Sean MacBride, A Life: From IRA Revolutionary to International Statesman

Sean MacBride (1904 1988) was at different times the Chief of Staff of the IRA, a top criminal lawyer, Irish Foreign Minister, and a founder of Amnesty International, of which organisation he was chairman from 1973 to 1976. He is the only person to have won both the Nobel Peace Prize (1974) and the Lenin Peace Prize (1977). He was Secretary General to the International Commission of Jurists and United Nations Commissioner for Namibia with the rank of Assistant Secretary General.He was born in Paris in 1904 and spoke with a heavy French accent all his life. His father was John MacBride, one of the executed leaders of the Easter Rising of 1916 in Dublin. His mother was Maud Gonne, the beauty whom Yeats regarded as his lost love. MacBride s life fell into three youthful revolutionary, culminating in his leadership of the IRA; conventional politics in middle age; followed by his later career as international statesman and human rights activist.MacBride was a figure of national and international importance, one of the most distinguished Irish people of the twentieth century. In Elizabeth Keane, he has found a biographer who surveys his life and times with scholarly authority and assurance."