Deale, Edgar Martin (1902–99), composer and civil activist, was born 1 August 1902 in Dublin, the first of four children of Edwin Deale (1870–1948), paper merchant, of Dublin, and his wife, Minnie (née Martin; 1880–1939), from Killorglin, Co. Kerry. Of his three brothers, Kenneth Deale (qv) became a high court judge and Leslie Deale (1910–99) inherited the family's stationery business, Edwin Deale & Son. Edgar Deale attended Christ Church cathedral grammar school and became a member of the cathedral choir in 1913. Having left school at the age of sixteen, he worked for several insurance companies before joining the Zurich as Dublin branch manager in 1929. After his retirement in September 1963 he continued for a number of years to serve the company as an adviser.
Deale's family was intensely musical: Edwin Deale was organist of the Methodist Centenary Church at St Stephen's Green, Dublin, for fifty-three years and all his sons became competent pianists. Around 1940 Edgar studied music privately with J. Turner Huggard (a cousin) and William J. Watson (1913–87), but as a composer he was largely self-taught. For sixty years from 1922 he was a bass singer with the Culwick Choral Society, which in 1927 won two first prizes at the eisteddfod in Holyhead with both Edgar and Kenneth Deale as members; Edgar was the choir's chairman from 1955. Another choral society with which he was associated was the Clef Club, which holds many of his manuscript arrangements of Irish traditional music.
As a composer Deale started late and was of minor importance: his first major performance was of Three Christmas songs in 1940. He wrote around forty original works, many of which were revised or withdrawn several years after their composition. There is a small remaining corpus of remarkable works, such as A pageaunt of human lyfe for baritone and piano to words by Thomas More (1945, orchestrated 1966), Ceol mall réidh for orchestra (1946, rev. 1973), the choral works Five poets – seven songs (1961, rev. 1965) and Padraic Colum: four facets (1967), the Dublin suite for oboe d'amore and piano (1969), several choral hymns, and arrangements of traditional Irish music. ‘I have a small talent’ was his modest comment about his own music, which is technically well crafted and eminently singable, but conservative in relation to work by the more forward-looking of his contemporaries. Some of his music was published by Elkin, Roberton, and Oxford University Press.
Deale left his mark as an activist for various cultural and social causes. He was a co-founder in 1948 of the Music Association of Ireland and was actively involved in many of its projects, including editing the Catalogue of contemporary Irish composers (1968, rev. 1973). For twelve years, until the mid-1950s, he was a governor of the Royal Irish Academy of Music. As director of a company called Concert and Assembly Hall Ltd, he fought for the building of a dedicated concert hall in Dublin, which was to have been built as the John F. Kennedy Hall to a design by Michael Scott (qv); the plan was dropped in favour of what became the National Concert Hall at Earlsfort Terrace (opened 1981). In the mid-1930s he founded the Safety First Association of Ireland in response to the growing number of traffic accidents; in time this became the National Safety Council. In 1947 he was a founder of the Irish Council for Civil Liberties and became its vice-president, campaigning against excessive censorship and bureaucracy. In the 1960s and 1970s he fought to save Georgian Dublin from developers.
He married Ruth Margaret Doran (d. April 1973) in 1932, and they lived at 16 Leeson Park; there were no children of the marriage. Deale died 19 December 1999 at his Dublin home. His diaries and many music manuscripts are held at TCD, and some of his music is available from the Contemporary Music Centre, Dublin.