Miriam Daly was born in 1928 in the Curragh army camp in Kildare, where her father was an officer of the Free State Army who had served with Michael Collins in the War of Independence and took the treaty side. But Miriam always claimed he had taught her much about insurrectionary politics.
She was brought up in Dublin's Hatch Street, near both her school the Loreto College on St Stephen's Green and University College, Dublin where she graduated in history. She was awarded an MPhil in economic history for research on Irish emigration to England, supervised by George O'Brien. She taught economic history in UCD for some years before marrying Doctor Joseph Lee and moving to England, where she became a lecturer in the History Department of Southampton University. Dr Lee died in 1963. In 1965 she married James Daly, with whom in 1968 she returned to Ireland, where they both became lecturers in Queen's University, Belfast.
The civil rights campaign was taking off at this time, inspired by the black civil rights movement in the US. The imposition of internment without trial by the six county government generated worldwide response. Miriam's organising and public speaking abilities were recognized and welcomed from the beginning. Grassroots activists, who at that time were almost the whole nationalist population of the six counties, were thrilled by the spontaneity and power of her impassioned and wholly genuine rhetoric. They were especially appreciative of the fact that she came from the South to share their oppression and their resistance. She earned the love of internees and their relatives and neighbours by visiting them in what were called their "cages" in Long Kesh to talk about Irish history.
A particular and very popular quality of her style, which perhaps came from her father's background, was that her genuine outrage did not take away her Olympian contempt for the forces of repression, both those of the State and of the loyalist murder gangs with which they were in collusion, even overlapping in membership. Her dynamic presence was felt on television in Ireland, Britain, and France, where she countered the insidious propaganda of the establishment-supported and Nobel Prize-winning -- and pocketing -- "peace" people. Her dynamism extended into her university lectures, where she expressed her convictions with a forthrightness which greatly impressed her students, including the many who came from a non-nationalist background.
Very early on she realised that there was developing a politics of confinement of the struggle to the six counties, and the promotion of an "internal" settlement which would place the inheritors of the great and noble struggle for Irish democracy in the same category as the Ku Klux Klan-like loyalist thugs, and give Britain the paternalistic role of benevolent overseer of a six county settlement. Republicans illustrated their community policing politics with a British army map of Belfast showing streets coloured in green and orange. She failed to get backing for what she saw as necessary, a massive campaign to educate the people in the 26 counties to the realities of the oppression in the six counties -- to make up for their lack of experience of the daily social, political, military, police and death squad oppression. She saw such a campaign as the only way to turn the struggle from a six county civil rights struggle to a national liberation struggle. A friend who agreed such a campaign was obviously absolutely necessary and the only consistent position for a Republican said "This is becoming a war against internment". The potential campaign, which might have prevented developments like the giving up of articles 2 and 3 of the Irish constitution, which claimed the whole of Ireland as the national territory, was vetoed by the leadership.
Miriam was a militant member of the Prisoners' Relatives Action Committee, and was overwhelmingly voted on to the national Hunger Strike Committee. She founded the highly efficient and effective Murray Defence Committee to save the Murrays from the death sentence in Dublin. In that campaign, she collaborated with Seamus Costello, and soon recognized his politics, especially his opposition to "Ring Road socialism", as the only continuation of James Connolly's politics today. She joined his party, the IRSP. After Seamus's assassination she was elected chairperson, and led the party very successfully for two years. At the time of her death she was in charge of the IRSP prisoners' welfare, and gave a great deal of her time to visiting the prisoners.
