McGrady enters politics in 1961 as an Independent Nationalist councillor on Downpatrick Urban Council, serving as chairman from 1964 until the council is replaced by Down District Council in 1973.
In 1970, McGrady becomes a founder member of the SDLP, later serving as its first chairman (1971–73). He sits on Down District Council from 1973 to 1989, serving as chairman from 1974–1975 and is also elected to all three regional assemblies in 1973, 1975 and 1982 representing South Down. In the 1973 power-sharing executive he is appointed as Head of the Department of Executive Planning and Co-ordination, serving from January to May 1974.
In Westminster elections McGrady contests South Down unsuccessfully in 1979, 1983 and at the by-election of January 1986, losing on each occasion to Enoch Powell, the sitting MP. He succeeds at the fourth attempt in the 1987 United Kingdom general election and holds the seat until his retirement in 2010. His tenure is briefly threatened in the mid-1990s when the Boundary Commission suggests merging much of his constituency with the neighbouring Newry and Armagh constituency to form a new “Newry and Mourne” constituency. This is overturned during a local review, which preserves his seat and actually removes more Unionist sections such as Dromore. His support holds solid over the years despite talk of a slippage, and this is reinforced in the 2005 United Kingdom general election with his re-election to the House of Commons.
On February 25, 2010, McGrady announces that he will stand down at the 2010 General Election. He continued to be chairperson of the Lecale Branch of the SDLP.
McGrady dies at the age of 78 in Downpatrick on November 11, 2013.
Logue grows up outside the village of Claudy in County Londonderry, the eldest of nine children born to Denis Logue, a bricklayer, and Kathleen (née Devine). He gains a scholarship to St. Columb’s College which he attends from 1961 to 1967. In 1967, he commences at St. Joseph’s Teacher Training college (Queen’s University) in Belfast from which he qualifies as a teacher of Mathematics in 1970. He first comes to prominence as a member of the executive of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA), the only SDLP member of the executive. He stands as a candidate in elections to the new Northern Ireland Assembly in 1973 and is elected for Londonderry, at the age of 24, the youngest candidate elected that year. With John Hume and Ivan Cooper, he is arrested by the British Army during a peaceful demonstration in Londonderry in August 1971. Their conviction is ultimately overturned by the Law LordsR. (Hume) v Londonderry Justices (972, N.I.91) requiring the then British Government to introduce retrospective legislation to render legal previous British Army actions in Northern Ireland.
The Northern Ireland State Papers of 1980 show that together with John Hume and Austin Currie, Logue plays a key role in presenting the SDLP’S ‘Three Strands’ approach to the Thatcher Government’s Secretary of State for Northern IrelandHumphrey Atkins in April 1980. The “Three Strands” approach eventually becomes the basis for the Good Friday Agreement. The Irish State papers from 1980 reveal that he is a confidante of the Irish Government of that time, briefing it regularly on the SDLP’s outlook.
Logue is also known for his controversial comments at Trinity College Dublin at the time of the power sharingSunningdale Agreement, which many blame for helping to contribute to the Agreement’s defeat, to wit, that: [Sunningdale was] “the vehicle that would trundle Unionists into a united Ireland.” The next line of the controversial speech says, “the speed the vehicle moved at was dependent on the Unionist community.” In an article in The Irish Times in 1997 he claims that this implies that unity is always based on consent and acknowledged by Unionist Spokesman John Laird in the NI Assembly in 1973.
Logue unsuccessfully contests the Londonderry seat in the February 1974 and 1979 Westminster Elections. He is elected to the 1975 Northern Ireland Constitutional Convention and the 1982 Northern Ireland Assembly. He is a member of the New Ireland Forum in 1983. In the 1980s he is a member of the Irish Commission for Justice and Peace and plays a prominent part in its efforts to resolve the 1981 Irish hunger strike. His role is credited in Ten Men Dead: The Story of the 1981 Irish Hunger Strike by David Beresford, Biting the Grave by P. O’Malley and, more recently, in Blanketmen: An Untold Story of the H-block Hunger Strike (New Island Books, 2016) and Afterlives: The Hunger Strike and the Secret Offer that Changed Irish History (Lilliput Press, 2011) by former Provisional Irish Republican ArmyvolunteerRichard O’Rawe. Following the New Ireland Forum in 1984 and John Hume’s decision to represent the redrawn Londonderry constituency as Foyle and a safe seat, Logue leaves the Dublin-based, National Board for Science and Technology and joins the European Commission in 1984 in Brussels.
