lit a candle 8h agoJust read the Hume biography again last month and there's his name on every other page. 102. That's a whole century of actually doing the work instead of just talking about it.
Their story
Michael Canavan was a Derry businessman, civil rights campaigner and nationalist politician who stood beside John Hume through the formative years of the civil rights movement and the founding of the Social Democratic and Labour Party. He was the last surviving member of the 1960s University for Derry Committee, and…
Michael Canavan was a Derry businessman, civil rights campaigner and nationalist politician who stood beside John Hume through the formative years of the civil rights movement and the founding of the Social Democratic and Labour Party. He was the last surviving member of the 1960s University for Derry Committee, and he died in October 2026 at the age of 102.
Born in Derry in October 1924, Canavan was educated at St Columb's College in the city before going into business. By the 1960s he owned a chain of bookmakers, a salmon processing factory and a pub in Derry. He was a keen advocate of the credit union movement and founded the Derry Credit Union with Hume, chairing it from 1963 to 1966 before spending a year as a director of the Irish League of Credit Unions.
In 1965 he became treasurer of the cross community University for Derry Committee, which campaigned against the decision to site Northern Ireland's second university in Coleraine. When rail closures threatened the North West, he wrote to industrialists around the world asking them to invest in the region, and he worked with Hume to bring industry to the city.
After the civil rights march in Duke Street was broken up by police on 5 October 1968, Canavan was a leading figure in the newly formed Derry Citizens' Action Committee. He was later prominent in the Derry Citizens' Defence Association during the Battle of the Bogside in 1969, and he chaired the Derry Citizens' Central Council at the time of Bloody Sunday in January 1972.
Canavan managed Hume's successful campaign in Foyle at the 1969 Stormont election and in 1970 was a founder member of the SDLP, serving for many years as its security spokesman. He was elected for Londonderry to the Northern Ireland Assembly in 1973 and to the Constitutional Convention in 1975. He declined to stand in 1982, arguing for a boycott because the proposed assembly offered no power sharing, and he later chaired Derry's civic committee.
His death was reported on 9 October 2026. SDLP leader Colum Eastwood said that by any measure his was a life well lived, and the Derry University Group called him an inspiration.
Biography adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0) and the Derry Journal.
In their own words
“If the Citizens' Action Committee was born on October 9, it was surely conceived on October 5.”
Public meeting in the Guildhall, Derry, 19 November 1968, as reported by the Derry Journal
Photos
1Michael Canavan
by People Forever
same, the credit union chapter got me