Tony Kinsella obituary: Revolutionary organiser of school students in 1970s

Born: September 19th, 1955

Died: June 29th, 2021

Tony Kinsella, who has died after a short illness, was the prime mover in giving Irish secondary school students a collective voice in national debates. The precocious organisational wizard was the first general secretary of the Irish Union of School Students, which he helped form in 1972. He was also the guiding spirit behind the creation of the Organising Bureau of European School Student Unions (Obessu), which now has members in 24 countries, from Iceland to Turkey. He subsequently spent most of his career working for European bodies and settled in France.

In the early 1970s second-level education in Ireland was rapidly expanding but still very hierarchical, largely controlled by religious orders. Corporal punishment of students remained perfectly legal and was widely practised. The idea of teenagers forming their own union and demanding a say in the issues that affected their school lives was radical and, for many, deeply alarming.

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It is doubtful whether it would have been possible at all without the particular combination of personality traits Kinsella brought to bear on the task. He was born in middle-class Dublin to parents whose marriage had broken up. He was a natural rebel: cheeky, fearless, roguish, insolent and delighted by the consternation he could evoke from those in authority. But he was also charming, astute and extremely capable.

One of his early acolytes, Fintan O’Toole, later a columnist with The Irish Times, recalled that “He was mesmerisingly self-confident and apparently omnicompetent. He knew things most school students didn’t: how to get an office and a phone, how to raise a few quid, how to operate a clunky old Gestetner printing machine that he managed to pick up from somewhere. Above all he knew how to convince the media that you actually represent a mass movement so that a small bunch of activists could generate the publicity that might eventually turn that pose into a reality.”

Revolutionary demands

The Irish union started out with what were, in the context of Irish society at the time, revolutionary demands. It promised to work towards “the abolition of all divisions along the lines of class, sex, race or religion and physical handicap as far as possible, and the separation of church and state in the administration of education”.

It also demanded the “setting up of co-educational comprehensive schools run by school councils made up of elected representatives of students, parents and staff”, and owned by “local education boards which would be responsible for the administration of all second-level schools in that area with representatives from parents, pupils, staff and the local community”.

Nearly 50 years on, these goals have not advanced much further towards realisation. But Kinsella was smart enough to focus on much more immediate and achievable ends: abolishing corporal punishment, giving pupils a right to have independent student representative councils, and the high cost of schoolbooks. In August 1973 he advised the union’s conference that “instead of trying to use the union as a two-handed claymore, I would suggest using it as a rapier, giving light, effective blows instead of huge attacks that never get off the ground”.

He was clever (and mischievous) enough to wield in one hand the rapier of practical campaigning while brandishing an imaginary claymore of mass teenage militancy in the other. He published The ABC of Campaigning, reviewed admiringly by The Irish Times as a pamphlet “remarkable for the scientific detachment of its approach to the techniques of protest and for its sophisticated treatment of the role of the media in publicising and to some extent creating student-authority confrontations”. While summoning the spectre of youth revolt sweeping through schools, he in fact organised an effective campaign for the removal of VAT on schoolbooks and an inquiry into the profit margins of publishers and highlighted the outrage of legalised violence against young people in schools.

His organisational skills have their longest-lasting legacy in the creation of the European body, Obessu. He persuaded the Council of Europe to fund a founding conference in Dublin, with delegates from the UK, France, Finland, Norway, Sweden and Denmark. O’Toole, who chaired the conference, recalls: “We were teenagers and most of us had never been outside of Ireland, yet Tony decreed that we could host an international gathering. He even organised professional simultaneous translation, as if we were the United Nations. It was a great rebuke to the patronising attitude towards young people and their ability to do things for themselves.”

Brussels move

Kinsella studied for a diploma in journalism at Rathmines College of Commerce, but through his involvement with the National Youth Council’s international affairs committee, he was drawn more deeply into European non-governmental organisations. In 1975, he moved to Brussels as assistant secretary general of the Council of European National Youth Committees. From 1978 to 1982 he worked for the Council of Europe in Strasbourg and was then based in Switzerland as secretary of the pan-European think tank and research forum the Zurich Initiative for a Co-operative European Security Policy. He was also, during that period, a member of the Socialist International’s disarmament advisory council. He retained an involvement with the Irish Labour Party, acting as a ministerial adviser to Ruairí Quinn and as the party’s national director of elections for the 1982 general and 1984 European Parliament elections.

After five years as managing partner of the Brussels consultancy, Schumann Associates, he settled in Auriébat in rural France with his partner Clare Doyle, with whom he lived very happily for 28 years after previous marriages to Ruth Kelly and Wendy Hilary were dissolved. He worked as a consultant and wrote with great relish on European and international affairs including, frequently, for The Irish Times. He also created a partnership with Biotricity Ireland to build a plant in Maubourguet to turn agricultural waste into energy – the first such project in France, but one whose fruition he sadly did not live to see.

Tony Kinsella is survived by Clare Doyle and by his sisters Anne and Dearbhaill