Tomás Ó Flatharta

I can’t remember who let me know that John Goodwillie had passed away a few days ago – the first person I told was Des Derwin, who has written the tribute below, which contains informative and entertaining scenes from the class struggle in Ireland.

There will be a celebration of John Goodwillie’s life at the Garden Chapel of Mount Jerome Cemetery, which is can be viewed online at 3pm on Tuesday December 10. Condolences to his husband Val, his family, friends, and comrades.

Links :
John Goodwillie Death Notice
John Goodwillie, Celebration of His Life, CLR
John Goodwillie Tribute, Des Derwin, FB
John Goodwillie Tribute, Des Derwin, CLR

Des Derwin knew John much better than me. But our paths crossed several times, and I retain good memories about comrade Goodwillie.

Here is one detail : After the 1977 General Election in the 26 County bit of Ireland we had to come to terms with new realities : Fianna Fáil shocked the pundits by trouncing the outgoing Fine Gael/Labour coalition government : the Labour Party had propped up a reactionary Fine Gael government (the FG taoiseach had voted against his own government’s proposal to slightly liberalise laws banning contraception, thus defeating the timid measure).

John Goodwillie, Matt Merrigan, the Socialist Labour Party – Getting a Name Right

Sections of the Labour Party left (led by a veteran left-wing personality Noel Browne and the General Secretary of the Amalgamated Transport and General Workers’ Union [ATGWU]) Mattie Merrigan) split from Labour after a government attempt to declare a sinister “State of Emergency” was defeated. Merrigan and Browne ran initially small election campaigns, which mushroomed – and produced positive results. Noel Browne won a Dáil seat in the Artane constituency of Fianna Fáil strongman (and soon to be party leader) Charles Haughey, while Merrigan polled very strongly in Finglas.

Merrigan and Browne founded a new left-wing organisation, the Socialist Labour Party (SLP), and the scattered Irish far-left charged in.

I attended an SLP policy conference which Mattie Merrigan chaired. I was amazed by the democratic culture of the meeting , which Merrigan chaired in an expert manner. Mattie sometimes had difficulty with unusual and unexpected words – he knew John Goodwillie very well, but could not pronounce the name correctly.

After a little hesitation and shuffling of papers, Mattie called the next speaker in the debate “JohnWillie”!

Gales of laughter, as the amused John Goodwillie approached the podium to make his speech.

John Meehan December 10 2024

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Goodbye John – You Go – You Stay

My old friend John Goodwillie died on Wednesday (4th December 2024). He was extraordinarily committed, honest, kind, genuine and erudite. His broad brow housed an encyclopedic knowledge of – it seemed – almost everything. I knew him since 1968. I remember John speaking at an IALSO (Irish Association of Labour Student Organisations) conference (chaired by Paul Gillespie with Gerry Lawless responding in a smart-ass way to John). I was a keen secondary school onlooker in the GMB at Trinity College Dublin. Then we were in the Young Socialists together. John was part of the Socialist Labour Alliance while I was away from politics for a while. From 1972 we were in the Socialist Workers Movement together, where John was a leading figure in his own quiet way.

No Time to read a political book – very bad

The SWM was for a time a group where working class trade unionists mixed with topflight intellectuals including ‘professorial’ Trinity College librarians like John. Despite occasional jibes the proletarians (with their pints of Guinness) had the highest respect for John (with his glass of Smithwicks), the specialist in rare documents and the aficionado of heraldry. John who was steeped in marxist theory and expressed his insights in documents of economic language. Someone once repeated mirthfully to me John’s remark arising from his workload for the group that ‘there isn’t even time to read a political book, and that is very bad’.

A Shared Arrest

John shared my one arrest. The Dublin SWM got the bright idea during the Crown Controls strike in the mid 1970s of venturing to Trim and Navan to distribute leaflets denouncing a Trim haulier who was breaking the strike. John, Marie McAdam and I set off in John’s Mini car. Our reception in the Trim pubs was less than warm. On reaching Navan I was grabbed by a few of the haulier’s henchmen but escaped with only one or two digs when the Gardai mysteriously materialised even before Marie, who had run for the Gardai, could have alterted them. We were told that we could continue to sell our paper (‘The Worker’) but we should stop giving out the leaflet. Our names and addresses were taken.

We decided to abandon both the leafleting and the paper-selling and hightail it out of Navan. Shortly afterwards we noticed headlights keeping behind us and jumped nervously to the conclusion that that our haulier friends had decided to follow us to where no Garda would intervene. John, who was not known as a skilled driver, stepped on the gas and took a left turn into a small country road. We hadn’t a clue where we were, but eventually agreed that we had lost our pursuers, if they ever were pursuing us.

