John Freeman:JOHN FREEMAN led one of Ireland's largest unions for a quarter of a century, from 1974 to 1998, through some of the worst years of the Troubles.
The membership of the Amalgamated Transport and General Workers’ Union (ATGWU) was cross-Border and cross-community. As regional secretary, Freeman kept it together as a space largely free of the North’s sectarian politics.
Freeman was born in 1933 on Shannon Street, north Belfast, the second of three children and older son to Samuel Freeman, a labourer, and his wife Mary Jane (née Adair). Both parents were from Belfast. Freeman’s grandfather, a carter, had taken part in the great 1907 Belfast dock strike.
Freeman was christened John Adair Freeman after his maternal grandfather, John Adair, a ship’s cook lost at sea.
Freeman’s father was absent for much of his early years as he enlisted shortly before the second World War. His regiment was sacrificed to protect the British retreat from Dunkirk in 1940. Samuel Freeman was wounded, and spent the next five years in Germany as a prisoner of war.
Freeman attended the Model Primary School on Belfast’s Cliftonville Road, leaving at 14. His education was ongoing, however, because the family used the public library. One of Freeman’s early employers, a chemist, offered to train him into the profession. Instead, in 1955 he emigrated to Australia and worked as a labourer.
In 1962, Freeman returned to Belfast. There, he failed to get a job in the Short Harland (now Shorts) aircraft factory – because he did not have an ATGWU card.
Getting a job in a warehouse, he joined the union. That opened the doors of Short Harland, where he became a semi-skilled labourer.
He also became active in the ATGWU. He was elected convenor of the shop stewards in the plant, the second-biggest workplace in the North, and a member of the union’s general executive committee.
In 1971 loyalists intimidated Freeman out of the plant. This was because he openly opposed internment, then being directed solely against Catholics. The ATGWU took him on as an organiser.
As well as being ATGWU regional secretary, he served as president of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions from 1995 to 1997.
The Enkalon Foundation was one of his proudest achievements. When Enkalon closed its factory in Antrim in 1984, Freeman persuaded the company to establish the foundation. It funds community groups, particularly those working cross-community or catering for the unemployed or disadvantaged. Freeman was one of its trustees.
He was predeceased by his wife Ellen, his sister Sarah Eliza (Stella) and brother Eddie. He is survived by his step-daughters Sheila, Joanie and Marie, and by his nieces and nephews.
John Freeman: born November 24th, 1933; died March 15th, 2011