MARIE MOORE, who has died aged 72, was a west Belfast republican activist and street agitator who became the first Sinn Féin member on Belfast City Council and was elected deputy lord mayor in 1999.
Marie Moore (née Gilmore) was born in Cawnpore Street in the Clonard area of Belfast in May 1936, the first of two children to Peter Gilmore, a tram driver, and his wife Nora (née O’Brien).
The family held republican views. On Easter Sunday 1942, Marie Moore was in her maternal grandparents’ house in Cawnpore Street when the only IRA man executed in the North was captured upstairs, after a policeman was shot dead nearby.
She was in the living room when a gunfight erupted outside and six young men ran into the kitchen. A group of uniformed policemen followed. The first group retreated upstairs, carrying a wounded man covered in blood.
Marie remembered her terror: “An RUC man grabbed me and my grandfather. He put a gun to our heads. He was screaming at the men upstairs to come down or he would shoot us.”
Her grandparents were arrested. The men upstairs surrendered. The wounded man, Tom Williams, was their leader and was later executed. One of the others captured was Joe Cahill, a leading IRA figure in the 1970s and 1980s.
Marie’s republican sympathies were strengthened as she grew older, when, because of religious discrimination in her view, she failed to get jobs for which she was qualified.
For her, 1969 was a fateful year. First, she married her husband Jack, who was a Yorkshireman; her republican views were no obstacle to love. Shortly afterwards, she helped Catholic residents under sectarian attack evacuate their burning homes in Bombay Street.
That led her to become active in the newly formed Provisional Sinn Féin. A photograph from the time records her marching through Belfast in a combat jacket carrying a hurley stick.
In 1972 she was shot and wounded by the British army. This left her with a slight limp for the rest of her life. The shooting happened when she was on so-called hen patrol, groups of women banging bin-lids on pavements to harass army patrols. She was taken to a house for first aid – by coincidence the same house where she was cared for when her grandparents were arrested in 1942.
In the 1970s, she became prominent in Sinn Féin, being elected to the Ard Comhairle, heading its prisoners’ department, and helping found its women’s department. In 1978-9 she spent a year on remand in Armagh Gaol on a charge of treason, which then carried the death penalty.
During the hunger strike of 1981, she organised communication between the prisoners and Sinn Féin and IRA activists outside the prison. The prisoners referred to her as “An Bean Uasal” (the Noble Woman).
In 1993, after Sinn Féin decided to recognise government structures in Northern Ireland and end its policy of abstentionism, she was elected to Belfast City Council.
The current Deputy Lord Mayor, Davy Browne of the Ulster Unionist Party, was elected at the same time. “I always found her very approachable, very pleasant and easy to talk to,” he recalled.
“She was a very hard constituency worker. She was never aggressive, always very friendly..”
She was predeceased by Jack, brother Frank (Gilmore), but is survived by children Brian, Eileen and Kieran, 12 grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.
Marie Moore: born May 16th, 1936; died March 21st, 2009