Betty Sinclair

Elizabeth "Betty" Sinclair (1910–1981) was an Irish communist activist. Born to a Church of Ireland family in the Ardoyne area of Belfast, Sinclair became a millworker alongside her mother after leaving school at the age of fifteen. She joined the Revolutionary Workers' Groups (RWG) in 1932. In 1933, she was involved in the Outdoor Relief Strike. She then attended the International Lenin School in Moscow until 1935. The RWG established the Communist Party of Ireland (CPI) in 1933, and Sinclair became a leading member. In 1940 she was arrested after the CPI paper Unity published an article allegedly sympathetic to the IRA, and she was sentenced to two months' imprisonment in 1941. The same year she became a full-time party worker in Belfast. When the all-Ireland CPI dissolved in 1941, Sinclair remained an active member of the Communist Party of Northern Ireland (CPNI) and served as its Secretary from 1942-45. She stood for the group in Belfast Cromac at the 1945 Northern Ireland general election, taking almost one third of the votes. In 1947, Sinclair was appointed full-time secretary of the Belfast and District Trades Union Council. In 1941 Sinclair was arrested and imprisoned following the publishing a controversial article in the Red Hand, the official party paper of the Communist Party of Ireland. The Communist Party of Ireland and the Red Hand were worried by the IRA's willingness to explore links with Nazi Germany in order to secure support for a United Ireland, and this was expressed in the Red Hand, questioning if the IRA was turning into a pro-fascist organisation. Republicans requested an opportunity to respond to this criticism, and the Red Hand allowed Jack Brady to write an article voicing their views. However, the IRA was a proscribed (banned) organisation at this time in both the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland, and publishing their material was illegal. As part editor of the party Sinclair was held responsible for the article and subsequently interned. Betty was originally sentenced to 2 years of prison time but was able to reduce it to 2 months upon appeal. She served her sentence in Armagh Jail, in conditions she described as "medieval". Sinclair campaigned for the restoring of American Paul Robeson's passport. Robeson, a noted musician and activist, had supported the allies during World War 2. However, due to his long history of supporting left-wing politics and his pro-Soviet Union stance, as well as his anti-colonial attitude, he was denied a passport by the United States State Department. In 1958, Sinclair personally met with Robeson when he came to Belfast as part of a worldwide tour. Sinclair was the Trades Council's representative at the talks which founded the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA) in 1967, and she served as NICRA chairperson until 1969, when she resigned, claiming it had become dominated by ultra leftists and was worsening sectarian divisions. She stepped down from her trades council post in 1975, and moved to Prague to work for the World Marxist Review, before returning to Belfast. She died in a fire in her flat in East Belfast in 1981.