Brendan Clifford (born 1936) is an Irish historian and political activist. Early life and education He was born in the Sliabh Luachra area of Munster, Republic of Ireland. Career As a young man, Clifford emigrated to the United Kingdom and became involved in left-wing politics. Initially, he was an associate of Michael McCreery, a leader of the Committee to Defeat Revisionism, for Communist Unity, a small British Marxist–Leninist group that had left the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1963. Later, he joined the Irish Communist Group which soon split into two factions; Clifford sided with the Maoist faction, which named itself the Irish Communist Organisation (ICO). In 1967, Clifford gave a public speech on the Republican Congress in Wynn's Hotel, Dublin, at a meeting of the Irish trade union group Scéim na gCeardchumann. In the early 1970s, he joined the other ICO members in advocating the "two-nations theory"that the Ulster Protestants formed a separate nation and the Republic of Ireland had no right to force them into a United Ireland against their wishes. Clifford soon became a prolific publisher of material advocating the group's viewpoint. The ICO later changed its name to the British and Irish Communist Organisation (B&ICO). He was an active campaigner against Irish nationalism alongside other B&ICO members including his wife Angela Clifford, Jack Lane, Manus O'Riordan and Len Callendar. By the late 1970s, according to historian Richard P. Davis, Clifford and historian Peter Brooke were effectively leading the B&ICO. In the 1980s, Clifford began campaigning for the organisation of British mainland political parties in Northern Ireland. He was an active member of the Campaign for Equal Citizenship political-advocacy group which advocated this aim. Clifford was strongly against the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement and wrote several pamphlets attacking the agreement and especially the Irish politician John Hume, whom Clifford regarded as a reactionary Irish Nationalist; and Queen's University Belfast, which Clifford claimed was biased against the Ulster Unionists. As the B&ICO became inactive in the mid-1980s, he began working through several new groups, including the Aubane Historical Society, an organisation originally intended to be a local history organisation, but later expanded into the role of opposing the "revisionist" movement in Irish history; and the Ernest Bevin Society, the B&ICO's British branch. In a piece written for The Independent, Clifford argued that Northern Catholics had no interest in a United Ireland and therefore electoral integration was the answer