McQuillan, John (‘Jack’) (1920–98), Gaelic footballer and politician, was born 30 August 1920 at Ballyforan, Co. Roscommon, eldest among seven children of Thomas Francis McQuillan, an RIC sergeant who was pensioned after the 1921 Anglo–Irish treaty and became a teacher, and Annie McQuillan (née Fallon), a national school teacher. He was educated at Roscommon CBS, Summerhill College, Sligo, and St Clement's Redemptorist college, Limerick. A lieutenant in the defence forces during the 1939–45 emergency, he frequently ruffled superiors with unconventional attitudes toward the responsibilities of command. First displaying prowess in Gaelic football at schools level, he played a vital role on the great Roscommon sides of the 1940s, which won four senior Connacht championships (1943–4, 1946–7), and the county's only two all-Ireland senior titles (1943–4). A determined and robust left-footed full forward, he scored the second Roscommon goal in the 2–7 to 2–2 victory over Cavan in the 1943 all-Ireland final replay, and starred in three memorable championship matches against Kerry: the two-point comeback victory in the 1944 final; the drawn 1946 final, in which Roscommon squandered a six-point lead by conceding two late goals; and the fiercely contested 1946 final replay, won by Kerry (2–8 to 0–10). A modest 5 ft 9 in (1.75 m) in height, owing to his practice of bodybuilding McQuillan was considered the strongest man on the team. He last appeared for Roscommon in 1952, when brought on as a substitute in the all-Ireland semi-final defeat to Meath. He played club football for Ballyforan till its disbandment, then transferred to St Patrick's, Knockcroghery, with whom he won two county club championships. Selected regularly for Connacht in the Railway Cup competition, he was on the 1945 side that lost the final to Leinster. Some of his best performances were on army teams; his bruising tussles with famed Kerry fullback Joe Keohane (qv), also a wartime soldier, were legendary. Jack's brother William McQuillan, a medical doctor, won two Connacht senior football championship medals with Roscommon (1952–3), and played on the Connacht side that won the 1951 Railway Cup.
Campaigning on a programme of radical land and agricultural reform, McQuillan was elected TD for Roscommon (1948–65); one of the ten Clann na Poblachta candidates returned in the 1948 election, he aligned more with the socially progressive rather than with the republican wing of the party. He held the seat through four subsequent general elections, securing a healthy personal vote based on his football fame and personal charisma, but also tapping a streak of small-farmer radicalism. He developed a lasting personal friendship and political alliance with party colleague Noel Browne (qv), the mercurial minister for health in the first inter-party government. Resigning from Clann na Poblachta because of the party's treatment of Browne over the mother-and-child health scheme (13 April 1951), he withstood charges of anti-clericalism to win re-election as an independent, one of fourteen returned in the May 1951 election, holding as a bloc the balance of dáil power. Establishing his reputation as ‘the most independent of independents’ (Manning, 292), he broke ranks with Browne and two other ex-Clann TDs by voting against the election of Éamon de Valera (qv) as taoiseach, fearing the return of ‘a dictatorship system . . . because the leopard cannot change its spots’ (quoted in Horgan, 165). He declined to follow Browne into Fianna Fáil in 1953, rejecting the government party's offer of a parliamentary secretaryship responsible for western development; the post went instead to Jack Lynch (qv).
Re-elected in 1954, and in 1957 as an ‘independent republican’, he became involved in the 1913 Club (1957–8) (the name alluding to the lockout), the leftist discussion group organised by supporters of Browne after the latter's departure from Fianna Fáil, and the incubator of the National Progressive Democratic Party (NPD), launched by Browne and McQuillan (May 1958). McQuillan strongly influenced the populism of the party's initial policy statement, which urged rapid development of such rural concerns as fisheries, forestry, and land reclamation, and denounced the army, presidency, and diplomatic corps as examples of fiscal waste and inefficiency. The party's only two TDs, Browne and McQuillan exerted a disproportionate influence in dáil debate, exercising industry, imagination, and a command of procedure to harry Fianna Fáil ministers relentlessly with probing, well-researched parliamentary questions, raising issues (largely social rather than economic) that embarrassed both sides of the house: health care, conditions in mental hospitals (especially the plight of involuntary patients), corporal punishment in the schools, capital punishment, compulsory Irish, neutrality. Despite evoking derision, outrage, or indifference, and enduring continual red baiting – their questions often elicited a dismissive ‘ask Khruschev’ – they were regarded by many observers as the true opposition. Their skill at introducing private member's motions resulted in a change in dáil rules, restricting such motions to members of a party with a minimum of seven members (1962). Their close questioning (December 1958–January 1959) of de Valera's financial and managerial relationship with the Irish Press – originating in McQuillan's acquisition of several Press Group shares, allowing him and Browne to inspect company records – may have contributed to de Valera's decision to retire from active politics and seek the Irish presidency.
McQuillan topped the poll and secured the first Roscommon seat in the 1961 general election. During the Cuban missile crisis he and Browne joined a non-violent protest demonstration outside the US embassy, controversially dispersed by gardaí using dogs (October 1962). Asserting that Irish politics were realigning along more clearly defined conservative–progressive lines, he and Browne disbanded the NPD and joined Labour (November 1963), responding to that party's leftward tilt under the leadership of Brendan Corish (qv). Taking a libel case against the Roscommon Herald for reporting the remarks of a local politician, arising from the embassy protest, that he and Browne were communists, McQuillan testified that, as a practising catholic, he thought communism ‘a damnable idea’ because of its atheism; the jury found in his favour, but awarded a mere halfpenny damages (1964). Publicity attached to the case, combined with alienation of his small-farmer base by association with Labour Party image and policy, contributed to his defeat in the 1965 general election. Elected to Seanad Éireann (1965–9), he continued to advocate radical proposals regarding cooperative farming and rural industrial development (including public ownership of the milling, distilling, and bacon processing industries). Appointed general secretary of the Irish Post Office Officials Association (IPOOA) (February 1966), a militant breakaway trade union, he became embroiled in a bitter and protracted dispute with the mainstream trade-union movement and their allies within the Labour Party, climaxing in withdrawal of the party whip (April 1968). Resigning soon after from the Labour Party (July 1968), he accused Corish and other party leaders of exploiting socialism as a ‘gimmick’.
Disillusioned with politics and the prospects for radical social change in Ireland, McQuillan withstood entreaties from Browne to rejoin Labour, and from constituency supporters to contest the 1969 election as an independent, and retired from public life. He lived with his family for seven years in Alicante, Spain, followed by one year in Paris. Returning to Ireland in 1977, he settled at 28 Seapoint Court, Bray, Co. Wicklow. After supporting the ‘independent labour’ candidacies of Browne and Matt Merrigan (qv) in the 1977 general election, he joined them as founding members of the Socialist Labour Party (October 1977), of which he became a trustee, but resigned from the party in objection to its adoption, under Merrigan's chairmanship, of a militantly republican line on Northern Ireland (1979). He died 8 March 1998 after a long illness at St Columcille's hospital, Loughlinstown, survived by his wife Angela, a native of Roscommon town, and their daughter Helene.