Eamonn Melaugh

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Eamonn Melaugh (born 4 July 1933) is an Irish socialist, political campaigner and activist from Derry, Northern Ireland.

He helped found the Derry Housing Action Committee (DHAC) [1] [2] and the Derry Unemployment Action Committee (DUAC) [3] which campaigned for jobs and housing for Derry Catholics.

As a result, Melaugh and the DHAC became involved with the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association in the late 1960s. [4] He later contributed evidence to the Bloody Sunday Inquiry. [5]

He is an active member of the Workers' Party, [6] and has stood as a candidate for it and its predecessor, Republican Clubs/Official Sinn Féin, in the Foyle constituency. [7] [8]

Personal life

Melaugh married Mary McLaughlin in 1956; the couple had 11 children, 4 daughters and 7 sons. [9] One son, Martin, curates the University of Ulster's CAIN website. His nephew is the comedian and TV presenter Andrew Doyle. [10]

Related Research Articles

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The Northern Ireland civil rights movement dates to the early 1960s, when a number of initiatives emerged in Northern Ireland which challenged the inequality and discrimination against ethnic Irish Catholics that was perpetrated by the Ulster Protestant establishment. The Campaign for Social Justice (CSJ) was founded by Conn McCluskey and his wife, Patricia. Conn was a doctor, and Patricia was a social worker who had worked in Glasgow for a period, and who had a background in housing activism. Both were involved in the Homeless Citizens League, an organisation founded after Catholic women occupied disused social housing. The HCL evolved into the CSJ, focusing on lobbying, research and publicising discrimination. The campaign for Derry University was another mid-1960s campaign.

Springtown Camp was a former United States military camp near Derry, Northern Ireland, that housed up to 400 Catholic families in the 1940s to 1960s in substandard housing rented by the local authority. The outcry over the Unionist-controlled city council's failure to re-house the tenants in proper buildings gave rise to some of the first Northern Irish civil rights protests of the 1960s.

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References

  1. "Irish Civil Rights". Irish Anti-Partition League. Archived from the original on 16 April 2018. Retrieved 8 September 2022.
  2. Hastings, Max (1970). Barricades in Belfast: the fight for civil rights in Northern Ireland. Taplinger Publishing. p. 47. ISBN   978-0-8008-0665-1.
  3. Stout, Angela Kathryn; Richard Alan Dello Buono; William J. Chambliss (2004). Social problems, law, and society. Rowman & Littlefield. p. 352. ISBN   978-0-7425-4207-5.
  4. McMahon, Seán (1997). A short history of Ireland . Dufour Editions. p.  200. ISBN   978-0-8023-1319-5.
  5. Bloody Sunday Report (Volume 5, Chapter 86) Archived 3 November 2010 at the UK Government Web Archive Volume 5, Chapter 86.
  6. Presentation to Eamonn Melaugh, Annual Northern Ireland regional conference of the Workers Party, Belfast (4 October 2008), youtube.com.
  7. Foyle Elections 1983-1992, ark.ac.uk; accessed 30 January 2018.
  8. Foyle Elections 1973-83 Eamonn Melaugh Electoral history], electionsireland.org; accessed 30 January 2018.
  9. Eamonn Melaugh Archived 22 January 2011 at the Wayback Machine , eaawsecohumanitarians.org; accessed 30 January 2018.
  10. "'If the state had treated people equally, none of this would have happened'". Spiked. 14 August 2019. Retrieved 7 December 2020.