Sheelagh Murnaghan: Stormont’s Only Liberal MP

Introduction

‘In Northern Ireland politics, I don’t know which is the greatest obstacle: to be a woman, a Catholic or a Liberal. I am all three.’

SHEELAGH MURNAGHAN¹

NORTHERN I RELAND IN THE 1960s was a divided and unequal society. Since its foundation forty years earlier only one party, the Ulster Unionists, had held power. Some of the electorate had no vote in local government elections as a result of archaic electoral laws, long abandoned in the rest of the United Kingdom. Housing and jobs could be allocated on the basis of religious affiliation rather than need or ability. Catholics, who comprised nearly a third of the population were largely absent from the highest levels of politics, the judiciary, the civil service and academia. Women from all religious traditions were also all but invisible in the public sphere of the deeply patriarchal world of Northern Ireland in those days, as elsewhere. This male, Protestant ‘Wee Province’ was a world in which the tribal voices of Unionist/British and Nationalist/Irish all but drowned out other voices – the voices of those who wished to live a life not defined by religious affiliation or loyalty to the Union Jack or Tricolour.

Into this world came Sheelagh Murnaghan from Omagh, County Tyrone; a Catholic; a woman; a member of the Liberal Party. For just over seven years she was the Ulster Liberal Party’s only member of the Stormont Parliament. She was one of just three women in that parliament. She was a Catholic who was comfortable with Northern Ireland’s membership of the United Kingdom and saw Northern Ireland as a distinctive part of the island of Ireland with its own identity and culture.

Sheelagh Murnaghan loved her country and wanted Northern Ireland to look good to the rest of the world, but she saw very clearly all that was wrong and rotten in the province. A lawyer by profession, she focused her forensic legal training and skill on the ways in which the state denied equality of opportunity to a third of its citizens. Unlike so many in public life, she did not rant or roar. Instead she spoke quietly but firmly about the ‘disadvantage’ experienced by so many and about the fact that in Northern Ireland of the 1960s, there were ‘degrees of citizenship’. Discrimination was something ‘to be angry about’.

To remedy the ills in Northern Ireland society, Sheelagh Murnaghan brought before the Stormont parliament a Human Rights Bill. This was the first time such a bill had ever been presented in any British or Irish legislature. Drawing on American and Canadian legislation, her bill was aimed at ending the evil of discrimination by making discrimination on grounds of creed, colour, gender or political views illegal and setting up a Human Rights Commission which could provide legal remedy for those who believed themselves to be the victims of discrimination.

Four times she brought forward her pioneering legislation and four times the government rejected her proposals. The history of the late twentieth century in Northern Ireland might have been a very different one had her bill been accepted.

Sheelagh Murnaghan was an eloquent voice for the Traveller/Itinerant community too. In parliament she harried ministers constantly over the appalling way in which that most marginalised community was treated. She helped set up a school for Traveller children and visited their campsites. There was absolutely no political gain to be made by such actions, but that never deterred her. Sheelagh Murnaghan was a genuine liberal and her belief in equality was absolute.

Throughout her life, she was used to being a lone woman in a man’s world. Brought up to believe herself equal to men, she fought to ensure equality for women in the workplace. Half a decade before laws requiring equal pay were enacted, she was seeking an end to the situation in which women were paid less for doing exactly the same job as men. In 1983, she adjudicated the first case of sexual harassment ever brought in the United Kingdom. The ruling she gave in that case influenced courts in Britain, Ireland and the rest of the European Union.

By any standards, Sheelagh Murnaghan was a remarkable person. She was the first female barrister to practise in Northern Ireland; a talented sportswoman who played hockey for Ulster and Ireland; the only Liberal Party MP in the 50-year history of the Northern Ireland Parliament. In a country riven by sectarianism, she was consistently a voice of reason and humanity, endlessly challenging the widely held assumption that it was normal and right to ‘look after one’s own people’ and ‘do down the other side’. A patriot in the most genuine meaning of the word she tried to save her country from its demons. Her efforts were rejected and Northern Ireland paid a terrible price for that rejection.

Most of the reforms which Sheelagh Murnaghan sought to introduce into Northern Ireland are now in place. She did not live to see the end of the conflict which she had tried so hard to prevent, but it may be said that the 1998 Good Friday/Belfast Agreement embodied much of what she wished to achieve. Half a century after her fourth and final Human Rights Bill was debated, and a quarter of a century after her death, it is time to remember Sheelagh Murnaghan OBE, lawyer, politician, human rights activist and sportswoman, by bringing her into the light of history.

Notes

1Quoted by Jeremy Thorpe in a letter to The Times, 22 Sep. 1993.

