My life partner, Caroline O’Reilly, who has died aged 71, was a fearless community activist and socialist.
In the 1970s, when I first met her, Caroline was active in Southall, west London, helping to establish Rock Against Racism and the Anti-Nazi League, and was with her friend Blair Peach when he was killed by police in 1979. Later, having moved to Hackney, in east London, she organised against the poll tax. Caroline was a member of the Socialist Workers party from 1977 until she died, and was fond of paraphrasing Rosa Luxemburg that “revolutionaries are the best fighters for reform”.
In 1985 she toured South Africa on a covert solidarity visit, and in 1990 worked in Johannesburg with accountants who assisted “struggle organisations”. In 1998 she and I moved to South Africa on a permanent basis. Caroline was involved in implementing the government-funded Community Work Programme, which, by 2012, employed 93,000 people in the most marginalised parts of the country.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, Caroline played a pivotal role in the two most successful organisations to emerge from grassroots activity, the Community Organising Working Group and #PayTheGrants, both based in townships and informal settlements.
Born in Cork, she was the oldest of the six children of Frank O’Reilly, a bank official, and Anne, a housewife; she went to school there, and, later, to schools in Carlow and Bundoran. She attended University College Cork, where she was involved in starting one of the first women’s groups in Ireland, but at the end of her second year she moved to Britain.
She worked in a canning factory in Lincolnshire, and then a pub in London, and from 1973 was employed by the Allied Irish Bank in the City, where she was a union representative. Seeking to develop herself intellectually, in 1990 she began to study information and communication at the University of North London. Later, while working for Christian Aid, she completed an MSc in development studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies.
For most of our 27 years in South Africa Caroline and I lived in the Johannesburg suburb of Brixton, where she was part of the Community Forum. Before our return to London in 2024, she was honoured with a quilt made by community members.
Caroline was adventurous and courageous. She stood up to violence, was shot at by soldiers in Belfast, ran out of breath on Mount Kenya, was charged by elephants in Botswana, was caught in sudden snow blizzards on the Cairngorms and in the Drakensberg mountains, and coped with me coming out as transgender. She could stun with one sentence, but was funny and warm. She made you laugh at yourself but you never felt ridiculed, just grateful for her advice, support, friendship and love.
She is survived by me, and by her siblings Michael, Mary, Conor and Sally.
