John Beattie (14 April 1886 – 9 March 1960) was a Northern Ireland Labour Party (NILP) politician from Northern Ireland. He was a teacher by profession. In 1925, he became a Member of the Northern Ireland House of Commons for Belfast East. He represented Belfast Pottinger from 1929. At one point he served as leader of the NILP. Early life Beattie was born into a Presbyterian family in Ballymacarrett, Belfast and left school at 13. After working in the Belfast Ropeworks he joined the British Army for three years and then became an apprentice blacksmith in the Harland & wolf shipyards and joined the Independent Labour Party in Belfast and later became assistant secretary of the Associated Blacksmiths' Society and then from 1921 to 1925 the full time organiser. Early career Belfast did not prosper in the 1920s. During the period, 1923 to 1930, unemployment in Northern Ireland averaged 19 per cent of the insured workforce. Many of the long term unemployed became ineligible to receive unemployment assistance. To make matters worse, the Belfast Poor Law Union, the last resort of the destitute applied its rules on who qualified to receive assistance very harshly. On one occasion in June 1926 unemployed men protested outside a meeting of the Guardians of the Belfast Poor Law Union. Jack Beattie and William McMullen, a fellow NILP MP were among their number. The two MPs obstructed the meeting and were unceremoniously "seized by the police and thrown out onto the pavement." The Guardians were later congratulated for their "stand ...by a delegation of Protestant clergymen who called on the guardians 'to cut off grants to parasites'". Historian Tim Pat Coogan remarks of the time that, despite the prevailing conditions, "the Unionist ascendency was so secure that it could blithely go ahead with measures such as cutting unemployment benefits while lavishing expenditure on the new parliament building, which was opened in 1932". Jack Beattie did not blithely play along with the establishment. One occasion perhaps highlights this better than any: in September 1932, Lord Craigavon, the Prime Minister of Northern Ireland, spoke in the Parliament of Northern Ireland on a motion thanking the Belfast Corporation for the use of the City Hall for meetings of the Northern Ireland Parliament. Beattie, incensed, seized the mace and shouted that his motion to bring "to your notice the serious position of the unemployment in Northern Ireland" had been