Sean MacBride; Nobel, Lenin Prize Recipient

DUBLIN, Ireland — Sean MacBride, the only person to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize and the Lenin Peace Prize, died Friday at his home in Dublin. He was 83, and his son, Tiernan, said the cause of death was not immediately known.

Once a young gunman with the Irish Republican Army, MacBride became one of Ireland’s most noted constitutional and criminal lawyers and was known internationally as a crusader for human rights and nuclear disarmament.

Irish Prime Minister Charles Haughey said in a statement that MacBride was “a statesman of international status who was listened to with respect all around the world.”

Fought for Underdog

Throughout his life, MacBride fought for the underdog. In his later years, the former Irish foreign minister devoted much of his time to Amnesty International, the London-based human rights organization.

MacBride won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1974, along with former Japanese Prime Minister Eisaku Sato, for his “untiring fight for human rights.” At that time, he was U.N. commissioner for Southwest Africa, also known as Namibia and controlled by South Africa. He was charged with bringing independence to the territory.

In 1977, the Soviet Union awarded MacBride the International Lenin Prize for Peace Among Nations for his work in Namibia and in 1978 he received the American Medal of Justice.

His experiences rivaled the diversity of those awards.

He fought as a teen-ager with the IRA, became Irish foreign minister in a 1948 coalition government and was a co-founder of Amnesty International and an assistant secretary-general of the United Nations.

Opposed Campaign of Violence

MacBride was among the senior leaders of the IRA in the 1920s and 1930s but strongly opposed its current campaign of violence. The guerrilla group is fighting to drive the British out of Northern Ireland.

Despite his international reputation, his political career at home had been moribund since Clann na Poblachta, the radical nationalist party he founded in 1946, collapsed in 1965.

MacBride was born in Paris where his parents were living in exile after his father fought against the British during the Boer War. He grew up among European intellectuals and nationalists in Paris, London and Dublin.

His father, Maj. John MacBride, was a leader of the ill-fated 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin. He was executed, along with his brother, Joseph, by the British.

His mother, Maud Gonne MacBride, rebel daughter of an English army colonel, was repeatedly jailed for her nationalist activities.

‘Concerned About Prisoners’

“All her life she was concerned about prisoners,” MacBride once said. “Her life interest seemed to converge in trying to get people released from prison.”

MacBride played a role in setting up the Council of Europe in 1949 and in resisting pressure to end Dublin’s neutrality and join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

His nationalism established his credentials in the Third World, whose future leaders he had met in the 1920s at anti-imperialist conferences. Among them were Ho Chi Minh and Jawaharlal Nehru.

In 1979, one of his mediation attempts was aimed at securing the release of American hostages seized in Tehran. Although MacBride said he sympathized with the Islamic revolution, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini rejected the initiative, keeping the hostages until January, 1981.

His prime focus in his final years was nuclear disarmament and eradication of disease.

“We’re spending $1.7 million a minute on military preparations in the world,” he told the Associated Press in 1983.

“If we stopped for 24 hours, we could wipe out several diseases. If we stopped for a week, we could end all water pollution.”