The priest, the prelate, the politician and a bloody secret that festered for 30 years

In December 1972, the head of the Catholic Church in Ireland, Cardinal William Conway, held a private meeting with the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, William Whitelaw, to discuss an item of the most extreme sensitivity to both of them.

It was the involvement of one of the cardinal's priests, Father James Chesney, in the deaths of nine people ­ the victims of three IRA bombs that created slaughter in the Co Londonderry village of Claudy.

The attack, in July 1972, killed nine civilians, including a nine-year-old schoolgirl, when three car-bombs went off in the streets of the village. A warning of sorts had been given but it had come too late, arriving after the first bomb had exploded. The possibility that a priest had been implicated as an IRA activist in so many killings was an appalling prospect for both men. By rights, the proper thing to do was for the authorities to arrest the priest and attempt to bring charges against him.

Instead, it was revealed yesterday, the evidence is that the two men, as leaders of church and state, decided to hush up the whole thing. Chesney was not to face legal processes but would instead be quietly transferred across the border into the Irish Republic. The disclosures follow a special police inquiry prompted by an anonymous letter in July implicating Chesney. They have provoked disbelief, anger and hurt throughout Northern Ireland.

Tony Blair was urged to order a judicial inquiry similar to the ongoing Saville tribunal into the Bloody Sunday killings while David Trimble, the Ulster Unionist Party leader, said allegations of a cover-up should be "vigorously investigated". However, the Government insisted last night that all police inquiries would have to be finished before a judicial investigation could be considered.

The team of detectives investigating the affair is seeking additional documentation from the Church, the Northern Ireland Office and the military.It is understood they haveidentified most, if not all, of the people involved, and the sequence of events before the blasts. But many questions remain unanswered, including the role of the Royal Ulster Constabulary, and why more people ­ including Chesney ­ were not interrogated.

One enduring question is why, weeks after the Conway-Whitelaw meeting, Chesney had not been moved. In the meantime, another killing took place in which the priest, according to security sources, was also involved.

Captain James Hood, a member of the locally recruited Ulster Defence Regiment, was shot dead outside his home in January 1973. A number of men, some of them from the Claudy area, were arrested after the killing but Chesney was not among them.

In the same month, the priest moved from Northern Ireland to the Republic, a coincidence of timing that raises the question of whether a life might have been saved had the authorities moved against the priest. The circumstances at the time, and the two personalities involved, help explain why the cardinal and the cabinet minister, both now dead, appear to have opted for a cover-up instead of the proper legal processes.

Although Cardinal Conway came from the Falls Road district of Belfast, he was not a republican sympathiser, and although he was critical of British Army excesses, he also condemned IRA violence. An associate recalled that he was personally haunted by the fear of an uncontrollable spread of violence, the cardinal once pronouncing it as "madness" to think that Protestants could be bombed into a united Ireland.

Most Irish priests thought along the same lines, only a very few becoming directly involved in republican activity.

The revelation that a priest had been responsible for nine deaths would have been a nightmare for the cardinal, both in terms of the image of the Catholic Church and in its potential for stirring up fierce loyalist retaliation. This was no abstract fear. When the two men met, loyalists had already killed more than 100 people in 1972, as part of an overall death toll of almost 500 in what was by far the worst year of the Troubles in terms of lives lost.

William Whitelaw was all too aware of that, having assumed responsibility for both Northern Ireland's politics and security in March of that year when the Conservative government closed down the Protestant-dominated Stormont parliament.

Edward Heath dispatched Whitelaw to Belfast with the daunting brief of drawing up a fresh political blueprint. He was to create a new assembly to replace the previous Protestant administration with a new arrangement in which Protestants and Catholics would share power.

A wealthy landowner who would go on to serve as Mrs Thatcher's deputy, Mr Whitelaw affected the persona of a bluff country squire but this concealed the character of a cunning wheeler-dealer who, in Belfast, acted in a highly pragmatic manner. One example of that was the fact he had already secretly met the IRA, flying Gerry Adams, Martin McGuinness and others to London.

After that, he concluded they had written themselves out of the political equation by insisting on British withdrawal rather than any compromise. He then concentrated on bringing together the more moderate elements of Unionism and nationalism in the hope of constructing a new centrist administration. The Catholic Church was important to him since he hoped to win its blessing for his plan.

The Chesney case would have appalled Mr Whitelaw in that it could have made violence worse, and would have angered and repelled the moderate Protestants he was hoping to entice into government with the Catholics. Since government policy was specifically that of bridge-building, the spectacle of a priest being convicted of nine murders would have been a grievous blow to the prospect of power-sharing.

The politician and the cardinal thus had substantially overlapping interests which, it seems, led them to agree that it was best to evade the law and hustle the renegade priest out of Northern Ireland and out of trouble.

One irony is that this obviously overrode any notion of justice, which was one of the concepts the cardinal dwelt on most in public statements in which he exhorted the British government to do what was right and fair for all.

Bill Eakin, whose daughter Kathryn, nine, was the youngest victim, said yesterday: "Why should they [the bombers] be walking around when we live our lives in a terrible state?"

One irony is that the Catholic Church, in transferring Chesney, was resorting to exactly the same approach it has more recently been seen to employ in cases of sexual abuse by clerics. The head of the Catholic Church in Ireland, Dr Sean Brady, described the possible involvement of a priest as bringing disgrace to the Church. "My heartfelt sympathy is for the relatives of the victims whose grief has not lessened over time and must be intensified by the prevailing suspicion and speculation with respect to this shameful crime," he said.

Malin Head, where Chesney ended up, is one of the most north-westerly and remote spots of Co Donegal, lashed by biting Atlantic winds.

It was clearly meant by the church to be a place of exile for him. For Mr Whitelaw, too, it was obviously a safe place to conceal a serious problem.