Tyrone O’Sullivan, who has died aged 77, was the miners’ leader who became a Welsh national hero when he saved the Tower colliery in Hirwaun, where he worked, from closure by engineering a buyout and keeping it going for another 13 years as the last deep mined pit in Wales. It was a dramatic entrepreneurial twist in the career of a committed socialist, and caught the imagination of the Welsh people, raising spirits and even inspiring an opera. Mark Drakeford, the country’s first minister, described O’Sullivan as “a great figure in the history of Wales in our time”. The man himself insisted: “We were [just] ordinary men; we wanted jobs and bought a pit.”
For all the simplicity of his words, O’Sullivan’s achievement was huge – and unique. Miners had struggled to pick up their lives after the defeat of the 1984-85 strike. Pit after pit voted to take redundancy terms and union leaders despaired at the resulting closures. The Tower mineworkers had voted to do the same, when in 1994 they were the last deep mine in Wales. But after signing the deal and then drowning their disappointment in a local pub, O’Sullivan and his allies found themselves still convinced that there was plenty of good coal left down below, and so came up with the idea of a buyout.
