Sean McAteer

Sean McAteer (1892–1937) was an Irish communist killed in Stalin's Great Purge.

Biography McAteer, a dock labourer, was involved with the Irish Citizen Army and the Socialist Party of Ireland. In 1915 he left for the USA.

Back in Ireland, McAteer adopted the name Sean Mac an tSaoir. He returned to take part in the Irish Civil War on the side of the Anti-Treaty IRA.

Once in the USSR, McAteer worked as an English teacher in Odessa, Ukraine. Here he married his wife Tamara and had a daughter, Maria. In 1937, after a drunken outburst in which he accused the Communist Party boss in Odessa of being a Trotskyist, he was charged with "subversive wrecking", "counter-revolutionary bourgeois thoughts", and espionage. On 16 November 1937, he was sentenced to death by shooting and executed before the month's end.

Following petitions from his wife and daughter, he was posthumously rehabilitated in the 1950s.