Patrick Michael O'Hanlon (8 May 1944 – 7 April 2009) was an Irish nationalist politician who later became a barrister. Born in Drogheda, County Louth, but resident in Mullaghbawn, South Armagh, since childhood, O'Hanlon attended St Colman's College and at University College Dublin, where he studied law. He worked as a maths teacher, a youth leader and vocational training facilitator. SDLP leader Mark Durkan called O'Hanlon a "real champion of civil rights, justice and reconciliation".
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Political career
Prominent in the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA), O'Hanlon was elected at the 1969 Northern Ireland general election as an independent Nationalist MP for South Armagh. In August 1970, he was a founder member of the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP). O'Hanlon was jailed several times in Armagh Jail for advocating civil rights for Catholics and one-man-one-vote.
O'Hanlon's father, also Paddy, had been an active participant in the Irish War of Independence and lost a limb during the original Dungooley Ambush in 1922 during the Irish Civil War. The journalist Toby Harnden erroneously stated that the leg was buried in St Patrick's Cemetery, Dowdallshill. Were it not for the intervention of a nurse who was a member of Cumann na mBan O'Hanlon Snr could have been summarily executed in 1922 in Dundalk. His mother, Sarah, had in fact signed nomination papers to enable Michael Collins to contest the Northern Ireland House of Commons in the Armagh Constituency. The Northern Ireland Office denied their request for redress done to the farm and business in Mullaghbawn after the passage of the Anglo-Irish Treaty as the family were "bitter republicans".