Jim Higgins (Irish politician)

Jim Higgins (born 4 May 1945) is an Irish former Fine Gael politician. He served as a member of Seanad Éireann, Dáil Éireann, and was an EPP Member of the European Parliament for the North-West constituency from 2004 to 2014.

Early life

He was born in Ballyhaunis, County Mayo in 1945. He was educated at St. Jarlath's College, Tuam and at University College Galway. He was twice named Best Individual Speaker at the Junior Chamber Ireland debating championships (1978, 1979) and was the captain of the International Tripartite Debating Team. Higgins worked as a secondary school teacher before becoming involved in local politics.

Political career

He served as a member of Mayo County Council from 1979–1995, acting as Vice-Chairman of the Council from 1980–1981. He first ran for Dáil Éireann at the 1981 general election, but was unsuccessful. However, he was nominated by the Taoiseach Garret FitzGerald to the 15th Seanad Éireann.

He lost his Seanad seat in 1982 but was elected to the 17th Seanad by the Labour Panel in 1983, remaining in the upper house until 1987 as a member of the 17th Seanad. He was successful at the 1987 general election, winning a seat in the 25th Dáil as a Fine Gael Teachta Dála (TD) for Mayo East. He was re-elected to the Dáil in 1989, 1992 and 1997.

Jim Higgins

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Jim Higgins (footballer)

James Higgins (born 3 February 1926) is an Irish former professional footballer. He was born in Dublin and played with Home Farm, and then for Dundalk in the League of Ireland, before transferring to Birmingham City in England in 1949. In a four-year spell at Birmingham he played 50 league games and scored 12 goals before returning to play with Dundalk again in 1953.

He played just once for the Republic of Ireland national football team, appearing in a 1–0 friendly defeat to Argentina in Dalymount Park on 13 May 1951.

References

Jim Higgins (British politician)

Jim Higgins (2 December 1930 – 13 October 2002) was a British revolutionary socialist and leading member of the International Socialists.

Biography

Born into a working-class family in Harrow, London, Higgins joined the Young Communist League at 14. Age eighteen, he was apprenticed to the Post Office as a telecommunications engineer.

After National Service in the early 1950s, he became active in both the Communist Party of Great Britain and the Post Office Engineering Union. He left the Communist Party after Nikita Khrushchev's 1956 secret speech and the Soviet invasion of Hungary. Higgins instead joined the Trotskyist Socialist Labour League, soon leaving to join the Socialist Review Group which became the International Socialists (IS), and becoming the group's Secretary.

By the 1960s, Higgins was a POEU branch secretary and was elected to the union's national executive, but he gave up his union work to become IS's full-time national secretary in the early 1970s. In a burst of internal quarrels in the period 1973-76 he left the organisation. He was a founder member of the Workers League, but this organisation soon broke apart. Instead, he built a new life as a journalist, later moving into magazine design. He remained active as a writer and speaker at left wing meetings up until his death and in 1997 published a memoir, More Years for the Locust.