George Cunningham:GEORGE CUNNINGHAM from Strabane, who has died aged 90, was internationally renowned as a fast talker.
He came to public notice in 1970 in a famous television interview with Ulster Television journalist Charlie Witherspoon. Witherspoon was interviewing Cunningham during a protest against unemployment and Cunningham overwhelmed his interlocutor with a torrent of words. The interview can be seen on the video site YouTube.
As a result of the interview, the popular ITV programme It'll Be All Right on the Nighttook up Cunningham. Other stations in Ireland and Britain followed.
Over the next 40 years he was Strabane’s media celebrity. He was paid little, but enjoyed mixing with stars, and with people generally, because he talked to everybody.
Cunningham was not just a colourful character. It is fitting that a protest against unemployment made him known. Strabane has always had the North’s highest rate of unemployment: he spent years protesting against it.
The 1970 protest was against the then Strabane Urban Council. Nationalists controlled it, when most Northern councils were unionist. He believed Strabane Council neglected the interests of the working man as much as any unionist council.
When he felt strongly about an issue, he did something about it. After John F Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, he demanded the council name a street after the president. When the council failed to do so, he made his sign and erected it.
In 1968, he took part in a civil-rights march from Strabane to Derry. The march passed through strongly unionist territory and was attacked on the way. He suffered head injuries, but marched on.
George Cunningham was born on Christmas Day 1920, in the Head of the Town area of Strabane, to John Cunningham and his wife, Elizabeth (née Gallagher), both natives of the town.
His sister, Sara, was a year older and his brother, Jackie, would be born five years later.
John Cunningham was a railway worker who had served for four years in the first World War. Elizabeth worked for 50 years in Herdman’s Mill at Sion Mills. For five further years, she worked a four-hour shift in the mill and mornings as a cleaner in a convent.
George was educated at Evish School, a country school. As a town child, he had to bring a couple of lumps of coal to school every day. The country children had to bring a couple of sods of turf.
He left school when barely into his teens. For the next half-century he worked in whatever labouring jobs he could find, mixed with spells – sometimes long – on the dole. One job was sorting potatoes, making him an expert on varieties of potato, some now disappeared.
In 1949 he married Nancy Nevin. She had known hardship, having been raised by nuns in an orphanage in Tipperary. She came to Strabane as maid to a bank manager’s family. They treated her as a family member; so much that her employer acted as a father, vetting her suitor before giving his blessing to the marriage.
The Cunninghams began married life in one rented room of a terraced house in Strabane. Then they moved to an old thatched house in the countryside. It had previously been used for storing potatoes. Strabane council finally allocated them a house in the mid-50s.
The 1990s were hard for Cunningham. Nancy died, then their daughter Moira. But in his late 70s he decided to visit America. He was delighted at his conversations with a cross-section of American society.
George Cunningham is survived by his son, David, five grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.
George Cunningham, born December 25th, 1920; died January 4th, 2011