Following the 1994 Irish Republican Army (IRA) ceasefire, Logue, along with two EU colleagues, is asked by EU President Jacques Delors to consult widely throughout Northern Ireland and the Border regions and prepare recommendations for a Peace and Reconciliation Fund to underpin the peace process. Their community-based approach becomes the blueprint for the Peace Programme. In 1997, then EU President Jacques Santer asks the team, led by Logue, to return to review the programme and advise for a renewed Peace II programme. Papers published by National University Galway in 2016 from Logue’s archives indicate that he is the originator of the Peace Fund concept within the European Commission.
At the European Commission from 1984 to 1998, Logue creates Science and Technology for Regional Innovation and Development in Europe (STRIDE). In 1992, he is joint author with Giovanni de Gaetano, of RTD potential in the Mezzogiorno of Italy: the role of science parks in a European perspective and, with A. Zabaniotou and University of Thessaloniki, Structural Support For RTD.
Further publications by Logue follow: Research and Rural Regions (1996) and RTD potential in the Objective 1 regions (1997). With the fall of the Berlin Wall, his attention turns to Eastern Europe and in March 1998 publishes a set of studies Impact of the enlargement of the European Union towards central central and Eastern European countries on RTD- Innovation and Structural policies.
Logue convenes the first EU seminar on “Women in Science” in 1993 and jointly publishes with LM Telapessy Women in Scientific and Technological Research in the European Community, highlighting the barriers to women’s advancement in the Research world.
As the former vice-chairman of the North Derry Civil Rights Association, Logue gives evidence at the Saville Inquiry into Bloody Sunday. He is special adviser to the Office of First and Deputy First Minister from 1998 to 2002 and as an official of the European Commission. In 2002–03, he is a fellow of the Institute for British – Irish Studies at University College Dublin (UCD). In July 2006, he is appointed as a board member of the Irish Peace Institute, based at the University of Limerick and in 2009 is appointed Vice Chairman. He is a Life Member of the Institute of International and European Affairs.
On December 17, 2007, Logue is appointed as a director to InterTradeIreland (ITI), the North-South Body established under the Good Friday Agreement to promote economic development in Ireland. There he chairs the ITI’s Fusion programme, bringing north–south industrial development in Innovation and Research. Integrating Ireland economically is a theme of his writing throughout his career, most recently in The Irish Times and in earlier publications as economic spokesman for the SDLP. He is economist at the Dublin-based National Board for Science and Technology from 1981 to 1984.
Logue, after leaving the European Commission in 2005, becomes involved in Renewable Energy and is chairman of Priority Resources as well as a director of two companies, one in solar energy, the other in wind energy. In November 2011, he is elected to the main board of European Association of Energy (EAE).
In November 2023, Logue is awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Galway in recognition of “a lifetime dedicated to civil rights, human rights, equality and peace in Northern Ireland, Ireland and Europe.” He donates an archive of material, more than 20 boxes of manuscripts, documents, photographs and political ephemera, on the development of the SDLP from the early 1970s to the University of Galway.
Hume does not complete his clerical studies but does obtain an M.A. degree in French and history from the college in 1958. He then returns home to his native Derry, where he becomes a teacher at his alma mater, St. Columb’s College. He is a founding member of the Credit Union movement in the city and is chair of the University for Derry Committee in 1965, an unsuccessful fight to have Northern Ireland’s second university established in Derry in the mid-1960s.
Hume becomes the youngest ever President of the Irish League of Credit Unions at age 27. He serves in the role from 1964 to 1968. He once says that “all the things I’ve been doing, it’s the thing I’m proudest of because no movement has done more good for the people of Ireland, north and south, than the credit union movement.”
