Fergus O'Hare

Fergus O’Hare (aka Fergus Ó hÍr Irish:) was involved in the Civil Rights Movement in Northern Ireland as a member of People’s Democracy in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. Later he became a founding member and executive member of the Northern Resistance Movement, which continued to organise and struggle for basic democratic rights in the north of Ireland.

With the introduction of internment without trial in 1971 O’Hare helped setup and became chairperson of the Political Hostages Release Committee a group which organised a mass campaign against internment throughout the early 1970’s. When internment was phased out in the mid 1970’s and with the decision of the British Government to end political prisoner status, O’ Hare became involved with the campaign to ‘defend political status’ for the prisoners. He became a member of the Relative’s Action Committee and of the National H-Block Armagh Committee which helped organise the struggle in support of the hunger strikers in the early 1980’s.

In 1981 he was elected as member of Belfast City Council, defeating Gerry Fitt who was a Westminster MP as well as a Belfast councillor.

The election of O'Hare and other candidates who stood in support of the H Block prisoners occured within the context of an ongoing debate within the H-Block movement and Sinn Féin with regard to the use of elections as a tactic for building support for the prisoners struggle, and for the struggle for political and democratic rights for the minority in Northern Ireland. Sinn Féin at this time had a policy of boycotting elections in Northern Ireland. Previously in 1979 as part of this debate, Bernadette Devlin McAliskey stood as a candidate, supported by People's Democracy, for the European election. The debate again became pointed when Frank Maguire, a Westminister MP, died in 1981 during the hunger strike and People's Democracy and Bernadette Devlin McAliskey proposed that a candidate should stand in support of the prisoners. The outcome of this debate was that hunger-striker Bobby Sands was put forward as a candidate and elected to the Westminister parliment. After Bobby Sands death, his election agent Owen Carron of Sinn Féin was elected in the bi-election. The debate around the tactic of standing in elections was largely resolved and Sinn Fein have since become the largest nationalist party elected to the Northern Ireland Assembly. Ironically those who led the argument that elections should be used to further the struggle in Ireland were subsequently sidelined electorally by a resurgent Sinn Féin, so that in the Assembly elections in 1982, O'Hare and the other People's Democracy candidates faired badly their vote largely going to Sinn Féin candidates.Belfast West Belfast North

In the 1990's O’Hare became involved in the Irish language movement and in 1991 he helped set-up and became the first Head-Teacher (School Principal) of Meánscoil Feirste (later known as Coláiste Feirste) the first Irish language secondary school in northern Ireland. He served as a member of Comhairle na Gaelscolaíochta and Iontaobhas na Gaelscolaíochta, organisations set up after the Good Friday Agreement to help promote Irish language schools in the north.

Later he was involved with the establishment of Raidió Fáilte 107.1fm the first legal Irish language radio station in the north of Ireland, of which he became manager in 2006. The station continues to broadcast in Irish in the Belfast area and throughout the world on www.raidiofailte.com

In the early 1980’s Fergus O’Hare wrote a column in ‘Fortnight’ magazine a Belfast based arts review magazine and for ‘An Gael’ the magazine of the New York Irish Arts Centre. He published a history of the 1907 Belfast dockers and carters strike led by James Larkin, ‘The divine gospel of discontent’. In 2007 he published a book in Irish on Irish flora, ‘Mórbhealaí & Cúlbhealaí’.