Austin Currie

Joseph Austin Currie was born in Dungannon, County Tyrone, in 1939 and became one of Northern Ireland’s most visible civil rights campaigners. He entered the Stormont Parliament for East Tyrone in 1964, then helped turn housing discrimination into a public crisis when he occupied a Kinnard Park house reserved for a Unionist official. That act gave shape to a movement in which ordinary people demanded to be seen, named and treated as equals.