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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 |
| Political party | Young Fine Gael (1950s) National Democratic Party (1969-1970) Social Democratic and Labour Party (1970-1972) Provisional Sinn Féin (1972-1977) Irish Republican Socialist Party (1977-c.1979) Non-Party Political Affiliations Northern Ireland Civil Rights Committee Smash H-Block Committee Murray Defence Committee |
Miriam Daly was an Irish Republican Marxist political activist, historian, 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 Education
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 joined the youth wing of the center-right Irish political party Fine Gael, Young Fine Gael, at some point during her time at UCD, but soon grew opposed to its politics.[1]
Career and Early Political Activism
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 had slowly lost her Catholic faith throughout the 1950s due to a variety of factors, eventually abandoning it altogether by the end of the decade. By 1967 she had readopted the faith, publishing an article called 'Believing today', which described the progressive form of Catholicism she followed.[1]
She became a lecturer of economic history at the University of Southampton in 1964. At Southampton she began to participate in anti-war activism and was a member of the Association of University Teachers, a large trade union in the United Kingdom.[1]
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. She began to participate in the civil rights movement soon after she moved, joining the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association. She joined the National Democratic Party, a Social-Democratic Republican party, in 1969, eventually becoming its assistance secretary. When the NDP merged into the Social Democratic and Labour Party in October 1970 she joined that party. She led the opposition to a statement by prominent SDLP member John Hume which condemned political violence as a whole. They both began to work at Queen's University Belfast. [1]
Miriam and Jim adopted two children, a daughter and a son, in 1970.[1]
In 1971 she was elected to the executive council of the NICRA. She was voted off the next year. She was radicalized by the Bloody Sunday massacre in January 1972, leaving the SDLP and joining Provisional Sinn Féin. [1]
Faced with death threats in the majority Protestant Loyalist community they lived in at the time, the Dalys moved to Andersonstown Road, a Catholic area in Belfast in 1974.[1]
During her career at Queen's University she organized a course on labor history and lectured Republican and Loyalist prisoners interned in relation to the Troubles in Long Kesh. She was committed to the idea that academics should work to educate people and change the world, rather than watch events pass by. She was a founding member of the Irish Labour History Society and contributed to its journal Saothar. She was also a co-founder of the Economic and Social History Society of Ireland among many other academic positions.[1]
In 1976 she chaired the committee which advocated against the death sentences of Irish Republican anarchists Noel and Marie Murray.[1]
Irish Republican Socialist Party
Miriam and Jim Daly both resigned from Provisional Sinn Féin in opposition to the Éire Nua. In August of that year they joined the Irish Republican Socialist Party, eventually becoming part of its Ard Chomhairle in October.[1]
Daly was elected chair of the IRSP in February 1978 and in a paper called 'The relevance of Connolly today' argued that the form of Irish Republican Socialist developed and promoted by James Connolly was represented at that time in the Irish Republican Socialist Party. She spoke for the party on television in several countries.[1]
She resigned from her position as chair of the IRSP in March 1979 due to disputed between the party and the Irish National Liberation Army, its military wing. Despite this she remained active in the party.[1]
She visited the United States on a lecture tour in March and April of 1979, with her talk 'Women in Ulster' later being published in an essay collection compiled by Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin in 1985.[1]
Throughout the late 1970s to her death she also campaigned on behalf of Irish Republican political prisoners, increasing her attention on the issue after her resignation from the Irish Republican Socialist Party.[1]
She was a delegate to a UNESCO conference on labor history in Paris, France in April 1980.[1]
Barely two weeks before her death she was elected to the Smash H-Block Committee.[1]
Assassination, Funeral, and Possibility of State Conspiracy
Miriam Daly was murdered by members of the Unionist Ulster Defence Association in her home on June 26, 1980. They broke into her home and tied her up, waiting for Jim Daly, who was also a target in the attack, to return home. Unbeknownst to them at the time he was in Dublin. The terrorists then shot Daly 5 times in the head.[1]
She was buried in Swords, County Dublin with her first husband. The funeral was organized by the IRSP and attended by friends and political allies of various parties.[1]
Her murder was unusual due to its occurrence deep into a Catholic area of Belfast and due to the many other attacks on Anti-H Block campaigners in around that time, including the murders of INLA volunteer Ronnie Bunting on 15 October 1980 and Irish Independence Party founder John Turnley on 5 June of that year, as well as the attempted assassination of Bernadette Devlin McAliskey on 16 January 1981. These circumstances have led some to allege that the British army was directly or indirectly involved with her murder[1]