A Roman Catholic bishop denounced the IRA as followers of Satan during a eulogy Saturday at the funeral of a man forced to drive a bomb into a military checkpoint. ``They may say they are followers of Christ, some of them may even still engage in the hypocrisy of coming to church, but their lives and their works proclaim clearly that they follow Satan,'' said Bishop Edward Daly. Daly spoke at the funeral of Patsy Gillespie, 42, who was forced to drive a van loaded with explosives into a military checkpoint outside Londonderry. The explosion Wednesday morning killed Gillespie and five British soldiers. Gillespie was a civilian kitchen assistant in the army's Fort George camp in Londonderry. In its claim of responsibility for the attack, the Irish Republican Army branded him a collaborator. The predominantly Roman Catholic IRA is seeking to drive the British out of northern Ireland and unite it with the mainly Catholic Republic of Ireland. Gillespie's wife, Kathleen, said the family's home had been taken over by armed men Tuesday night and her husband taken away while the rest of the family was held hostage. The IRA used similar tactics in setting off a bomb the same morning at a checkpoint in Newry. One soldier was killed. A third attack in Omagh failed and the driver escaped injury. At the funeral Saturday of the soldier killed in Newry, the Rev. Anthony Doran said 21-year-old Cyril Smith died because he had helped the driver and then ran back to warn his comrades. Smith ``gave his life by running back into danger for his friends,'' the Catholic priest said. Londonderry was a flash point of the ``troubles'' that erupted in Northern Ireland in the late 1960s, leading to a revival of the IRA as the self-proclaimed defenders of the Catholic minority. The city remains one of the IRA's strongholds. Daly, for years a stern critic of the IRA, said the outlawed organization had ``descended a step lower to use people's lives to launch their vile attacks.'' ``Everyone is now at risk from these evil people with their foul and obscene actions. They corrupt everything and every person they touch,'' Daly said. ``We weep for the Gillespie family this morning. We weep for the families of the soldiers who died and we weep for our own city, a city we all love deeply. ``We weep because we have among our citizens men who are capable of planning and carrying out and even attempting to justify such evil.'' Gillespie died on his oldest son's birthay. His wife and three children -Patrick, 18, Kieran, 16, and Jennifer, 12 - wept at the graveside. Among the 60 wreaths was one from the Kings Regiment, which lost five soldiers in the attack. The death toll in Northern Ireland rose to 63 with the killing Friday night of Tommy Casey, a member of the IRA's legal political wing, Sinn Fein. Protestant guerrillas were suspected in the killing.
