Mary Lou McDonald (Dublin Central, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Austin Currie, through his long political career, was an influential Irish public figure. As a leading member of the early civil rights campaign, co-founder of the SDLP, Minister in the short-lived 1974 power-sharing Executive in the North and Fine Gael Minister of State, Austin had a long and distinguished record of public service.

He first served in the old Stormont Parliament for East Tyrone from 1964 to 1972, representing first the Nationalist Party and later the SDLP. Austin was among a class of young nationalists in the North who had benefitted from educational reform after the Second World War and sought job equality not alone for themselves but for everybody. In 1964, when he was elected to the old Stormont, he was the youngest person ever to gain a seat in that institution. He was one of the organisers of the first civil rights march in August 1968, which followed the occupation of a house in Caledon, County Tyrone in protest at discrimination in local council housing allocations. Austin was in the Caledon house just hours before the police ousted him and others, such as Patsy Gildernew and Joe Campbell. The photograph of him there became a recurrent and iconic image in media coverage of the civil rights movement.

He once eloquently described the effect of partition on the nationalist community in the North:

Partition was used to try to cut us off from the rest of the Irish nation. Unionists did their best to stamp out our nationalism and, the educational system, to the extent it could...was oriented to Britain and we were not even allowed to use names such as Séamus or Seán. When my brothers' godparents went to register their birth, they were told no such names as Séamus or Seán existed in Northern Ireland and were asked for the English equivalent.

Later in his career, Mr. Currie became a Fine Gael Deputy for Dublin West in 1989 and finished a creditable third in the 1990 presidential election. He was the first person to be elected to parliaments in Belfast and Dublin, and served as a Minister in both. He was the first ever Minister in an Irish Government with dedicated responsibility for children.

Austin Currie long harboured doubts about the commitment of many politicians in the South to the plight of nationalists in the North, many of whom demonstrated absolute indifference. In his 2004 autobiography, All Hell Will Break Loose, he wrote about his experience of running in that presidential election and the prejudice he faced as a northern nationalist from those within the political system here who harboured deeply partitionist attitudes. He wrote: "What annoyed, indeed angered me most was the suggestion that because I came from the North, I was not a real Irishman."

Following the deaths of Seamus Mallon and John Hume in January and August 2020 respectively, Austin was the last surviving founder of the SDLP. Whether as a representative of the SDLP or Fine Gael, Austin was often a spirited and determined opponent of my party and we of his politics, but that is the nature of politics. Today as we reflect on his very considerable life and political career, we pay tribute to his service to his constituents and his country. On my behalf and that of Sinn Féin, I express our condolences to his wife Anita, his family, his children, his grandchildren, all his friends and to his political colleagues in the SDLP, Fine Gael and beyond. Ar dheis Dé go raibh a anam.

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