Father Sean McManus

Father Sean McManus, born in Kinawley, County Fermanagh, Northern Ireland, is a US-based Irish nationalist activist and Roman Catholic priest. In 1971, McManus was a Redemptorist Father in Perth, Scotland. In August 1971 he was arrested in Enniskillen, Northern Ireland, after a demonstration, because he helped an arrested stone thrower to escape the police. In the following court proceedings he was sentenced to a fine of £20 and proclaimed: "I do not, I never have and I never will recognise the colonial State of British-occupied Ireland. ... I want to state publicly and unequivocally that I am in sympathy with the I.R.A. - indeed sympathy is too weak a word. ... I cannot join them in the fight for freedom of my country, but the very least I can do is speak up for them when they are being slandered and vilified by unscrupulously vicious propaganda. The oppressors of Irish freedom call the I.R.A. terrorists and murderers, but I call them by their proper titles; I call them freedom fighters, I call them heroes; and I venerate their dead as martyrs for Ireland."^[1] He moved to the US and founded the Irish American Caucus in the 1970s, a Washington, D.C.-based Irish-American lobby group, which campaigned for the introduction of the MacBride Principles. He has been director of that organisation, which has long had financial troubles. It was formally located at 413 East Capitol Street SE in Washington, D.C., but has since had to abandon an actual office space and relocated to Fr. McManus' residence in Southwest D.C.