Early life was an influence upon Mac Aonghusa growing up Born in
Salthill,
Galway,
County Galway in 1933, Mac Aonghusa was the son of Criostóir Mac Aonghusa, a writer and Irish language activist, and Mairéad Ní Lupain (De Lappe), a nurse and native Irish speaker. The eldest of four siblings, Mac Aonghusa grew up speaking Irish as his first language and allegedly did not learn English until the age of eleven. The Mac Aonghusa parents were left-wing
Irish republicans who supported
Fianna Fáil (his father at one time was a Fianna Fáil councillor)
Member of the Labour party In the 1960s both Mac Aonghusa and his wife joined the
Sean Connolly branch of the Labour Party in Dublin. The branch had established a reputation as a haven for intellectuals who wanted a branch to themselves away from the many other Labour branches dominated by trade unionists. The branch came to advocate for expressly socialist policies (something previously avoided by the Labour party in conservative Ireland) combined with on-the-ground grass-roots campaigning. Through the Sean Connolly Branch, both Mac Aonghusa and his wife began to develop significant influence over the leader of the Labour party
Brendan Corish. In the aftermath, Mac Aonghusa portrayed himself a left-wing martyr purged by a right-wing "
Star chamber", a tactic that garnered him sympathy. Nevertheless, his expulsion was confirmed at the October 1967 party conference, despite one last appeal. His wife Catherine left the party alongside him. Upon the onset of
the Troubles, Mac Aonghusa was initially supportive of
Official Sinn Féin, however by 1972 he came to resent them and, through the
Ned Stapleton Cumann, their secret influence over RTÉ. During the
Arms Crisis in 1970, Mac Aonghusa supported
Charles Haughey and
Neil Blaney, who stood accused of arranging to supply weapons to the
Provisional IRA, in the pages of the
New Statesman and other left‐wing journals. In this time period, Mac Aonghusa warned editors not to reprint his material in the Republic of Ireland as there was a de facto ban on him, and indeed, official attempts were made to block the transmission of his telexed reports. and during which time Mac Aonghusa became involved in setting up a radio station in
Namibia, linked to the
SWAPO nationalist party. In the 1980s, Haughey twice appointed Mac Aonghusa to the
Arts Council as well as naming him president of
Bord na Gaeilge (1989 to 1993). This was an issue as Mac Aonghusa was already president of
Conradh na Gaeilge; being head of the main Irish language lobbying body as well as the state body responsible for the Irish language had an obvious conflict of interest. In 1991, following the announcement by Haughey that the government was to fund the creation of an Irish-language television station (launched in 1996 as
Teilifís na Gaeilge), an elated Mac Aonghusa suggested that Haughey would be "remembered among the families of the Gael as long as the Gaelic nation shall survive". In 1992 there were calls for Mac Aonghusa to step down from Bord na Gaeilge after he pronounced that "every respectable nationalist" in West Belfast should vote for Sinn Féin
Gerry Adams over the
SDLP candidate
Joe Hendron in the
1992 UK general election as Mac Aonghusa considered a defeat for Adams "a victory for British imperialism". Nevertheless, Mac Aonghusa simultaneously advised voters in South Down to vote for the SDLP's
Eddie McGrady over Sinn Féin. Mac Aonghusa railed against his detractors at the Conradh na Gaeilge
árdfheis that year, declaring that "The mind of the slave, of the slíomadóir, of the hireling and the vagabond is still fairly dominant in Ireland". As of 1995, Mac Aonghusa continued to label himself a socialist. In the foreword to the book he wrote about James Connolly he released that year, Mac Aonghusa declared that However, with the recent
collapse of the Soviet Union in mind, Mac Aonghusa declared that the
Stalinist regimes of Eastern Europe had not been socialist, and argued that the
social democracies of
Scandinavia (the
Nordic model), were what James Connolly had envisioned as the desired socialist society. In the same text, Mac Aonghusa accused the Irish education system as well as Ireland's media of obfuscating Connolly's views on socialism and nationalism. Mac Aonghusa battled through ill health in his final years but remained able to continue writing a number of books. His last publication,
Súil Tharam in 2001, came just two years before his death in 2003. ==Personal life==