Austin Currie
SDLP co-founder who fought anti-catholic prejudice and violent Republicanism with equal vigour
AUSTIN CURRIE, who has died aged 82, was a founder of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association and the Social Democratic and Labour Party – and the only person to have been elected to Parliament and been a minister in both the North and the Republic. In a career spanning four decades he was a member of the Stormont parliament, a minister in Brian Faulkner’s power-sharing executive, a Fine Gael member of Dáil Éireann, the Republic’s Minister for Children, and a presidential candidate.
Only a seat at Westminster eluded him. He passed up Mid-ulster in 1969 to give a clear run to the student firebrand Bernadette Devlin – whose unfulfilled promise led him to call her “the George Best of politics”.
In 1970, 1979, and in the by-election following the 1985 Anglo-irish Agreement, Currie finished third in Fermanagh & South Tyrone; the first two times, the SDLP withheld its backing.
Credited with one of Ireland’s finest political brains, Currie – closer politically to Belfast’s working-class Gerry Fitt than Derry’s cerebral John Hume – opposed anti-catholic discrimination and violent Republicanism with equal courage.
His occupation in 1968 of a council house allocated to a Protestant girl when there were Catholic families in desperate need triggered the Civil Rights campaign. Years later, Currie said he would not have started it, had he known the ensuing unrest would cost 4,000 lives.
Currie’s house at Donaghmore, Co Tyrone – “Fort Currie” to his family – was bombed, shot at or invaded more than 30 times. In November 1972 his wife was sexually assaulted, beaten senseless and “branded” on her breast with the letters UVF (Ulster Volunteer Force) by two thugs who told her: “We will make sure there will be no more Currie bastards.”
Currie until then had refused police protection, and fortification of his house. Even when guarded by a rota of 18 RUC men the attacks continued, several officers being shot by the IRA. The Police Federation blamed Currie.
After one officer was shot in 1975, colleagues refused to guard the house. Two years later, the detail was withdrawn after Currie urged the RUC to respond to allegations of mistreating Republican prisoners. Attacks on the house, mainly by the IRA, continued for two decades. Currie later found its bulletproof glass ideal for growing prize potatoes.
He survived bombs outside party meetings and election-night chases under fire from Republicans. In May 1974 Loyalists murdered two of his friends; the getaway driver had installed Currie’s scrambler phone.
Joseph Austin Currie was born at Coalisland, Co Tyrone, on October 11 1939, the eldest of 11 children of John Currie, a lorry driver, and the former Mary O’donnell. They had lived in Yorkshire until war broke out.
When John Currie applied to the council chairman for a house, he was told, despite offering the expected £5 bribe, that he would be given “the first suitable one vacated by one of your own kind”. They had no electricity until 1961.
Soon after leaving St Patrick’s Academy, Dungannon, in 1957, Currie passed through Coalisland just as an IRA bomb killed a police sergeant.
At Queen’s University, Belfast, he read Modern History and Politics, spending his summers as a bus conductor in Bournemouth. He infiltrated a Unionist Society meeting to ask Lord Brookeborough why his government discriminated against Catholics in jobs and housing.
Currie was founding president of Queen’s nationalist New Ireland Society. When Charles Haughey, the Republic’s minister of justice, came to speak, the university tried to bar the press and public; Currie arranged a briefing in a bar nearby.
Graduating in 1962, he worked in London as a supply teacher and security guard. Then in May 1964 East Tyrone’s veteran nationalist MP Joe Stewart died. Currie was picked to fight the seat, and at 24 was elected Stormont’s youngest MP.
He pressed for the Nationalists to have a party organisation, instead of only an archaic candidate selection process. And in 1965 they declared themselves the formal Opposition, with Currie Shadow Minister for Development.
When 14 out of 15 new houses near Dungannon were allocated to Protestants, two Catholic families started squatting, and Currie supported them. When they were evicted, one house was given to 19-year-old Emily Beattie, a Protestant.
The Speaker ordered Currie from the Chamber when he accused the Unionist MP John Taylor of a “damned lie” in claiming there were four adults in the house, not one girl. To Unionist jeers, he declared: “All Hell will break loose, and by God I will lead it.”
Magistrates dismissed charges against him arising from the sit-in, but the Government went to the High Court, which ordered them to convict. Currie was fined £5, but with costs.
