system, seeking to attend to the needs of prisoners, internees, and victims of miscarriages of justice including the Birmingham Six (who were wrongly convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment for the 1974 Birmingham pub bombings, and whose convictions were quashed in 1991). Along with the Catholic primate of all Ireland, Tomás Ó Fiaich, Daly lobbied the British government in 1977 against its decision to revoke Special Category Status (political prisoner status) from IRA prisoners and subsequently their treatment as criminals. When the issue culminated in a hunger strike in 1981 which resulted in the deaths of ten prisoners at HM Prison Maze, he lobbied the European Commission on Human Rights to intervene. In 1979, Daly was involved in planning a visit by Pope John Paul II to Armagh, scheduled for September and which had won the approval of the British government, but the visit was cancelled in the wake of the IRA's assassination of Lord Mountbatten and the Warrenpoint ambush (in which 18 British soldiers were killed), both on 27 August 1979. The visit was transferred to Drogheda, in the same archdiocese but across the border in the Republic, where the pope appealed to the IRA to give up armed resistance. Tension between Daly and the IRA reached its peak in 1983 when Daly banned requiem mass with the body present, and forbade military trappings, at funerals of paramilitaries. The ban came after Daly negotiated an agreement with the IRA that there be no guns present at funerals, which the IRA breached when several of its members fired shots over a coffin during a ceremony. Daly was deeply affected by the IRA's "proxy bombings" in October 1990, in which IRA members forced civilians to drive car bombs to their targets, with the result that the driver was killed in the explosion along with anybody in close proximity to the van. Daly described the bombings as having "crossed a new threshold of evil", and believed that while they may claim to be Catholics, "works proclaim clearly that they follow Satan". While Daly was always willing to attend to the religious needs of IRA members, he refused to engage in any formal meeting until 1992, when John Hume—the leader of Northern Ireland's Social Democratic and Labour Party, who was attempting to negotiate a truce with the IRA, and with whom Daly was close friends—convinced him to meet Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness.