Brendan Clifford

Brendan Clifford
Born	1936 (age 80–81) Sliabh Luachra area of Munster, Ireland
Occupation	Historian and political activist

Brendan Clifford (born 1936) is an Irish historian and political activist.

He was born in the Sliabh Luachra area of Munster, Republic of Ireland.

As a young man, Clifford emigrated to the United Kingdom and became involved in left-wing politics. Initially, he was an associate of Michael McCreery, a leader of the Committee to Defeat Revisionism, for Communist Unity, a small British Marxist–Leninist that had left the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1963. Later, he joined the Irish Communist Group which soon split into two factions; Clifford sided with the Maoist faction, which named itself the Irish Communist Organisation (ICO). In 1967, Clifford gave a public speech on the Republican Congress in Wynn's Hotel, Dublin, at a meeting of the Irish trade union group Scéim na gCeardchumann.

In the early 1970s, he joined the other ICO members in advocating the "two-nations theory" – that the Ulster Protestants formed a separate nation and the Republic of Ireland had no right to force them into a United Ireland against their wishes. Clifford soon became a prolific publisher of material advocating the group's viewpoint. The ICO later changed its name to the British and Irish Communist Organisation (B&ICO).

He was an active campaigner against Irish nationalism alongside other B&ICO members including his wife Angela Clifford,Jack Lane, Manus O'Riordan and Len Callendar. By the late 1970s, according to historian Richard P. Davis, Clifford and historian Peter Brooke were effectively leading the B&ICO.

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