He went on to chair a committee organising civil disobedience. In October 1968 he was one of three MPS arrested after a demonstration in Derry which was attacked by the police.
Currie gave ministers the names of likely culprits when Loyalists staged explosions in the hope of bringing down Terence O’neill’s government. He warned Irish intelligence that an associate of Ian Paisley planned a bombing in the Republic; the man was found with burns at a power station, the tip not having been heeded.
He warned ministers at Stormont and in Dublin of a “long, hot summer” for 1969, and after riots in Dungannon contacted the Home Secretary James Callaghan, demanding British intervention. While on the phone, he was shot at three times – the first attack on his house. Nights later, B Special police reservists opened fire and his wife took their daughter to safety in the Republic. The troops arrived days later.
Callaghan disbanded the B Specials. Currie opposed forming the Ulster Defence Regiment in its place, but told Callaghan he would encourage Catholics to join. Some who did were murdered by the IRA.
In February 1970, Currie and five other Stormont MPS agreed to form a Social Democratic & Labour Party; he persuaded Hume that Fitt must lead it. Launched that August, the party’s founding policy document was produced on Annita Currie’s typewriter.
In July 1971 Currie worked to avert violence when Brian Faulkner let the Orange Order march through Coalisland, which was 90 per cent Catholic. Next month, security forces rounded up 300 supposed IRA members – the start of internment. Currie worked hard to get detainees released; because of his stand against the IRA, only families of the innocent contacted him. He joined a hunger strike against internment in Downing Street, and took to Westminster claims that detainees had been tortured at police barracks.
Then came Bloody Sunday: January 30 1972. Currie went to Derry for the planned civil rights march, but police turned him back. Only when he saw the news did he learn that troops had shot 28 unarmed civilians.
Stormont banned all marches, but NICRA went ahead with one in Newry, with Currie a speaker and a crowd of 100,000. Weeks later, he was given a six-month suspended sentence. He had been drinking with the judge days before; two years later, the IRA would murder him.
That March, Stormont was abolished. Currie called also for internment to end and urged the IRA to call a ceasefire. He condemned feuding between the Official and Provisional IRA after three people were shot outside a priest’s house, saying: “For many in my constituency, this must be the last straw.”
Currie that June proposed a powersharing Executive drawn from an assembly elected by PR. Weeks later, he was summoned from holiday to discuss the plan with Irish ministers. Then the SDLP leadership was invited to meet Willie Whitelaw; Republicans accused them of selling out, even though the IRA had itself met him. That September the SDLP met Edward Heath at Chequers, Currie taking the lead.
In June 1973, Currie was elected to the Assembly he had suggested, topping the poll in Fermanagh-south Tyrone. Talks on power-sharing, chaired by Whitelaw, opened that October, Currie pressing for the relaunch of the RUC with a new name and uniform.
Whitelaw brokered an agreement giving Faulkner a majority on the executive, but with the SDLP and Alliance Party having extra lower-level posts.
The next day, three gunmen fired 36 bullets at Currie’s home. One broke a window, just missing his wife and children, while six hit an RUC officer’s car. The IRA blamed Currie – an “arch collaborator” – for putting his family in danger.
At that December’s Sunningdale conference involving the Taoiseach Liam Cosgrave, Currie pressed for a British declaration that a united Ireland on terms acceptable to all its people was in their best interests. Heath said that no British government would stand in the way if the people of the North wished to change their relationship with Great Britain – but did not encourage it.
Solemn Declarations were registered on the status of Northern Ireland at the UN, and a Council of Ireland, but there was deadlock over creating a joint authority over the Garda and the RUC. Currie kicked the Irish Minister of Justice, Paddy Cooney, under the table for saying the two governments had to have ultimate control.
Currie was sworn in as Minister of Housing on New Year’s Eve 1973. His remit was to create more homes “not exclusively for Catholics, but for people who need them”; 100,000 homes out of 450,000 were unfit for habitation. He sidestepped a demand from the Executive for the RUC to clear Catholic squatters in North Belfast, arranging for them to leave peaceably.
Faulkner was fatally weakened by Loyalists’ strong showing in the February 1974 general election. The Ulster Workers’ Council called a general strike, with paramilitaries intimidating key workers, and Labour’s incoming Northern Ireland Secretary Merlyn Rees vacillated before declaring a state of emergency.
