Father Hugh Mullan

Life

Hugh Mullan was born on 9 April 1933 in Portaferry, County Down, at the tip of the Ards Peninsula, and was ordained a priest of the Diocese of Down and Connor in 1959.

By 1971 he was a curate at Corpus Christi church in Ballymurphy, a young and crowded housing estate in west Belfast where, by all accounts, he was well known. As violence grew around them he became a go-between for his people: he made representations to the Army about what the community was living through, and on the morning of 9 August 1971 — the day internment without trial was introduced — he contacted the Army again to ask for protection for local residents. That afternoon he rang his mother and told her not to come to visit him, because things were not good.

That evening a parishioner, Bobby Clarke, lay wounded in open ground near the priest's house. Fr Mullan went out to him holding up a white cloth, so that he could be seen to come in peace, and knelt to give him the last rites. He was shot and killed there. He was 38 years old. Frank Quinn, aged 19, was shot dead at the same spot as he too tried to help. Bobby Clarke survived and lived for more than fifty years afterwards.

Fr Mullan was the first Catholic priest to be shot dead in the Troubles. Ten people died in Ballymurphy between 9 and 11 August 1971. Their families campaigned for half a century for the truth, and on 11 May 2021 the inquest found that all ten were entirely innocent. The coroner, Mrs Justice Keegan, said she was convinced that Fr Mullan was a "peace-maker", that he was carrying a white object when he was shot and was trying to help someone who had been injured, and that the force used against him was "clearly disproportionate". Letters written by the military after his death, she noted, showed the esteem in which he had been held.

In September 2026 Bishop Alan McGuckian SJ began the preliminary work towards a cause for the canonisation of Fr Mullan, together with his fellow curate Fr Noel Fitzpatrick, who was killed in strikingly similar circumstances at Springhill eleven months later. The diocese already keeps their memory: a prayer card in their honour has been in use since around 2019, Holy Oils were donated in their memory at St Peter's Cathedral, Belfast, and an icon of the two priests with Christ the Good Shepherd is to be installed there. No formal cause has yet been opened, so he does not yet hold the title Servant of God.