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Miriam Daly | |
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| Born | Miriam Annette McDonnell 16 May 1928 Curragh Camp, County Kildare, Ireland |
| Died | 26 June 1980 Belfast, Northern Ireland |
| Cause of death | Assassination |
| Political orientation | Marxism Irish Republicanism |
Miriam Daly was an Irish Republican Marxist political activist and martyr. She was involved in the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Movement and the Troubles and played an important role in the spread of Marxism in these movements. She was murdered on 26 June 1980 by the Unionist terrorist group the Ulster Defence Association.[1]
Early Life and Career
Miriam Daly was born Miriam McDonnell at Curragh Camp in County Kildare, Ireland on 16 May 1928 to Daniel McDonnell and Anne Cummins. Her father was a Republican veteran of the Irish War of Independence and a trade unionist.[1]
She attended a local convent school before attending the University College Dublin, where she graduated with a bachelors degree in history and economics in 1948. She went on to receive a Higher Diploma in Education in 1949 and a Masters degree. Her dissertation was: 'Irish labour in England in the first half of the nineteenth century'.[1]
She was an assistant lecturer in the University College Dublin department of history from 1950 to 1953. She worked with historian Robert Dudley Edwards there, where he sexually harassed her until her father threatened him with a gun.[1]
She married a psychiatrist named Joseph Lee in 1953 and subsequently took a position as an extramural history lecturer at the college. She moved to England in 1958 and worked as history mistress at Aberdashers' Aske's School for Girls in London. She also studied for a Ph.D. at King's College, studying agrarian resistance in Ireland in the 1800s. Lee died in 1963 of a heart attack and Daly was forced to abandon her studies.[1]
She became a lecturer of economic history at the University of Southampton in 1964. She married philosopher and Socialist political activist Jim Daly in 1964 and in 1968 they moved to Belfast, Northern Ireland, where growing tensions relating to the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Movement would soon erupt into a full scale civil war. They both began to work at Queen's University Belfast. They adopted two children, a daughter and a son, in 1970.[1]
She was a founding member of the Irish Labour History Society in 1973.[1]