Vincent MacDowell: Vincent MacDowell, who has died aged 78, was well before his time in making the shift from (1940s) IRA activity in the North to socialist, environmental and community activism.
Born in Newry in 1925, he lived in Belfast and later in Dún Laoghaire, where he was elected a Green councillor in 1999, having stood unsuccessfully in the 1997 general election. His formation was republican-labour.
When his daughter, the Green MEP Nuala Ahern, asked him why the family had been brought up in the Republic, he explained that he had felt the North was "just one big concentration camp" and he did not want to raise his children in such a place.
An active member of An Taisce, Amnesty International and recently chairman of Dún Laoghaire Business Association, his many campaigns included one against a proposed marina at Salthill and another to retain the local baths as a public amenity.
Though living in the Republic since 1952 he remained active in the North. A founder member of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association, as vice-chairman in 1970 he felt strongly that the movement would have succeeded had it not succumbed to RUC provocation. Civil disobedience was then central to his thinking.
In the 1980s he was a regular protester at weekly Birmingham Six pickets of the British embassy in Dublin. He later represented the Greens on the Forum for Peace and Reconciliation.
During the second World War he was interned for three years in Crumlin Road Prison. His mother, Nora, and sister, Una, were also held without trial. Vincent was 16. He used the time well, becoming an enthusiastic Irish speaker and gaining the education that had eluded him when he left the Christian Brothers in Newry several years earlier.
He worked as a milkman, a mechanic and a boatman in Belfast docks. In Dún Laoghaire he became a businessman and self-taught engineer.
Following internment he had become involved in Young Socialist discussion groups and later the Socialist Republican Party. It merged into the Dublin-based Labour Party. In West Belfast its Protestant trade unionist candidate, Jack Beattie, was elected MP. In the early 1950s the Republic's Labour Party was a significant force in the North. MacDowell became involved in setting up a branch in Belfast. Later he stood in Dublin South East, against Dr Noel Browne, then a Fianna Fáil candidate. MacDowell was party treasurer under Brendan Corish.
He left Labour in the early 1970s because of its decision to coalesce with Fine Gael but rejoined this year, having quit the Greens last year after he failed to get the party nomination in the general election.
A former fellow internee, Hedley Wright (82), recalls that An Ulster Idyll, which MacDowell wrote and published in 1989, describes many of their exploits as IRA men during the war. MacDowell wrote another book, Michael Collins and the Irish Republican Brotherhood (1997).
Wright also recalls that the 1940s MacDowell home in College Square North, Belfast, was well known as a meeting place for IRA members, a few of them Protestant.
At his funeral Uinsionn Mac Dubhghaill said his father was "a man who liked to think outside the box, who took a lateral view and challenged orthodoxies, be they church or state". He was "a very emotional man", blunt in his rejection of cant or hypocrisy. As a father he was sure of his role: "a strict but fair and loving parent".
It was his ambition to sail the Atlantic, but the boat he built for it was soon wrecked. A keen sailor, diver, waterskier and inventor, he had already built a craft from wooden crates and sailed it to Bristol. That was Saoirse (Freedom).
His wife, Nora; daughters Nuala, Noreen, Una, Sheila and Emer; sons Colm and Uinsionn; his sister, Aileen, and 15 grandchildren survive him. He is predeceased by his former wife, Elizabeth Graham.
Vincent Francis MacDowell: born January 20th, 1925; died August 31st, 2003