The Common Market Defence Campaign, formed to campaign for a No vote, had an impressive line-up of artists and intellectuals among its patrons: the great essayist Hubert Butler, the poet Austin Clarke, the 1916 Rising veteran and activist Máire Comerford, the playwright John B. Keane, the novelist Monk Gibbon, the actor Siobhán McKenna, the lawyer and anti-apartheid campaigner Kadar Asmal, the novelist and editor Peadar O’Donnell, my favourite singer Luke Kelly of The Dubliners and the academic sociologist and future president Michael D. Higgins.
