From the Irish Times an obituary on John Throne, a leading Irish Marxist from rural Protestant background.
![]() |
John Throne made his mark by founding and building the ‘militant tendency’ in Ireland, the precursor of today’s Socialist Party
![]() |
Throne quickly became key figure in hothouse of Ireland’s far-left politics in the 1970 |
The road from John Throne’s home, the smallholding outside Lifford, Co Donegal, took him on a long and unlikely, winding course, geographically and politically: a small farmer from a Protestant, very Orange family who would end up travelling the world preaching Marxism and Trotskyism.
Throne who has died in Chicago at the age of 75, plunged into a life of full-time socialist political activism after participating in Derry’s “battle of the Bogside” in 1969.
He quickly became a central figure in the hothouse of Ireland’s far-left politics in the 1970s, and a thorn in the side of the leadership of the Labour Party, on whose executive he served before expulsion in the early 1990s.
Continue reading @ the Irish Times.
No comments