“After 50 years, I had hoped it might be possible to sit down and enjoy myself and not still be out marching,” says lifelong human rights activist Michael Farrell. “It’s depressing, but not so depressing that you give up.”
When he was a student at Queen’s University Belfast in the 1960s, Farrell marched for civil rights for nationalists in the North, nuclear disarmament and in opposition to the US war in Vietnam and the apartheid regime in South Africa. He has taken to the streets for many other causes, including the release of the wrongly convicted Birmingham Six and, more recently, protesting against the Israeli onslaught on Gaza.
Marching can be dangerous. A cane-wielding police officer beat Farrell to the ground in Derry during an October 1968 march over housing discrimination against Catholics. Months later, he was knocked unconscious when struck by a brick during another civil rights march, one attacked by loyalists at Burntollet Bridge in Derry.
Change does not happen overnight but Farrell, now aged 81, is grateful to have seen some enormous achievements, including the Belfast Agreement and enactment of anti-discrimination and equality laws in the North, the dismantling of apartheid in South Africa and the release of the Birmingham Six, Guildford Four, Maguire family and Judith Ward.
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While admitting to sometimes feeling despair over the destruction of Gaza, the Trump administration in the US and the growing far-right influence across Europe, he is not one for giving up. “It just has to be all done again.”
“For a long time, we thought we were in a period of progress, we had the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), the international UN Convention on human rights, and effective human rights and equality bodies set up in a lot of countries. Now, we seem to be galloping backwards.”
He believes the backlash against human rights gains can be turned around, pointing to the scale of public opposition globally to the war on Gaza. “This is going in two directions, the bad direction with the far right, racism and intolerance, but there also is a good deal of motivation on the other side, people who want to defend what has been achieved and implement it.”
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Farrell was born in Magherafelt, Co Derry, in 1944, to Tom and Helen Farrell, the youngest of three boys. Both parents were from Co Mayo but moved to Magherafelt after his father, who worked with the National Bank, was transferred there in 1938.
His parents disliked the sectarian divisions in the North but did not discuss politics at home. He attended a “good Catholic” secondary school, St Patrick’s College in Armagh, and succumbed to pressure from it to embark on a religious vocation.
Unknown to him, his parents were both ill and were not enthusiastic about his decision. They need not have worried, Farrell lasted just six months before he was sent home after expressing doubts about his vocation.
He moved towards socialism for several reasons, including what he saw when working as a volunteer in London with the Legion of Mary in 1961.
“We had a kiosk in Euston station, there were these very poor-looking young kids with cases tied together with rope coming to England because they had nowhere else to go. The idea was to save their souls but, more practically, to save their bodies, get them somewhere to stay and so on. I hadn’t seen that level of poverty before.”
In 1962, he went to Queens University in Belfast. His time there was life-changing for reasons including the shocking experience of the deaths of both parents during his first six months.
His father was aged just under 60 and his mother was 58. “I never thought I would be living so much longer.”
On a happier note, Farrell met his wife Órla in his first week at Queens and they married two years later. A “huge support”, she has marched alongside him in every respect since.
His studies in English literature took a back seat to his activism, fuelled by what he saw on news reels about civil rights struggles and anti-war protests across the world.
He was a prominent student union leader, including as vice-president of the Union of Students in Ireland, and joined several other groups, including the Labour society and anti-apartheid movement.
His lecturers included a neighbour from Co Derry, the late Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney, whom Farrell credits with helping ensure he got his degree.
There were more Catholics in Queens then because post-second World War legislation funded education for people who would otherwise have been unable to go, he says.
Queens was “very conservative” but a small core of activists, including Farrell and another Derry man, Eamonn McCann, sought to change that.
Farrell was a founding member of People’s Democracy, formed after the Royal Ulster Constabulary broke up the October 1968 civil rights march in Derry. It sought to achieve radical change through non-violent means and Farrell was its candidate for Bannside in the 1969 Northern Ireland general election, finishing third. The aim, he says, was to raise awareness about the party’s programme rather than get elected.
It seems the Israelis have done a lot of work in the Council of Europe, the bigger countries have more power and seemed very pro-Israel
— Michael Farrell
An active opponent of emergency laws and detention without trial, he was himself interned without trial for six weeks in 1971. Two years later, when jailed for breach of the peace, he and another People’s Democracy member, Tony Canavan, went on hunger strike demanding political status. Their strike lasted 34 days before they were released with 100 other prisoners, bringing an end to a mandatory rule under which anyone convicted of a public order offence was jailed for six months.
