Career
On 17 January 1964 the couple established the Campaign for Social Justice, with Patricia McCluskey as the first chairwoman, to broaden the focus of their campaign to cover all aspects of discrimination against the one-third Catholic minority in Northern Ireland. A pamphlet written by the McCluskeys, The Plain Truth, drew widespread attention to the issues. In January 1967 they helped to found the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA), which became the main vehicle for the civil rights campaign that, following repressive counter-measures by the unionist government, was followed by the 30-year conflict known as The Troubles.
Patricia McCluskey served for a time as an elected councillor in Dungannon, but the couple were not prominent in public life after the onset of the Troubles.
In 1989 Conn published a memoir of their campaigning, Up Office Their Knees. The McCluskeys retired to Dublin, where Patricia died in 2010, aged 96.
Conn died in 2013, and was buried in Burren, County Down. An annual McCluskey Civil Rights Summer School was established in Carlingford, County Louth, in 2008.