NORMAN BADGER: NORMAN BADGER, who has died aged 70, was an Ulster Unionist councillor who worked for all his constituents during his 16 years on Dungannon and South Tyrone Borough Council.
Before the peace process, he worked with Sinn Féin councillors on issues to benefit the community. He was involved in community projects in Coalisland, perceived as a strongly Republican town with few votes for Unionists. He was a council representative on a project to commemorate the Dungannon Communist poet, Charlie Donnelly, who was killed when fighting on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War.
It was a measure of the respect in which he was held that two Sinn Féin councillors travelled 50 miles to attend his wake.
Badger was born in 1939 in the townland of Lammy outside Newmills, Co Tyrone, to James Badger a farmer and his wife Elizabeth. James Badger came from the Catholic area of Ardboe on the shores of Lough Neagh. Norman was the eldest of a family that comprised three brothers and a sister.
His only formal education was at Lisnageer Primary School. When he was elected to the council, he was involved in an unsucessful campaign to save that school from closure. After leaving school, Norman worked on the family farm. Then he took a job with agricultural machinery manufacturer Gascoigne.
In that job, he worked in every county in Ireland in the 1960s installing milking and grain drying machinery. While doing so he stayed on farms all over the country, sometimes for a couple of weeks at a time. It gave him knowledge of and a great love for the country. Later, he sold milking machines; worked as a telephone engineer and became an agricultural contractor. In 1993, he was elected as a councillor for the Torrent electoral area on Dunngannon and South Tyrone Borough Council. He was the only Unionist in the six-seat electoral area. However, he was not interested in party politics but in issues facing the entire community.
One of the earliest causes he championed was the campaign to save the Coalisland canal, one of the oldest in Ireland. It was built in 1733 to take coal from Coalisland to Dublin. There was a proposal to fill in the basin in Coalisland to provide a car park for a supermarket. Thanks to the campaign, it was saved.
Norman was involved with community groups across his area, most of whom would be perceived as Catholic.
For 12 years, he worked closely with an Independent nationalist councillor for the same area, Jim Canning. Of his colleague, Canning said: “Catholic, Protestant, it didn’t matter. Norman went everywhere.”
He is survived by his wife May; children Alistair, Clive, Helen and Rhonda; his brothers Ivan, Raymond and Noel, his sister Vera and his three grandchildren.
Norman Badger: born March 12th, 1939; died December 11th, 2009