Our Board

I hail from the northern outskirts of Belfast, coming from a family of eight. I attended Secondary School in North Belfast, attending primary school in Greencastle. I played football and hurling with my local GAA Club while at school. 

I served an apprenticeship with Shorts when I completed school, an aircraft manufacturing company, located beside Harland and Wolf shipyard, joining a trade union for the first time. I have been a constant member to the present day. I benefitted from a good industrial training and opportunities for higher level education, allowing me to progress to Development Engineer. I then completed teacher training, returning to my alma mater to teach. 

I joined the staff of Irish Congress of Trade Unions in 1979, where I represented and negotiated on behalf of the trade union movement on a wide range of issues with public bodies and at European level. My work included preparation of detailed economic, social and political responses to consultation papers, including submissions to Programmes for Government. I had a profile as a frontline spokesperson for Congress and a frequent media participant in local, national and international news outlets. 

I remain active as a retired member of my own union’s (Siptu) retired members structures and with the ICTU retired members committee. I retain a wide interest in a wide range of political issues, local and international, campaigning and agitating for political change in the capitalist and neoliberal political arrangements which blight our society today on the island of Ireland, and the world in general. The Irish Senior Citizens Parliament has a particular role to play in implementing this change, as it can benefit older people.  

Born in Dublin in 1946, Mick O’Reilly left school early and became involved in the trade union movement when he was a teenager. He emigrated to Britain for a short period before he was elected as a shop steward in Fiat Motors. In 1978, Mick began a career, in Dundalk, as a full-time trade union official that would span decades and take him to every corner of the island. He became Republic of Ireland secretary in 2002 and was appointed as Regional Secretary for the ATGWU four years later in 2006. He has served on the Executive of the Irish Congress of Trade Union and its Finance and General Purposes Committee.

Despite retiring in 2008, Mick went on to serve on the Employment Appeals Tribunal. He was elected by the ICTU executive and served on the Citizen’s Assembly of Northern Ireland. He remains very active in Unite and the trade union movement, representing the Dublin Council of Trade Unions at the Pensioner’s Parliament.

In 2019, Mick published his memoir From Lucifer to Lazarus detailing his own life on the left and his personal experiences of historic times in the Irish Trade Union Movement.