of Ireland,” he told The Irish Times, speaking this week from his home in Washington DC.
Within days of returning to Ireland, Mac Stiofain made contact with him to make a direct and unusual request, one that lives vividly in the memory of the still vigorous, strongly spoken 81-year-old priest.
I spent about 20-30 minutes with Joe. He was very amiable. A nice man. He shook my hand saying goodbye. He thanked me warmly
— Father Sean McManus
Fr McManus had been invited by a family to spend a few days at their hotel in a Co Louth village.
“The first time ever that I stayed in a hotel,” the priest remembers. Once there, Mac Stiofain quickly got in touch.
Sending a driver to collect the priest, the two men met.
“He said one sentence to me, just one: one of our men wants to see a priest; would you go and see him? And I said, yes, I’ll do that.
“I assumed that this man, whoever he was, was important, couldn’t go out to church or be seen in case he was picked up, or whatever. And that’s why he wanted someone to come to him.”
A day later, he was picked up by two men, one of whom he now believes was killed more than two decades later by the Ulster Volunteer Force as he worked behind a newsagent’s counter.
The man he was to meet, though he did not yet know it, was former Cistercian monk Joe Lynskey. It would be almost four decades before the IRA admitted to Lynskey’s killing, when he was included in the list of “The Disappeared” – people who were abducted, murdered and secretly buried by republicans during Northern Ireland’s Troubles.
Today, Fr McManus is careful not to conflate what he knew then with what he has learned since 2010 when the IRA finally acknowledged that the Belfast man was one of those secretly killed and buried.
Fr McManus was not blindfolded, but he was told to close his eyes during the 30-minute journey. Today, he could not identify the house he was brought to. Even if he could, he would not identify it, he said.
Once there, he found two men in the kitchen. The priest believes the men were aged in their 60s; they were relaxed, had no guns, and there were no signs of tension.
“One said: ‘Hello Father.’ The other said: ‘Joe’s up there on the right.’”
“They were pottering about, making tea. All very normal, relaxed, pleasant, not a care in the world. I had absolutely no feeling of anything else. I didn’t have the slightest feeling that he was a prisoner,” said Fr McManus.
“None of that, absolutely none of that. That’s why years later, I was amazed when I read the truth that he had been killed.”
Entering the small bedroom, Fr McManus met the casually dressed Lynskey: “He stood up. He shook my hand. He said: ‘How are ye, Father? Thanks for coming.’ It was all perfectly normal,” the priest said.
Fr McManus heard his Confession, which remains confidential. Today, he is careful repeatedly to make clear that it was a normal Confession, not a last Confession, or the last rites given to someone on the brink of death.
“I spent about 20-30 minutes with Joe. He was very amiable. A nice man. He shook my hand saying goodbye. He thanked me warmly,” said Fr McManus.
Leaving the house, the two men were still in the kitchen, still relaxed, still drinking tea.
The 40-year-old Lynskey could easily have escaped, he believed, if he had wanted. Though Fr McManus did not know it, he had given Lynskey his final Confession because a court martial headed by Mac Stiofain had condemned him, says writer Martin Dillon.
I have nothing to hide because I did my duty as a priest, which any priest would and should do when told someone wants to see a priest
— Father Sean McManus
Asked now if Lynskey knew he was to die, Fr McManus said: “I’m not really in a position to say. All I know is that later I was amazed to think that he had been so completely relaxed, at ease, at peace.”
A senior IRA intelligence officer who was involved in the paramilitary group from the foundation of the IRA, Lynskey had had an affair with the wife of an interned IRA volunteer. He subsequently tried to have the man killed.
Leading IRA figure Brendan Hughes found out and sought a court-martial, despite Lynskey’s high rank. He was taken south by another IRA member, Dolours Price, later jailed for the 1973 Old Bailey bombings.
“He sat in the rear, clutching a little overnight bag,” Dillon writes in his latest book, The Sorrow and the Loss. Lynskey tried to explain his actions, but Price did not want to hear. He made no attempt to escape.
“Nevertheless, she later felt a great deal of regret about leading a friend to his death,” writes Dillon, whose earlier book The Dirty War in 1988 revealed the IRA’s policy of secret killings and burials.
Looking back more than five decades, Fr McManus wonders at Lynskey’s conduct: “How could he have been so much at peace and calm and open and friendly and engaging? Everything was fine.”
Over later years, he “very occasionally” asked when he was back in Ireland if anyone knew Lynskey.
[ Joe Lynskey remains are not those exhumed in Monaghan, tests showOpens in new window ]
“Nobody, nobody ever had heard of him. And I thought: ‘Oh, good, because that means he’s fine,” he told The Irish Times.
The IRA told the Independent Commission for the Location of Victims’ Remains about Fr McManus, which led its then lead investigator, Geoff Knupfer, to contact him eight years ago in Enniskillen.
“A very impressive man,” says the priest.
“The very first thing I said to him was: ‘Geoff, was it British intelligence or the republican movement that told you I was the priest who heard Joe’s Confession?’ He answered immediately: ‘The republican movement.’
“I said: ‘Let me tell you upfront, there’s very little I can tell you.’ And he said: ‘It’s still important to meet.’ And I said: ‘Okay, fine’.”
Fr McManus sounds more surprised that the IRA had not told him that they were going to pass on his name than by the fact that they did.
Last July, long-standing commission investigator Jon Hill, who took over from Knupfer, travelled to Washington to see him.
Though he has no doubts but that the commission would honour confidentiality, he had decided that he should be the one to tell the story of his involvement.
Responding to The Irish Times, the commission issued a short statement, saying, “Given our very strict adherence to confidentiality we cannot comment on sources of information or who the commission engages with.”
Fr McManus’s final prompt to go public came after reading Martin Dillon’s latest “powerful, poignant” book, which displays “great respect and sensitivity to all the victims”, leading him to contact the New York-based journalist.
“I wanted it to come from me, not someone else. I have nothing to hide because I did my duty as a priest, which any priest would and should do when told someone wants to see a priest,” said Fr McManus.
Saying that he had been happy to co-operate with the commission, he cautioned that he had nothing more to add.
“Not because I don’t want to do so, but because I don’t know anything else. I had explained it fully previously,” he said.
Near the end of their meeting, Hill asked the priest if he would meet Lynskey’s niece, Maria, telling him that he believed “she would get great comfort from meeting you and how he was at peace”.
The two met in Ireland last August, he said.
“She said it brought some comfort, as Jon said it would,” said the priest. “Of course, it would have brought back renewed pain too, as always. I was pleased to do it.”
