Des O'Hagan

Des O'Hagan (29 March 1934 – 5 May 2015) was a prominent member of the Workers' Party and was a founding member of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association.

O'Hagan was born in the Lower Falls area of Belfast in 1934

On his release from imprisonment, O'Hagan was enrolled in the London School of Economics, where he was influenced by Marxist theorist Ralph Miliband, graduating in 1964. He subsequently returned to Belfast and was appointed to the post of Senior Lecturer in Sociology in Stranmillis College of Teacher Education, now known as Stranmillis University College.

On his release from internment, O'Hagan resigned from his post in the overwhelmingly Protestant Stranmillis and once again became involved in the official republican movement and played an important role of its development into the Workers' Party.

Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, left-wing parties and movements across the West rapidly shifted away from hardliner positions. Splits were common and the Worker's Party was not unaffected, seeing a major split occur when a major faction of the party left to form Democratic Left, a Democratic socialist party as opposed to the Marxist-Leninist stance of the Worker's Party. O'Hagan remained a hardliner and viewed the split as a "Betrayal", and desperately tried to hold the fragments of the Worker's Party together as it dwindled. He lashed out the emergence of New Labour in the United Kingdom, which saw the Labour Party move away from Socialist policies towards a version of Social Democracy.

Des O'Hagan died on 5 May 2015, aged 81 in Downpatrick.