"Father Alec Reid", C.Ss.R. was an Republic of Ireland/Irish Catholic priest noted for his facilitator role in the Northern Ireland peace process, a role BBC journalist Peter Taylor subsequently described as "absolutely critical" to its success.

Born and raised in Nenagh, County Tipperary, Reid was professed as a Congregation of the Most Holy Redeemer/Redemptorist in 1950, and ordained a priest seven years later. For the next four years, he gave Parish Missions in Limerick, Dundalk and Galway (Esker), before moving to Clonard monastery in Belfast, where he spent almost the next forty years. The Redemptorist Monastery at Clonard stands on the interface between the Nationalist Catholic Community and the Protestant Shankill Road.

In 1988 Reid delivered the last rites to two British Army Royal Signals corporals killed by the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) – an event known as the "corporals killings" – after they drove into a Republican funeral cortège in Belfast, Northern Ireland. A photograph of his involvement in that incident became one of the starkest and most enduring images of the Troubles.

More Alec Reid on Wikipedia.

History will prove that this is the end of the IRA.

The reality is that the nationalist community in Northern Ireland were treated almost like animals by the unionist community. They were not treated like human beings. It was like the Nazis treatment of the Jews.

I would lay my life on the line that the IRA has acted in good faith, and has fully disarmed.

[As Frazer hurled more accusations at Reid, among them that the Catholic community had] butchered Protestants, ... You're in the same category as the Nazis, as far as I'm concerned.

The key issue now is to get a police force that everyone accepts.

I am absolutely certain, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that all the arms of the I.R.A. have been decommissioned. I know them well enough to know that they don't play games.