Hume becomes a leading figure in the civil rights movement in the late 1960s along with people such as Hugh Logue. He is a prominent figure in the Derry Citizens’ Action Committee. The DCAC is set up in the wake of the October 5, 1968, march through Derry which had caused much attention to be drawn towards the situation in Northern Ireland. The purpose of the DCAC is to make use of the publicity surrounding recent events to bring to light grievances in Derry that had been suppressed by the Unionist Government for years. The DCAC, unlike the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA), is aimed specifically at a local campaign, improving the situation in Derry for everyone, and maintaining a peaceful stance. The committee also has a Stewards Association that is there to prevent any violence at marches or sit-downs.
In October 1971, Hume joins four Westminster MPs in a 48-hour hunger strike to protest at the internment without trial of hundreds of suspected Irish republicans. State papers that have been released under the 30-year rule that an Irish diplomat eight years later in 1979 believes Hume supported the return of internment.
Hume is directly involved in secret talks with the British government and Sinn Féin, in an effort to bring Sinn Féin to the discussion table openly. The talks are speculated to lead directly to the Anglo-Irish Agreement in 1985.
The vast majority of unionists reject the agreement and stage a massive and peaceful public rally in Belfast City Centre to demonstrate their distaste. Many Republicans and nationalists also reject it, as they see it as not going far enough. Hume, however, continues dialogue with both governments and Sinn Féin. The “Hume–Adams process” eventually delivers the 1994 Irish Republican Army (IRA) ceasefire which ultimately provides the relatively peaceful backdrop against which the Good Friday agreement is brokered.
In 2015, Hume is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, of which he had first displayed symptoms in the late 1990s. He dies in the early hours of August 3, 2020, at a nursing home in Derry, at the age of 83. On his death, former Labour Party leader and prime ministerTony Blair says, “John Hume was a political titan; a visionary who refused to believe the future had to be the same as the past.” The Dalai Lama says on Twitter, “John Hume’s deep conviction in the power of dialogue and negotiations to resolve conflict was unwavering… It was his leadership and his faith in the power of negotiations that enabled the 1998 Good Friday Agreement to be reached. His steady persistence set an example for us all to follow.”
(Pictured: John Hume with U.S. President Bill Clinton in 1995)
Devlin is born into a highly political household in the Pound Loney in the Lower Falls of West Belfast on March 8, 1925, and lives in the city for almost all his life. His early activism is confined to Fianna Éireann and then the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and as a result he is interned in Crumlin Road Gaol during the World War II. He leaves the republican movement upon his release.
After the war, and in search of work, he spends some time in Portsmouth working as a scaffolder and in Coventry working in the car industry. In Coventry he becomes interested in Labour and trade union politics and briefly joins the British Labour Party.
Returning to Belfast in 1948 Devlin helps establish the Irish Labour Party there after the Northern Ireland Labour Party (NILP) splits on the issue of partition. He later beats Gerry Fitt to win a seat on the city council. Later Catholic Action claims the Irish Labour Party is infested with communists and ensures the party is effectively wiped-out causing Devlin to lose his seat.
In the mid 1960s Devlin joins the revived NILP and beats Harry Diamond for the Falls seat in Stormont. Devlin then goes on, with Fitt, John Hume, Austin Currie, and others to found the SDLP in 1970. He is later involved, at the request of William Whitelaw, the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, in ensuring safe passage for Gerry Adams for talks with the British government in 1973. He is a member of the Northern Ireland Assembly, 1973 and Minister of Health and Social Services in the power-sharing Executive from January 1, 1974, to May 28, 1974.
In 1978 Devlin establishes the United Labour Party, which aims to be a broad-based Labour formation in Northern Ireland. He stands under its label for the European Parliament in 1979 but polls just 6,122 first preferences (1.1% of those cast) and thereby loses his deposit.
In 1987 Devlin, together with remnants of the NILP and others, establishes Labour ’87 as another attempt at building a Labour Party in Northern Ireland by uniting the disparate groups supporting labour and socialist policies but it too meets with little or no success. In 1985 he loses his place on Belfast City council.
Devlin suffers from severe diabetes and throughout the 1990s suffers a series of ailments as his health and sight collapse.
seamus dubhghaill 