He Led A Cause Everyone In Ireland Could Get Behind

at

Apart from Ben Dunne and Margaret Heffernan, obviously.

And Foster & Allen.

And the church, Iveagh House, team after team of dim rugby players and others too numerous or dead to mention.

Kader Asmal, stalwart of the Irish Anti-Apartheid Group, Dean of  the faculty of Arts at Trinity College in the 1980s, Minister for Water in the first democratic South African government, Mandela confidante. 1934-2011.

“We had very little funding that we did not raise ourselves – and here I should pay tribute to the many musicians who sang for us at concerts, and often turned down lucrative offers to tour South Africa as well. Poets like Seamus Heaney read for us, Sean O’Casey and Samuel Beckett were among the first signatories of a list of playwrights who refused to allow their plays to be performed in South Africa. In 1984 Mary Manning, a young trade unionist working in a supermarket in Dublin, refused to register the sale of an Outspan grapefruit. She and 10 others who supported her were suspended, and went on strike for three and a half years. For those three and a half years we organized a Saturday picket outside the store, but management refused to respond to our letters and refused to meet us. In 1987 the Irish Government imposed sanctions on South African fruit and produce.”

Louise Asmal, widow of Kader Asmal.



Kader Asmal Dies In SA (Irish Times)

Louise Asmal quote and Anti-Apartheid posters via Irish Election Literature
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