Roy Johnston

Roy Harry William Johnston (11 November 1929 – 13 December 2019) was an Irish theoretical physicist and republican political activist. He was a Marxist who as a member of the IRA in the 1960s argued for a National Liberation Strategy to unite the Catholic and Protestant working classes. He wrote extensively for such newspapers as The United Irishman and The Irish Times.

Biography His father was Joseph Johnston, a farmer, economist and historian, a fellow of Trinity College Dublin and a member of the Seanad Éireann on several occasions between 1938 and 1954. Joe Johnston was a Home Rule supporter who hailed from a small farming Ulster-Scots Presbyterian background in Tyrone.

Roy Johnston was born in Dublin in 1929. He was educated at St Columba's College, Rathfarnham, and at Trinity College Dublin (TCD). At graduated from TCD with honours in mathematics and physics in 1951. He then worked in the Paris École Polytechnique. In 1955 he completed a PhD thesis in cosmic physics, under the supervision of Cormac Ó Ceallaigh at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies. His PhD was called "A study of the unstable particles occurring in the cosmic radiation". He made an oral presentation to the New Ireland Forum in 1984. He also wrote a bi-monthly science and technology column for the Irish Times. While in London he became acquainted with Desmond Greaves.

He contributed many articles to its newspaper the United Irishman. He was a supporter of the republican movement's move to the left with Goulding and Tomás Mac Giolla, which subsequently led to a split with the Provisionals, remaining as a member of the Official IRA after the split.

However, he left in 1972 after the assassination of Northern Ireland Senator John Barnhill and joined the Communist Party of Ireland. He was expelled from the Communist Party in 1977 following his public criticism of the Soviet Union's treatment of writers and scientists. After the divorce ban was lifted following a 1995 referendum, the couple were married at a Quaker meeting house in 1998.

Publications Roy H. W. Johnston, Century of Endeavour: A Biographical and Autobiographical View of the Twentieth Century in Ireland (Carlow: Tyndall Publications, in association with Lilliput Press, Dublin, 2006). Century of Endeavour - Senator James G Douglas short biography of James G. Douglas, 1999. A study of the unstable particles occurring in the cosmic radiation PhD Thesis