Victor Halley (15 January 1904 – 24 October 1966)^[1][2] was an Irish trade unionist and socialist in Northern Ireland, who identified the cause of labour with the achievement of an all-Ireland republic.

A Presbyterian,^[2] Halley was born in 1904 at 19 Carew Street, Belfast, the son of James Halley, a soldier, and Julia McCormick. He became an official, and eventually Vice-Chairman, of the Amalgamated Transport and General Workers' Union.^[3]

Haley joined the Independent Labour Party, and when in 1932 this disaffiliated from the British Labour Party, he became a founder member of the Socialist Party of Northern Ireland, which retained its Northern Ireland Labour Party affiliation.^[4] A mainly Protestant organisation, it had around 150 members in the Shankill and Newtownards Road districts of Belfast,^[5][6] Included were Jack Macgougan,^[7] and the married couple, Ulster Volunteer veteran George McBride, and 1916 Easter Rising veteran Winifred Carney.^[8]

In 1934, along with Macgougan, the original Irish Citizen Army organiser Jack White and other northern trade unionists and socialists, he attended the convention in Athlone that established the broad "anti-imperialist" Republican Congress, an initiative of a left split from the Irish Republican Army.^[9] From 1936 he was active, alongside Betty Sinclair, Macgougan, McBride, Carney and others, in organising relief aid for the Spanish Republic during the civil war with Franco.^[1][10]

In 1944, with other Protestant trade unionists in west Belfast, Halley joined Nationalist Party dissidents around Harry Diamond, and ex IRA volunteers in forming the Socialist Republican Party.^[3] He stood for the party at the 1946 Belfast Central by-election for the party, but was defeated by Frank Hanna of the NILP by 5,566 to 2,783 votes.^[11]

In 1948, along with MacGougan and the writer Denis Ireland, Haley was a member of the Belfast 1798 Commemoration Committee.^[12] After the government blocked a rally in the city centre, a crowd of 30,000 gathered in Corrigan Park in nationalist west Belfast where they heard Halley declare: "The people who destroyed Tone in Ireland were those who feared the Protestant tradition of association with America, French Republicanism, Freedom and Democracy".^[1]

In 1950 and 51, with Diamond he led efforts within the Irish Labour Party to persuade it to organise north of the border.^[1]

He died in 1966 in County Westmeath, Ireland.^[13]