The Fermanagh-born Redemptorist told of the hurt caused by the “whispering campaign” which was used to discredit the MacBride Principals, which he successfully got American companies to embrace.
The MacBride Principles – named by Fr McManus after Nobel Peace Prize winner Sean MacBride – were a set of nine industrial relation standards that US companies were asked to sign up to.
However, the Principles provoked an immediate and angry reaction from unionists and others who branded Fr McManus “a Provo fellow traveller”. Criticism of him and his growing influence on Washington’s Capitol Hill was relentless.
“This was all going on behind my back. It was aimed at closing us down before we got started,” Fr McManus said this week.
Now 81 and back on the Fermanagh farm where he was born and brought up during World War Two, Fr McManus took time out from visiting family and friends to speak.
And he recalled when he first became aware of how the British Secret Service used black propaganda to smear anyone it perceived as a political threat.“We knew this was the type of thing the British engaged in,” he said.
But Fr McManus was appalled to learn some senior Irish politicians had also stooped to using the same tactics as a means of attacking his character.
“In particular a senior figure in Irish diplomacy was telling anyone who’d listen that I was a ‘Provo priest’,” he said.
In the late 1970s, Fr McManus established the Irish National Caucus (INC), a human rights organisation which lobbied American politicians on Washington’s Capitol Hill. It focused on employment practices in Northern Ireland, where many American companies had financial interests.
From the beginning, the INC nailed its colours to the mast: It was non-violent, non-partisan and non-sectarian. And it didn’t support any group or party anywhere in Ireland.
And it wasn’t a support group for any organisation involved in violence in Northern Ireland. All of its funds were spent lobbying politicians and large companies based in the United States, but with business interests in Northern Ireland.
From its office on Capitol Hill, the Irish National Caucus set out to enlighten American politicians to the reality of business and economics in Northern Ireland.
One of its primary functions was to highlight employment practices which openly used religious and cultural bias as a means of denying an applicant a job.
The INC revealed that employment practices outlawed in America many years ago were still in place in Northern Ireland.
And Fr McManus said he also came under intense pressure from some Irish politicians not to raise the matter at all, but he point-blank refused.
“We started by making contact with minor American politicians and gradually worked our way up until we were invited into the Oval Office at the White House,” said Fr McManus.
He added: “In the end, we succeeded in getting the MacBride Principles passed into American law.”
But Fr McManus’s difficulties with the British Establishment began long before he ever set foot on America.
As an Irish Redemptorist priest working in England at the outbreak of the Troubles, he was often asked for his views, which were heavily critical of the unionist regime at Stormont.
But he was unaware a fellow Redemptorist colleague had contacted MI5, suggesting that they might like to keep an eye on him as he was espousing “subversive” views.
“I later learned MI5 signed up this priest as an agent and it was at that point I decided I would be better off working on the other side of the Atlantic,” Fr McManus said.
Sean McManus was born 81 years ago in the Fermanagh parish of Kinawley, a few miles from the border with the Republic which had been created just 20-odd years earlier.
And he has often spoken about the devastating effect partition had on his home area.
“Can you imagine how local people felt to wake up one morning to discover that much of their natural hinterland now formed part of another country? It was destabilising for everyone around here,” he said.
In 1971, Fr McManus intervened in a street disturbance in Enniskillen when he objected to RUC officers beating a young boy. He was arrested and later appeared in court on a public order offence and was fined £20.
McManus gave a stirring speech for the dock, stating he didn’t recognise the court, which he insisted had been imposed on the people of Ireland.
However, as the years passed, Fr McManus modified his views and lent his support to the Good Friday Agreement.
But he continued to lobby for change, which saw him meeting many well-known unionist politicians and even paramilitary figures.
“I met them all,” he says. “From Gusty Spence to Billy Hutchinson and I got on well with them.
“One said to me, ‘There was a time when I wanted to see you down the sight of my rifle!’”
Fr McManus also has a firm memory of the last time he met the Reverend Ian Paisley.
“As First Minister, Ian Paisley was in America with Martin McGuinness. And when they had finished speaking, Paisley caught my attention.
“I’ll always remember it, because it was the first time he had addressed me as ‘Father’ McManus. Paisley said to me, ‘It was just saying to the wife on the plane coming over, I wonder if we’ll meet Father McManus.’”
The Northern Ireland First Minister was seated on an elevated platform and to get closer to him, Fr McManus knelt on it.
“Martin McGuinness passed by and said, ‘I’ve seen it all now, Sean McManus kneeling before Ian Paisley!’”
The McManus family are steeped in the Kinawley area of Fermanagh. Fr McManus’s solicitor brother Frank served as Unity MP for the area at the start of the Troubles.
And during the IRA border campaign of the 1950s, Sean McManus lost his 29-year-old brother Patrick.
Patrick, who was on the IRA Army Council, died in a premature explosion near Swanlinbar in Co. Cavan in 1958.
A small stone monument to Patrick’s memory has been erected on the side of the road leading to the McManus family farm.
“I often think about my brother Patrick. I was still a teenager in 1955 when he called the family together to tell us he was leaving to take part in the IRA border campaign. But two and a half years later he was dead,” said Fr McManus.
And reflecting on Patrick, he added: “But times have changed and I’m glad we succeeded in getting the MacBride Principles passed into US law.”