the times | Thursday November 11 2021 65
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Stained-glass artist who
collaborated with John Piper
Patrick Reyntiens
Page 66John Hume, Austin Currie and Paddy O’Hanlon on their 48-hour hunger strike outside 10 Downing Street in October 1971taking part in a hunger strike in Down-
ing Street in October 1971.
Back home he and his family became
targets for extremists: shots were fired
through his windows, bombs exploded
outside the front door, and the family
received almost daily threats by tele-
phone and letter at the isolated and
heavily guarded bungalow they bleakly
called Fort Currie. He was away in 1972
when armed men burst into the house,
beat his wife unconscious and branded
the initials UVF, for Ulster Volunteer
Force, across her chest.
Currie remained a stalwart of the
SDLP and by the time the peace process
was under way in the 1990s he was a
Fine Gael member of the Dail, the Irish
parliament, where he was widely re-
garded as an elder statesman of the civil
rights movement. As for the lady in
whose house he squatted in 1968, she
married, became Mrs Crawford and
had two children. Speaking in 1974 as
the Troubles consumed Northern Ire-
land, she said: “If I had known whattaking the house meant in the long run,
I’d have thrown the keys away.”
Joseph Austin Currie was the eldest
of 11 children born into a Catholic
family at Dungannon, Co Tyrone, in
1939, the son of John Currie, a lorry
driver and farmer, and his wife Mary
(née O’Donnell); three of his siblings
predeceased him. He recalled that at
one time seven of them were living in a
two-bedroom home when a larger
property near by became vacant: “My
father got on his bike and rode the 12
miles to the chairman of the local
council. He gave the man a big white
fiver, which was a lot of money in those
days. The chairman folded the fiver into
his top pocket. He said to my dad, ‘I’ll
tell you what I’ll do. You are a decent
sort of fellow. You will get the first
house that comes up vacated by one of
your own’.”
There was other discrimination. “We
were not even allowed to use names
such as Séamus or Seán,” he told the
Dail during a debate on the British-Irish Agreement Bill in 1999. “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.”
He was educated at St Patrick’s Aca-
demy, Dungannon, and read history
and politics at Queen’s University Bel-
fast. While still a student he made a
powerful speech in 1962 criticising Sir
Basil Brooke (later Viscount Brooke-
borough), the Unionist prime minister,
for the discrimination against Cathol-
ics in housing and jobs.
While at Queen’s he met Anne Ita
Lynch, known as Annita, at a student
“hop”. He was convinced that she was
the woman for him, but she had differ-
ent ideas and joined a convent. After
three years she had a change of heart
and emerged from the novitiate to find
Currie waiting, as he said he would.
They married in 1968 and she became a
teacher. Annita survives him with their
children: Estelle, a media officer in theHouse of Commons in London; Caitrí-
ona, known as Cait, who works in
human resources and was the Liberal
Democrat candidate at Tewkesbury in
the 2017 general election; Dualta, who
works for an insurance company in Du-
blin; Austin, a businessman; and Emer,
a senator in the Dail.
Meanwhile, Currie had won the East
Tyrone seat for the Nationalists in 1964,
making him the youngest person to be
elected to Stormont. He was one of the
party’s nine MPs in a parliament where
the Ulster Unionists held 34 out of 52
seats but recalled that it was “a very alien
place”, adding: “Looking at it you could
see not one Union Jack flying but two.”
In 1972 Edward Heath imposed di-
rect rule from London, but by then Cur-
rie was well versed in articulating the
SDLP’s demands: a new Council of Ire-
land; an amnesty for political prisoners;
the repeal of the 1922 Special Powers
Act that was widely seen as a tool of Un-
ionist oppression; economic aid for re-
construction; and a commitment to
work for a long-term political solution
to the divisions. There was no future, he
added, in seeking a victory for one com-
munity over the other; instead, there
was a need to work out a set of institu-
tions in which the two traditions could
coexist and prosper.
