My friend Tony McNally, who has died of cancer aged 81, was an activist determined to devote his energy to environmentalism.
During the 1990s he was one of the organisers of “green shows” at the National Exhibition Centre in Birmingham. In 2003, he established Climate Change Solutions (CCS), a not-for-profit company, which, over the following two decades, acted as a key adviser for climate change initiatives across the Midlands and nationally.
It organised conferences and exhibitions and promoted a wide range of renewable energy technologies, in 2004 pioneering an annual hydrogen fuel conference at the NEC, and latterly championing solar energy. Always optimistic about people’s ability to confront challenges, Tony was a director of the Heart of England community solar farm and the driving force behind the West Midlands Bright Solar Future taskforce.
Born in Cookstown, County Tyrone, Northern Ireland, while he was still a child Tony moved with his parents, James, a factory worker, and Mary, an auxiliary nurse, to Birmingham to find employment after the second world war. They were lodged in a disused army barracks in the spectacularly ill-named Hollywood, on the edge of Birmingham, and Tony left Bishop Challoner secondary school in King’s Heath at 15 with no qualifications. He joined the army and served for three years in Germany.
He got involved in socialist politics on his return. During the 1960s and 70s within the Young Communist League and Communist party he and his colleagues developed a new approach to leftwing politics, engaging with youth rebellion, feminism and environmentalism. Tony rejected old dogmas and stuck to these reformist principles throughout his life.
One of his early notable actions came when he climbed Oliver Cromwell’s statue outside the House of Commons the day after Bloody Sunday in 1972, protesting about the shooting of civil rights marchers.
He continued to campaign on key issues of the day: as one of those organising the two people’s marches for jobs that passed through the Midlands in 1981 and 1983; in solidarity with the miners in their fight against pit closures; protesting for nuclear disarmament; and in support of Vietnamese, Chilean, South African and more recently Palestinian people, in their struggles against repression.
Tony is survived by his wife, Ruth Longoni, whom he married in 1971, their daughter, Rebecca, and grandchildren, Emily and Lewis, and by his brother, Tom.