Sheelagh as a child in her grandfather’s house, Lisanelly

1

Childhood

SHEELAGH MARY MURNAGHAN WAS BORN in Omagh, County Tyrone, on 26 May 1924. Her father, Vincent Murnaghan, was town surveyor for Omagh and Strabane, and Assistant County Surveyor for County Tyrone from 1922 until 1964. ¹ Her mother, Ann Morrogh, was from a County Cork business family and was the niece of an Irish Home Rule MP, John Morrogh, who had worked in South Africa for years, before returning to Ireland to set up a woollen factory. She and Vincent met while they were studying at University College Dublin (UCD). ²

The Murnaghan family were deeply involved in politics, the law and science, and had a remarkable range of achievements to which Sheelagh would make her own later contribution.

Sheelagh’s grandfather, George Murnaghan, was born in County Down in 1847 and emigrated to the USA where he was successful in business. Returning to Ireland, he settled in Omagh and became involved in politics, serving as Irish Nationalist MP for Mid-Tyrone from 1895 to 1910. He also served on Omagh Rural District Council and Tyrone County Council for many years.³

In the aftermath of the 1916 Easter Rising, the British government was prepared to grant immediate Home Rule to Ireland providing that the six Ulster counties with Protestant majorities were excluded. A meeting of the Home Rule Party in Belfast endorsed the idea of temporary exclusion. George Murnaghan and his solicitor son, George Jnr, were among those who opposed the idea of exclusion. George Murnaghan Snr acted as ‘an éminence grise’ to a group of younger Irish nationalists – including George Jnr, who drew up a document, later known as ‘The Omagh Remonstrance’, which rejected any form of exclusion, however temporary. In July 1916, George Jnr was one of the founding members of a new Nationalist party, the Irish Nation League, sometimes known as ‘The League of the Seven Attorneys’ due to the number of lawyers involved. The Irish Nation League was absorbed into Sinn Féin the following year.⁴ During the War of Irish Independence (1919–21), George Murnaghan Snr acted as an advisor to Arthur Griffith and other senior Sinn Féin figures on Ulster issues.⁵ Along with his Nationalist colleagues, he refused to recognise the new Northern Ireland administration created in 1921, and continued to give allegiance to the new Dáil Éireann government in Dublin instead. Like most Irish Nationalists in Northern Ireland, he supported the Anglo-Irish Treaty. Retiring from politics in 1924, George Murnaghan died at his Omagh home on 13 January 1929.⁶

James Murnaghan, one of Sheelagh’s uncles, was a major figure in the Irish legal profession for many decades. Born in the USA, he attended University College Dublin, where his friends included James Joyce. Together with Joyce and a future Supreme Court Judge, Hugh Kennedy, Murnaghan was a contributor to the student magazine St. Stephen’s. He remained on friendly terms with Joyce and would later visit him in Paris. Called to the Irish Bar in 1903, he practised in the Northern and Midland circuits. In 1919, he represented Pope Benedict XV in a court case arising out of the will of an Athlone businessman who had bequeathed £10,000 to the Pope.⁷ Murnaghan also worked in academia, as professor of Jurisprudence, Roman Law and International Law at UCD. In 1922, James Murnaghan served as a member of the committee appointed by the provisional government of the Irish Free State to draw up a constitution for the new state.

In 1924, when the new Irish Courts Service came into being, he was appointed to the High Court. A year later he was appointed to the Supreme Court, on which he would serve for 28 years. One of his first judgements was a ruling which interpreted Article One of the 1921 Anglo-Irish Treaty as making ‘Southern Ireland’ an independent State. Interestingly, in the light of his niece Sheelagh’s later opposition to internment without trial and to the Special Powers Act in Northern Ireland, Judge Murnaghan upheld the constitutionality of special military tribunals to deal with subversives in the Irish Free State in 1934, and the Offences Against the State Act of 1939, which permitted internment. Judge Murnaghan retired from the courts in 1953. A noted art connoisseur, he was a member of the board of the National Gallery of Ireland. He died in Dublin in 1973, at the age of 92.⁸

Francis Dominic Murnaghan, another of Sheelagh’s uncles, made his name as a leading mathematician of twentieth-century America. Having received a first class honours degree from UCD in 1913, he went to the United States in 1914, where he took a PhD at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore. Most of his career was spent at Johns Hopkins, where he was professor of mathematics from 1928 to 1948. During a year as a visiting professor at the Princeton Institution for Advanced Study in 1936, he worked with Albert Einstein and John von Neumann. He also held visiting professorships at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies in 1948 and 1957, and worked in São Paulo, Brazil in the 1950s, making a major contribution to maths teaching there. His research output resulted in 15 books and 90 research papers, including the definitive reference work in the field of Hydrodynamic Theory and