Noel Harris, who died in August, spent his adult life as a trade union official in Belfast, Dublin and London.
He came to politics as a young man through the Northern Ireland Communist Party. Although of non-Catholic background he was active in the early and middle 1960s in bringing the issue of anti-Catholic discrimination to the fore through his trade union DATA. In January 1967 he was on the founding committee of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association and was one of those who walked in the first civil rights marches.
In Dublin he was an active member of the Irish Anti-Apartheid Movement and its general secretary for a period. Noel was a genial companion, a determined campaigner for good and progressive causes, a person of wide reading and culture and altogether a splendid human being who will be missed by all who knew him.