There was a sequel. Some time later a lorry belonging to the strikebreaking Trim firm was burnt out. John, Marie McAdam and I were picked up by the Special Branch the next day. A more unlikely trio of saboteurs would be hard to find. Our homes were searched, yielding the expert Branch pickers useful copies of the relevant SWM Internal Bulletin, and other documents. We were held and questioned for a day, John and I in the Bridewell, and released in the afternoon when the Branch thoughtfully gave us a lift into the city centre. I was told there had been some trade union phone calls on our behalf.

I used to say to myself in the SWM that as long as the rock that was John Goodwillie continued to ‘believe’ so would I. Then to my shock John left the SWM, when we were the Socialist Workers Tendency in the Socialist Labour Party, while remaining a leading member of the SLP. (In John’s case it seemed that the desired direction was being reversed, from the SWT to the wider Party.)

About three years later John Cane, Mary Cummins and I, with differences with the leadership over party-building, left the SWM, and finding we had overlapping politics with several former SWM members, including John Goodwillie, Brian Trench, Gene Kerrigan and Tom O’Connor, published with them and others ‘Gralton’ magazine. One of those involved with ‘Gralton’ was Tommy Simpson who would later be a colleague of John in the Green Party, and of mine in the Dublin Council of Trade Unions.

Another shock came later again when John left marxism and became a Green. He wrote a pamphlet renouncing marxism for what he considered the overriding necessity of dealing with the ecological emergency. John joined the Green Party and later stood unsuccessfully as an election candidate for them.

John was as esteemed in the Green Party as he was in the socialist movement. A measure of the general respect for him came one time from an unexpected quarter. In the days before the IRSP, Seamus Costello, who was also a native of Wicklow, like John (who was from Greystones), was heard to remark, on observing John selling socialist literature (probably ‘The Worker’) in the Wicklow pubs, that ‘that is one dedicated man’. The tough man of action recognised the stalwart steel in the frail and gentle intellectual.

Irish Left Archive

Who else but John, with his sharp awareness and incredible knowledge of detail, would produce the timeline or family tree of Irish left wing organisations for ‘Gralton’? It was updated for the ‘Irish left Archive’ website (part of the ‘Cedar Lounge Revolution suite) and may be viewed there. John was also the subject of one of the podcast interviews on the ‘Irish Left Archive’, where he speaks of his life of commitment, about the Irish socialist movement in those small-scale but dynamic years of the 60s, 70. and 80s, and then about the Green Party. Some of his writing is also archived on that page. John shared my one entry in the prestigious pages of ‘International Socialism’ journal, in an article along with Brian Trench and Gene Kerrigan.

When we went on political trips with John we usually crashed with comrades while John stayed in a bed and breakfast. Not because he was posh, but because of his delicate constitution. One weekend a ‘Gralton’ delegation went to the – probably first – Jimmy Gralton commemorative gathering in Drumshanbo and Effrinagh, Co. Leitrim. The talk of the weekend among us was the news that John had come out as gay. This was a big deal in the early 1980s. John had always been very private about his personal life. The left was then pretty macho, and we, his friends for all his reserved ways, had pangs of guilt for not being more conducive to John before that, and in realisation of how lonely he might have been. But John found love, companionship, and home with Val.

John of course played his part in the trade union at Trinity Library which was then the Workers Union of Ireland, later the Federated Workers Union of Ireland (and then SIPTU). How strange that a colleague at the Library, Jack McGinley, who took on a role in the same union, but in different political currents, and who was due to launch a new history of that same trade union, should be sent off from Mount Jerome just ten days before John.

It is many years since I had an in-person meeting with John, but we always exchanged Christmas cards and ‘liked’ and commented on each others Facebook posts (up to very recently). It is hard to believe John is no longer with us. Part of what formed me goes with him. Goodbye John. You go. You stay.

Des Derwin 8th December 2024

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John Goodwillie was a trailblazer of Irish politics – one of the first openly gay men to stand for election in Ireland – above is a 1994 poster.

Some mistaken posters claimed John was “the first” openly gay man to run in an Irish election.

Not true! A Trinity College colleague of john’s got there first.

The gay rights campaigner David Norris represented the Dublin University constituency in the Seanad as an independent. He was first elected in 1987, and was re-elected at each election until his resignation in 2024.