Currie and the SDLP gave Rees an ultimatum: the Army must take over the distribution of oil or they would resign. Troops moved in, but too late. Faulkner said he had no choice but to open talks, and resigned with his supporters from the Executive; Rees then sacked Currie and the other ministers.
In May 1975, Currie was elected to Rees’s Constitutional Convention, becoming SDLP chief whip. That October, Fianna Fáil’s leader Jack Lynch asked Hume and Currie to talk his foreign affairs spokesman, Michael O’kennedy, out of pressing for British withdrawal from Ulster; they failed.
After the Convention expired in May 1976, Fine Gael’s Garret Fitzgerald secured Currie a research fellowship at Trinity College Dublin. In 1980 he opened an estate agency in Dungannon, but had to close it because of intimidation. Instead he started a successful business helping local firms obtain government and EC grants.
In 1982 he was elected to Jim Prior’s Northern Ireland Assembly, becoming the SDLP’S trade and industry spokesman.
Currie was next involved in the New Ireland Forum, through which the Republic’s parties and the SDLP hoped to break the cycle of deadlock and violence. It convened at Dublin Castle in May 1983 and took a year to report, with Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil at loggerheads and the SDLP also divided. Every option it proposed was rejected by Margaret Thatcher.
Fitzgerald, by then Taoiseach, kept Currie informed as the Anglo-irish Agreement was negotiated; their families even holidayed together. Currie reckoned the Agreement “a remarkable feat of negotiation in view of Mrs Thatcher’s background and inclinations, and her experience at the hands of Irish extremists at Brighton”.
During the Commons debate on the Agreement he first met Mrs Thatcher. Fitt introduced him as “the one who started all the trouble”; Currie thanked her for concluding the Agreement.
When Hume opened contacts with Sinn Fein’s Gerry Adams, Currie agreed to join in if lives could be saved. In March 1988 they met in a church in Belfast, in a “very tense” atmosphere. Sinn Fein wanted a broad nationalist front, which the SDLP could not accept while violence continued. Adams accused the SDLP of prolonging the violence by accepting Partition.
Five more meetings followed, but the violence continued and Currie became convinced the SDLP needed to talk to the Unionists. In February 1989 he and Hume had secret talks with them in Duisburg, West Germany.
Currie’s move to the Republic began with Fitzgerald urging him to go for a seat in the Dáil at the 1989 election. He was elected for Dublin West, taking his seat on crutches after a near-fatal car accident.
Alan Dukes, Fitzgerald’s successor as party leader, pressed Currie to stand for the presidency of the Republic in 1990, Fine Gael’s obvious candidate, Peter Barry, having ruled himself out.
Currie entered what appeared a straight fight between Fianna Fáil’s Brian Lenihan and Labour’s Mary Robinson. Then a scandal broke over Lenihan’s past efforts to influence a court case, but despite fighting an energetic campaign, Currie finished third that November, with 17 per cent of the vote.
He had agreed with Dr Robinson that the one who did better would take the other’s transferable votes, and Currie’s were enough to give her the presidency.
Currie became a member of the Angloirish Parliamentary Body, and from 1991 Fine Gael’s spokesman on communications. He was re-elected in 1992, the party’s next leader, John Bruton, moving him to Equality and Law Reform.
In 1994 he joined the Forum for Peace and Reconciliation, which aimed to bring Sinn Fein into the political process. Despite a charm offensive, the Republicans gave no ground.
That December Bruton became Taoiseach, and Currie Minister for Children – the first in Europe – with responsibilities in three departments. His principal role was co-ordinating child care, but he kept a close eye on the growing wave of allegations of child abuse within the Irish Church. He updated the laws on school attendance and inspections and on child pornography, and proposed a Children’s Ombudsman.
Re-elected in 1997 as Fine Gael went down to defeat, it fell to Currie to welcome the 1998 Good Friday Agreement. He told the Dáil: “This is the first day of the rest of our lives, the first day of the rest of our history.”
In January 2001 Bruton lost a confidence vote in the Fine Gael caucus, despite Currie speaking in his support. Michael Noonan, his successor, appointed Currie deputy foreign affairs spokesman. In the May 2002 elections he fought Dublin Mid West but lost. Retiring from politics, he moved to Co Kildare.
Austin Currie married Annita Lynch, who had spent three years as a novice nun, in 1968; they had two sons and three daughters (one of whom became a councillor in Tewkesbury).
Austin Currie, born October 11 1939, died November 9 2021