Those We Lost: recent Irish-American passings

Tom Clancy died in 1990, Paddy Clancy in 1998, and Tommy Makem in 2007. Liam Clancy is survived by his wife Kim, sisters Joan and Peg, children Eban, Siobhan, Donal and Fiona, and eight grandchildren.

Tim Costello
1945-2009 

Noted labor advocate and author Tim Costello died December 4 at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts of pancreatic cancer. He was 64. A Boston native, Costello spent two decades as a truck driver and was a vital voice for workers’ rights. Born in 1945 with a father who was a union president, he joined Students for a Democratic Society at the New School in New York, around the same time that he began driving oil trucks. In 1971, he moved back to Boston and became an outspoken voice and writer against corruption in the Teamsters union. 

In 1999, Costello founded the Campaign on Contingent Work, which evolved into the North American Alliance for Fair Employment, and in 2005, he helped to found Global Labor Strategies, which encouraged cross-border alliances to improve wages and working conditions in the context of a new climate of outsourcing and globalization. He was the co-author of four books: Common Sense for Hard Times in the 1970s, Building Bridges: The Emerging Grassroots Coalition of Labor and Community in 1990, and Global Village or Global Pillage: Economic Reconstruction From the Bottom Up in 1994, all with co-author Jeremy Brecher. Brecher and Costello teamed up with Brendan Smith in 2000 to publish Globalization From Below: The Power of Solidarity.

Costello is survived by his brother Sean, his wife Susanne Rasmussen, his daughters Pia and Gillian, and two grandchildren.

John Crofton
1912-2009

Sir John Crofton, a medical pioneer, researcher and clinician who demonstrated the effectiveness of combinations of antibiotics in curing tuberculosis, died November 3 at age 97 in his home in Edinburgh. He began his work in the late 1940s, when antibiotics were first being used in clinical practice, but tuberculosis was resistant to each drug that doctors attempted to treat it with. Crofton used a three-antibiotic combination on tuberculosis patients in Edinburgh and announced his findings at the 1958 meeting of the British Medical Association. His treatment had cured tuberculosis in 63 patients over 18 months.

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Nster.com