  The chiral properties of the fat-link irrelevant clover (FLIC) fermion action
are examined. The improved chiral properties of fermion actions incorporating
smoothed links are realized in the FLIC action where only the irrelevant
operators of the fermion action are constructed with smoothed links. In
particular, the histogram of the additive mass renormalization encountered in
chiral-symmetry breaking Wilson-type fermion actions is seen to narrow upon
introducing fat-links in the irrelevant operators. The exceptional
configuration problem of quenched QCD is reduced, enabling access to the light
quark mass regime of $m_{\pi} / m_{\rho} \sim 0.35$. In particular, quenched
chiral non-analytic behavior is revealed in the light quark mass dependence of
the $\Delta$-baryon mass. FLIC fermions offer a promising approach to revealing
the properties of full QCD at light quark masses.