Currie was an SDLP negotiator at the
Sunningdale Agreement talks in 1973,
an attempt to establish power-sharing
in Northern Ireland. Fittingly for a
former squatter he was minister for
housing, planning and local govern-
ment during the subsequent short-
lived executive that collapsed in May
1974 after five months. The next eight
years were spent largely in the political
wilderness, working as an estate agent
in Dungannon. He stood for Westmin-
ster in Fermanagh and Co Tyrone at
the 1979 general election and in the
1986 by-election, coming third on both
occasions, and in 1982 won the same
seat in the restored Northern Ireland
assembly, though that lasted only four
years.
To the surprise of his SDLP col-
leagues he then turned up in Ireland,
standing successfully in Dublin West
for Fine Gael at the 1989 Irish general
election and claiming to be the first per-
son to have been elected to both Stor-
mont and the Dail. He retained his seat
three years later and was variously a
minister of education, justice and
health during the rainbow coalition of
1994 to 1997. He also stood for the Irish
presidency in 1990 but came third; the
redistribution of his votes meant that
Mary Robinson, who had been second
after the first count, beat Brian Lenihan
to become the country’s first female
president.
Currie lost his seat in 2002 and re-
tired from politics, thereafter living qui-
etly in Co Kildare, west of Dublin, en-
joying Gaelic football, snooker and golf.
As an authority on the Troubles he
was a sought-after speaker, and in 2004
published his memoir All Hell Will
Break Loose, its title taken from a
speech he gave in Stormont at the time
of the housing protest when he added
presciently: “And by God I will lead it.”Austin Currie, Irish politician, was born
on October 11, 1939. He died in his sleep
on November 9, 2021, aged 82Emily Beattie, a happy young bride-to-
be, received the keys to her three-bed-
room council house in Caledon, a quiet
village in Co Tyrone, in June 1968 and
was preparing to move in. However,
local Catholics were furious that all 14
homes in the new development had
been allocated to Protestants and que-
ried how Beattie had been able to jump
ahead of them in the queue.
Social-housing discrimination had
long been a sore point in Northern Ire-
land, with allocation made largely by
Unionist-dominated councils. The
right to vote was linked to property,
meaning that the refusal to allocate
houses to Catholic families restricted
their ability to vote, helping to perpetu-
ate the Unionist domination of local
authorities.
For Austin Currie, a 28-year-old Na-
tionalist party member of the Stormont
parliament, it was yet another example
of Protestant vote-rigging, anti-Catho-
lic bias in housing and jobs, and other
discrimination. “The Beattie affair was
the last straw,” he recalled. “There had
been so many incidents and com-
plaints, but the time had come for
action.”
He and two fellow civil-rights activ-
ists, Patsy Gildernew and Joe Campbell,
used a poker to break into the pebble-
dash terraced house. “The three of us
jointly held the poker and smashed the
window,” he said 50 years later. Having
alerted the media, they barricaded
themselves in and waited to see what
would happen, though he recalled one
of their number having other concerns:
“Joe Campbell said, ‘I hope we’re not
left here overnight because I have to
milk the cows’.”
Beattie’s brother, a police officer,
soon arrived with a sledgehammer and,
in front of the cameras, knocked down
the front door. Their protest might have
been over, but as he left the house Cur-
rie was surrounded by the press. “For
the first time, discrimination in housing
was getting reported, which was the im-
portant thing,” he said, recalling how
that evening Catholic grievances were
aired on television news in Britain. He
was arrested, charged with squatting
and fined £5.
Currie’s protest was not the first
against discrimination in Northern Ire-
land nor the last, but his squat is often
regarded as a turning point in the civil
rights movement. Nationalists took to
the streets demanding equality, while
Unionist reaction was angry and often
violent. Before long the civil war known
as the Troubles was in full flight and
over the next 30 years more than 3,500
people lost their lives.
Within two years Currie and five fel-
low Stormont MPs, including John
Hume and Gerry Fitt, had broken from
their political parties to start the Social
Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP).
Their goal was the reunification of Ire-
land while renouncing the violence
demonstrated by the likes of the Provi-
sional IRA. They took their demands to
London, with Currie, Hume and others
Armed men beat his
wife unconscious and
branded initials on her
Obituaries
Austin Currie
Stormont and later Dail MP, co-founder of the SDLP and campaigner for Catholic rights who took his hunger strike to No 10’s doorstep
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