Labour Party stalwart, trade unionist and war hero

The life of Jack Harte, who has died aged 94, could be said to have typified much of not just Ireland's, but Europe's, experience in the twentieth century.

Born into a Dublin tenement home in 1920 in the midst of the War of Independence, Harte was one of 11 children of a Dublin couple who were strong supporters of “Big Jim” Larkin.

He left Strand Street CBS aged 12 to work as a delivery boy. His father, Thomas, served in the British army during the first World War, and the themes of military service and trade union activism were to be key pillars of his son’s life.

Another was politics, and Harte was to become the longest-serving Labour Party senator: he was elected in 1973 and held on to his seat until his retirement in 1992. He was the party’s national organiser from 1973 to 1983, and director of elections in 1981.

Former general secretary Seamus Scally describes him as a pragmatist “from the “pro-coalition wing of the party”; he “would feel that it was always better for Labour to be in government to influence decisions” and that Fine Gael on their own would be much worse for working class people.

In the Seanad he was known as a conciliator. In proposing him (unsuccessfully) for the post of leas-chathaoirleach in 1989, the late Pat Upton described him as "a healer, one who seeks out solutions rather than one who provokes rows". David Norris and Shane Ross both supported him, the former characterising him as "a plain man talking sense" .

He was not, however, afraid to take a stand, voting for Mary Robinson’s (unsuccessful) Family Planning Bill in 1974 and for the strongly anti-IRA Special Powers Bill two years later, which Robinson opposed.

Commemoration

In 1985 he initiated, with Michael Bell, a proposal for a national day of commemoration for the Irish dead of all wars, which is now an annual event.

Harte had a passionate reason for his commitment: he had himself joined the Royal Irish Fusiliers in 1936 in Liverpool, after stowing away on the mail boat Leinster and lying about his age. From 1937 to 1943, in the Middle East, North Africa and Greece, he saw service in some of the toughest fighting of the second World War. On his return to Ireland, in 1945, he consistently attended the Remembrance Day ceremonies at the National War Memorial at Islandbridge.

A tough-as-nails boxer who won regimental championships, he was seconded to the Royal Marines as one of the first members of the elite unit the Special Boat Service. He was decorated on six occasions.

Captured on the Greek island of Leros in 1943, he spent the rest of the war in a succession of prisoner-of-war camps in Germany, emerging with malnutrition after terrible suffering, of which he gave a vivid account in his autobiography (written with journalist Sandra Mara) The Limits of Endurance, published by Liberties Press in 2007.

Back in Dublin in 1945, he found work in Guinness's brewery and began an adult lifetime of service with the Larkinite Workers' Union of Ireland (WUI, later the Federated WUI), becoming a close associate of young Jim Larkin.

His long-time friend and fellow Labour politician Barry Desmond told The Irish Times that although the workforce was not organised at the time "there was a strong feeling among a block of Guinness workers that they should be in a union".

Union official

Harte became a founder member of the No 9 Branch of the WUI, based in the brewery. He was its chairman from 1958 to 1970, and branch secretary (a full-time post) from 1970 until his retirement in 1975.

He served the wider trade union community as the unions' representative on the Food, Drink and Tobacco Statutory Committee of AnCO, the industrial training body which preceded Fás, in the 1970s, and on the same committee of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions (Ictu) from 1966 to 1970.

Harte married Mary Emily Murray, always known as Maud, who died in 1977. The couple had two children, Marie and Thomas. In 1984, he married Myra Nolan, herself a widow, and she, his children from his first marriage and three stepchildren, Imelda, Rita and Vivienne, grandchildren and great-grandchildren survive him.