SEÁN Ó CIONNAITH: Seán Ó Cionnaith who has died aged 64, was known to Workers' Party colleagues as an energetic, uncompromising international and local community activist who "never did things by half". In charge of international affairs for the Workers' Party, he was distributing leaflets at last Saturday's anti-war march in Dublin.
Just before Christmas he moved from his Ballymun tower flat to one of the new "apartments", where he died suddenly last Sunday. The apartments are part of the new face of an area he had campaigned hard for over the past 15 years. Among officials and locals in the area he is remembered as "a fabulous community worker".
The assistant city manager, Mr Brendan Kenny, says the city manager would share his view that Ó Cionnaith was "a major loss and a major influence" in Ballymun. And Insp Gabriel McIntyre of Santry said his partnership contribution was "unique".
For most of his working life Ó Cionnaith was better known as a party political activist, though his main talent was as a community-based agitator, beginning with his key role in the Dublin Housing Action Committee campaign of the late 1960s. It was the idea of a youthful Proinsias De Rossa and Ó Cionnaith took it up with gusto to draw attention to the plight of Dublin's 10,000 homeless people.
A former party colleague, Máirín de Búrca, says Ó Cionnaith was "pivotal" in the move from the gun to mainstream politics, which took two "splits" over more than 20 years. That move began with the 1970 split leaving Provisional Sinn Féin and the Officials, and the 1992 cleavage that resulted in Democratic Left and the Workers' Party. But in spite of all the changes Ó Cionnaith retained traditional republican views.
His own decision to opt for the weaker Workers' Party in the bitter 1992 affair owed much to old personal loyalties - mainly to Seán Garland and Tomás Mac Giolla - and to "disappointment" with De Rossa, who became DL leader. Ó Cionnaith had been De Rossa's director of elections in the 1980s.
Although colleagues say that Ó Cionnaith bore little bitterness over the splits, the rift with De Rossa was never mended.
It is unclear whether Ó Cionnaith was ever in the IRA but former colleagues say he was "not a gunman" but more "a good committee man". Neither was he a great political strategist, but he was known as a great, "utterly methodical" - if often ruthless - organiser.
Born on June 7th, 1938, he was the second youngest in a family of five. With two brothers and two sisters he grew up on a small farm at Creagh, near Ballinasloe, Co Galway. His mother, Bridget, died when he was four and his upbringing was left to his "kindly" father, John Joe, and extended family. His mother's early death had a profound and lasting effect on him.
Then John Kenny, he left school at 14 and worked in a local hardware store. He got involved with Sinn Féin becoming chief scout in the youth wing, Na Fianna Éireann, and sold the party's paper, the United Irishman, around Ballinasloe.
In the hungry 1950s he left for England, where his sisters were living. There he worked with Clann na hÉireann and emigrant supporters. After working as a bus conductor in London, he returned in the 1960s and got a job in Dunne's hardware shop in Talbot Street, Dublin.
His return coincided with the party debate about force and mainstream politics. Ó Cionnaith was "the right man at the right time", recalled de Búrca and Mac Giolla. He threw himself into the housing occupations campaign and an idea of his own, citizens' advice bureaux.
His involvement included "fish-ins" on private rivers; sit-ins; the ground rents campaign and the National Association of Tenant Organisations. He was a member of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association and campaigned for republican prisoners in Britain.
He was involved later in "peace trains" to Belfast.
In 1969, on the 50th anniversary of the first Dáil, he succeeded in having himself arrested at the Department of Local Government to draw attention to how little of the 1919 social programme had been implemented. He was blamed for puncturing all four tyres of the Taoiseach Jack Lynch's car in the west, recalls Mac Giolla.
As chairman of Official Sinn Féin's international committee, he spent about two years in the early 1970s fund-raising in the US and Canada through republican clubs there. In the US he defended the use of force in defence against the British army and to achieve "the reconquest of Ireland".
He called for Protestant working class support. He joined civil rights and anti-Vietnam War protests .
His travels also included Cuba, North Korea, Africa, and the former Soviet Union. In the mid-1970s he organised an Anti-Imperialist Festival in Ireland. It included delegates from the PLO, the ANC, the MPLA in Angola and from European countries.
In recent years his campaigning in Ballymun included unsuccessful attempts at public office. But he did serve as a co-opted Dublin city councillor for Finglas for some months in 1999. He campaigned relentlessly and successfully against drugs in the area - which he considered "a dagger in the heart of the working class".
Seán Ó Cionnaith was divorced 18 years ago and is survived by two sons in their early 20s.
Seán Ó Cionnaith: born 1938; died February 16th, 2003.