Dermie McClenaghan, veteran Northern Ireland civil rights campaigner, dies age 81

The veteran civil rights campaigner Dermie McClenaghan, who was one of the organisers of the Duke Street march in Derry in October 1968, has died following an illness. He was 81.

A founder member of the Derry Housing Action Committee and a member of the Northern Ireland Labour Party, he was present when the marchers were attacked by the RUC on the day that is often regarded as the starting point of the Troubles.

Reflecting on the significance of the march in an interview with The Irish Times in 2021, Mr McClenaghan said that “since then, any sort of good march, for want of a better word, has always started here. That says a lot in itself.”

The civil rights marches, he said in an earlier interview, “empowered people [and] influenced all sorts of movements – the women’s movement, the gay rights movement – because it gave people a sense of what they could do if they got together.”

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His friend of 60 years, Eamonn McCann, paid tribute to Mr McClenaghan as a lifelong socialist, activist and trade unionist who he said was a supporter of women’s rights and gay rights from a very early age.

“Dermie had a sort of pioneering attitude to many aspects of politics but they were all based on the very simple idea of standing up for people who were being oppressed or excluded or isolated or mistreated or abused.

“His instinct was just to stand up for people who needed somebody to stand up for them, and that’s what would have been in Dermie’s mind during the early days of the civil rights movement,” Mr McCann said.

A member of the Derry branch of the Northern Ireland Labour Party since 1966, Mr McCann said he was instrumental in the local government elections the following year in which Labour did “very well, we got 30 per cent of the vote right across the city.

“It’s hard to explain that to people who think that there was only nationalists and unionists around, but Dermie was one of the people just determined not to be defined by the communal division in Northern Ireland.”

He was also, Mr McCann said, incredibly well-liked. “Nobody had a bad word to say about him.

“I don’t know of anybody else who was so ‘well got’ with, as they say, all sections of the community.

“When you think of all we came through ... it is something close to miraculous that he emerged as the endlessly benign, universally popular person. All the hatred swirling around never affected Dermie, and I think that, in Northern Ireland, is a wonderful thing.”

The Foyle MP, the SDLP leader Colum Eastwood, paid tribute to Mr McClenaghan as “a true socialist, a real rebel and probably the nicest person I have ever met.

“He was there at the beginning. We’ll miss him.”

The mayor of Derry, Sandra Duffy of Sinn Féin, said the city had lost “one of its longest-standing and most popular champions of civil rights and equality”.