Seán MacManus (politician)

Seán MacManus is an Irish Sinn Féin politician, and was the national chairperson of the party from 1984 to 1990.

MacManus was born in 1950 near Blacklion, County Cavan, Ireland and moved to London in the 1960s to find work. There he met and married Helen McGovern, a native of Glenfarne, County Leitrim. In 1976, he returned to Ireland and settled in the Maugheraboy area of Sligo town, County Sligo so that their family of two boys could be educated in Ireland.

Still based in Maugheraboy, MacManus has been involved in Irish Republican politics since the early 1970s and was secretary of the County Sligo Anti-H-Block Committee which campaigned in support of the republican prisoners hunger strikes of 1980/81. He became a member of the Sinn Féin Ard Comhairle (National Executive) in 1982 and remained there for over twenty years. MacManus was elected as the first Sinn Féin National Chairperson from 1984 until 1990. After the IRA ceasefire in 1994 MacManus was part of the first Sinn Féin delegation to meet with the British government in over seventy years. He was also involved in the protracted negotiations leading to the Good Friday Agreement.

First elected to Sligo Corporation (now Sligo Borough Council) in 1994 he has remained there to date. He was also elected to Sligo County Council in 1999 where he still serves.

In 2000, MacManus became Mayor of Sligo, the first Sinn Féin Mayor in the Republic of Ireland since the beginning of The Troubles in 1969. He was also elected Mayor in 2003.

MacManus has two sons. Chris MacManus, the youngest, is also an elected member of Sligo Borough Council as well as having served several years on Sinn Féin's National Executive. His eldest son, Joseph MacManus, was an IRA volunteer who was killed in a firefight against a UDR squad in Belleek, County Fermanagh in February 1992.