The civil rights movement in the North was “met with increased repression which boiled over into the long-running conflict and many deaths”, Farrell laments.
During the 1970s, when the Farrells’ two children were born, he worked as a lecturer in the technical college in Belfast. His first book, Northern Ireland: The Orange State, was published in 1976. The family moved to Dublin in 1981 and his second book, Arming the Protestants, the formation of the Ulster Special Constabulary and the Royal Ulster Constabulary 1920-1927, the basis of his master’s degree thesis, was published in 1983.
In Dublin, Farrell worked as a journalist, including reporting cases of Irish people wrongly convicted and jailed in England. Having developed a strong belief litigation can play an important role in advancing conflict resolution and social change, he qualified as a solicitor in 1991.
“A lot of people involved in the Northern conflict did not really want to continue it, it was not getting them anywhere, those big cases particularly had the effect of not just freeing the people concerned but also convincing others this was a way of achieving change.”
He joined the prominent Dublin criminal defence firm of ME Hanahoe, where his work included pursuing compensation for survivors of mother and baby homes. Interested in using the law in “a proactive way” to assert and extend people’s rights, he later moved to the Free Legal Advice Centres, where, as a senior solicitor until his retirement in 2015, he was involved in several landmark cases, including challenging the exclusion of deaf people from jury service. He represented transgender woman Lydia Foy for many years before she won the right to have her preferred gender recognised on her birth certificate.
His determined commitment to advancing human rights has been widely recognised, including through his appointment to the Irish Human Rights Commission and as a member of the Council of State.
Until last July, Farrell was involved for 14 years with the European Commission against Racism and Intolerance, a human-rights monitoring and standards body. He resigned last July over its failure, despite 18 months of efforts by him, to take a public position on Gaza. “It seems the Israelis have done a lot of work in the Council of Europe, the bigger countries have more power and seemed very pro-Israel.”
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The situation in Gaza, he was told when he announced his intention to stand down, was not within ECRI’s remit because Israel is not part of Europe. “My reply was that various Euro countries are supplying arms to Israel but they would not budge from their stance.”
Looking now at the situation in the North, he says it has improved enormously in several respects but says “not very much” has been done about housing and health. “Just like here.”
He is shocked about the “frightening” rise in racism in the North, particularly among loyalists.
“For a long time, the unionist population could be fairly sure of getting jobs but the old economy has gone. Now a higher level of education is required to get jobs, the state has not put energy into that and a section of people feel their situation has got worse. They obviously for a long time blamed nationalists but now they also have another group of people to blame, they are very angry in areas and it is very dangerous.”
There is a “particular irony” in some people from the South travelling North to take part in anti-immigration riots, he adds.
This, alongside increased racism and a drift to the right in Britain, is of much concern, he says. The British Labour Party leader, Keir Starmer, is “a disaster, giving in to the right all the time”.
He is very concerned about pressure from the Conservative party and others to get rid of the ECHR, which would have a “devastating effect” in the North “because a key element of the Good Friday agreement is the protection of human rights”.
While he personally would like to see a united Ireland, he believes a referendum on unity is not advisable in the short term. “It might not pass, it might be very divisive in a situation where there is a lot of fluidity and pressure coming from right-wing elements in Britain.”
There is “still a lot of hurt” from the Troubles and work has to be done to convince sections of the Protestant community they will not be discriminated against in a united Ireland and their problems are the same as those of the Catholic community, he believes.
NGOs do important work to bring communities together, he says, something which he has direct experience of. The Irish Council for Civil Liberties, of which he was chair, worked closely with the Belfast-based Committee on the Administration of Justice (CAJ) and other organisations to ensure human rights were put into the Belfast Agreement.
“It was very important that the nationalist community could resolve their problems without resorting to violence and very important to the unionist community there were mechanisms they could use.” There was a lot of progress, including on LGTBQI rights, he says, “all in a way where it did not matter what community people came from”.
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Communities working together on social issues, including housing and health, is not just “vital in itself but also important to build relationships”.
In an address on the Foy case in 2016, Farrell said working for human rights is among the “most frustrating” things anyone can do because it is “never-ending”. But, he added, it is “hugely fulfilling if you can look back upon your life and feel able to say that you think you helped to make a difference”.
