Joseph Johnston (Irish politician)

Joseph Johnston (20 August 1890 – 1972) was an Irish academic, farmer, writer and politician.

He was born in 1890 in Toomog townland, Castlecaulfield, County Tyrone,[1] to John Johnston, a national school teacher, and the former Mary Geddis. He came from a Presbyterian family of Ulster-Scots descent.[2]

He was educated at Dungannon Royal School (1902–06), Trinity College Dublin (1906–10, BA (Mod) in Classics) and Lincoln College, Oxford (1910–12).[3]

He supported Home Rule and was the author of Civil War in Ulster (1913) and The Nemesis of Economic Nationalism (1934).[1] He became Professor of Applied Economics in Trinity College Dublin in 1939.[1]

He was first elected to Seanad Éireann as an Independent member in 1938 by the Dublin University constituency.[4] He was re-elected to the 2nd and 3rd Seanad but lost his at the 1943 election. He was elected to the 5th Seanad in 1944 and lost his seat at the 1948 election. He was nominated by the Taoiseach to the 7th Seanad in 1951 and lost his seat at the 1954 election.[4]

Johnston was the father of Irish theoretical physicist Roy Johnston, a republican activist who was later a member of the Official Irish Republican Army. His daughter, Dr Maureen Carmody, was a member of the National Executive of the Irish Labour Party for many years, and at one time an elected Labour member of Nenagh Town Council.[5]