Christopher Fogarty

For the Australian rules footballer, see Chris Fogarty.

Christopher Fogarty better known as Chris Fogarty, is an American former civil engineer, writer and political activist in the Irish American community.

Background

Fogarty was born in Chicago in the United States to Irish parents. At the age of ten he moved to rural Ireland (Castlerea, County Roscommon) with his parents until returning to the United States at the age of eighteen. Fogarty also spent two years in the United States Army in France. He has worked as a civil engineer in Illinois, Puerto Rico, Borneo, Venezuela, Argentina, Paraguay, Honduras and El Salvador.

Political activism

Great Hunger as Irish Holocaust

Fogarty published a pamphlet entitled The Mass Graves of Ireland: 1845-1850 in which he claimed that of the 130 regiments of the British Empire, 67 were in Ireland during the Hunger exporting meats, livestock, grains, dairy and poultry products out of the country for export. The pamphlet also featured a map locating what he says are 170 mass graves in Ireland, along with the locations of British regimental deployments of the time.

Fogarty's 1980s pamphlet was turned into a website on the internet in 1995, at IrishHolocaust.org which expanded on the information. Later, in 2015, he published a full length volume entitled Ireland 1845-1850: the Perfect Holocaust, and Who Kept it "Perfect", which was printed first in the United States and then later editions in Dublin and Australia.

Activism during the Troubles

Fogarty and his County Limerick-born wife Mary O'Sullivan (married in 1957) became prominent Chicago-based activists in the Irish-American community during The Troubles in Northern Ireland opposing what they regarded as British injustices. They took part in campaigns to free the Birmingham Six and Guildford Four, as well as taking a stance against the 1972 US-UK Extradition Treaty (later replaced by the UK–US extradition treaty of 2003). In the Chicago City Council, Fogarty and his wife worked for the enactment of the MacBride Principles for Fair Employment in Northern Ireland, which later became federal law and dealt with how the United States approached Northern Ireland economically. The two also led the Illinois campaign to release Joe Doherty, a former volunteer with the Provisional Irish Republican Army, who was imprisoned in the United States in 1983 without trial and threatened with extradition to the United Kingdom for killing a member of the Special Air Service. Fogarty was chairman of the North Side chapter of the Irish American Unity Conference in 1990 and also worked as the Vice President of the Friends of Irish Freedom (a separate one to the organisation Friends of Irish Freedom which was wound up in 1932). Fogarty's writings have featured in The Blanket and The Pensive Quill (Anthony McIntyre's website).

Works

• The Mass Graves of Ireland: 1845-1850 (1980s)
• Ireland 1845-1850: the Perfect Holocaust, and Who Kept it "Perfect" (2015)

External links

• [Christ Fogarty interview:https://www.rte.ie/radio1/liveline/programmes/2017/0510/874092-liveline-wednesday-10-may-2017/?clipid=2481955]
• IrishHolocaust.org

• Smythies, Captain Raymond R. H. (1894). Historical Records of the 40th (2nd Somersetshire) Regiment. Devonport: A. H. Swiss. Search this book on

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