Obituary: Sean Redmond

Sean Redmond, former general secretary of the Connolly Association, died on Saturday December 15 at his home in Drumcondra, Dublin, at the age of 77, having been ill for some time.

Sean and his brother Tom grew up in Dublin and they emigrated to London in 1956, where their parents also lived for some years.

Both became very active in the Connolly Association, which around that time had launched its campaign to expose the iniquities of the Stormont unionist regime in British labour, trade union and liberal circles.

This campaign was based on the concept that the movement to end partition in Ireland and bring about Irish national unity in independence needed allies in the British labour movement and the support of progressive public opinion in this country.

In the early 1960s Redmond became general secretary of the Connolly Association and for the rest of that decade he did outstanding work in highlighting the deplorable civil liberties situation under unionist majority rule in the six counties.

During that period he represented the association on the executives of the National Council for Civil Liberties (now Liberty) and the Movement for Colonial Freedom.

He played a key role in inducing those bodies, which were very influential in British labour circles at the time, to take up the issue of discrimination against Northern nationalists and Catholics.

As Connolly Association general secretary Redmond worked closely with the late Desmond Greaves, who edited the association's monthly paper the Irish Democrat.

He edited some issues of that paper himself when Greaves was in Ireland undertaking research for his biographies of James Connolly and Liam Mellows.

Redmond became widely known and respected in the Irish community and in labour circles across Britain in those years and was much admired as a public speaker.

He organised numerous lobbies of MPs in the House of Commons on six-county discrimination.

In May 1966 Redmond wrote on behalf of the Connolly Association to Northern premier Captain Terence O'Neill pointing out that the 1949 Ireland Act offered Stormont no protection "if the British Parliament decides in its wisdom to abolish your government altogether."

O'Neill replied by denying the existence of gerrymandering, discrimination and police repression in the North and saying: "I was entertained to read your complex and ingenious version of our constitutional status," but the constitutional position of Northern Ireland "has a conventional as well as legislative basis."

The following years would show O'Neill that the North's constitutional position was indeed an illusion and that what Redmond had intimated was right.

Because of his work in those years Redmond may validly be considered one of the progenitors of the Northern Ireland civil rights movement which destroyed unionist dominance in that part of the world.

He later wrote the pamphlet Desmond Greaves And The Origins Of The Civil Rights Movement In Northern Ireland, describing the solidarity work in Britain in which he had played a leading part from the late 1950s until the mid-1970s.

That work was important in generating an anti-unionist climate in British labour circles which impelled the Wilson-led Labour government that took office in 1964 to put pressure in turn on O'Neill's Stormont administration to end discriminatory practices affecting the nationalist/Catholic population in the six counties.

This pressure from progressive British public opinion paralleled the pressure that came from within the North itself when the civil rights movement emerged there between 1968 and 1970.

On returning to Ireland Redmond worked as a trade union official with the Irish Municipal Employees Trade Union, now Impact.

He was one of the most influential organisers of that union and became greatly respected in Dublin labour and trade union circles for his political shrewdness, good sense and political and industrial experience.

Redmond wrote the official history of his union under the title The Irish Municipal Employees Trade Union 1883-1983.

He also described the public-spirited action of some of his fellow trade union members in the union publication, Belfast Is Burning 1941: The Story Of The Assistance Given By The Emergency Services From Eire Following The German Bombing Of Belfast.

In the 1980s, along with colleagues in other Irish trade unions, he helped to establish Trade Unionists for Irish Unity and Independence, which lobbied for Irish and British trade unions to take a stronger stand in working for the best interests of the labour movements and peoples of the two islands.

Redmond was a lifelong student of the history of the Irish and British labour and national movements. He was a member of the Irish Labour History Society.

His experience working in both countries and his political commitment to the classical left-wing position that the labour movement, socialists and radicals should be the foremost advocates of national independence and democracy led him to embark on a study of successive solidarity movements with the Irish national cause in Britain, going back to the days of the United Irishmen. He had virtually completed this before illness struck him.

In the 1970s and 1980s he was an active member of the Irish anti-apartheid movement and in the 1990s he was a committee member of the annual Desmond Greaves Weekend Summer School in Dublin.

He met his wife Susan while working in the Connolly Association in London and they have one son, Sean Og.

The Connolly Association executive sends its commisserations to his wife, his son and other relatives. The many friends and political acquaintances he made while working in Britain will mourn the passing of an outstanding socialist republican, a committed trade union activist and a fine and much-loved human being.