Milestone year for union man Derek

IT has been a special year for Enniskillen Unite branch secretary Derek Parton who recently received a silver long-service medal from the union.
The award, which was presented to him by Jim Quinn, was agreed by the Union’s national executive committee in recognition of Mr Parton’s decades of service as a workplace rep and branch officer.
Mr Parton moved to Fermanagh in the late 1970s after being blacklisted for union organising efforts among transport drivers in his home town of Macclesfield.
He took a job with the driving the library bus and continued with his union membership with the Amalgamated Transport and General Workers Union – later to become Unite.
He was an activist for the union and labour movement throughout the 1980s in Fermanagh.
Since that time, he has held a range of positions for the union. In 1994 he was a member of the union organising committee and a workplace rep – a position he was to hold until his retirement in 2024.
As rep, he sat on a range of workplace consultative committees with the Education & Library Boards, representing workforce issues from 2003 to 2023.
Derek is perhaps best known for being the person who succeeded legendary Fermanagh trade unionist Jim Brown as secretary of the ATGWU branch in Enniskillen in 2003 – a position he continues to hold twenty-two years later in Unite.
Since the 1990s he has repeatedly been a Unite delegate on the Fermanagh Council of Trade Unions and he is a stalwart of the trades council’s annual Workers’ Memorial Day event.
Aside from his role in union structures, Derek is an active campaigner. In 1991 he made the news for challenging a threat to the staff rest room in the library.
In the early 2000s, he was central to building the powerful cross-community campaign in Enniskillen which defeated plans for water charges. In later years he was prominent in the campaigns to defend library opening hours and remains an active supporter of the hospital campaigns.
Derek is a regular presence on picket lines in Enniskillen.