Ex-senator Paul Miller dies
Published:Thursday | May 5, 2022 | 12:13 AM
Former People’s National Party (PNP) senator, Paul Miller, has been hailed in his death as a patriot and passionate youth and community advocate.
Miller died at hospital on Tuesday after complaining of feeling unwell.
Maxine Henry-Wilson, former PNP general secretary and Cabinet minister, said he played a seminal role in the development of the youth movement in the late 1960s.
“He built a very robust set of community-based youth organisations. The sixth-form association, for example, which was very vocal during the 1960-1972 period, was a group he worked very hard to create,” Henry-Wilson said.
Miller was the parliamentary secretary for youth and community development, under whose tenure the National Youth Service was developed in 1973.
Another former PNP general secretary, Paul Burke, met Miller in the early 1970s. He recalled the late advocate’s agitation for voter rights.
“He was president of the Jamaica Youth Council. They vigorously protested, all the way up to February 1972, about the fact that young people were disenfranchised from voting,” Burke said in a Gleaner interview on Wednesday.
“For that 1972 election, no one under 24 could vote, even though the prescribed voting age was 21, and the Jamaica Youth Council was very active in exposing and protesting it.”
He said Miller was active in the PNP until the 1990s, not necessarily in a leadership capacity, but on assignments.
“He was a very pleasant, casual, easy-to-get-along-with person. He was liked throughout the party and was someone who was generally agreeable and certainly he was progressive in his speech and action,” Burke said.
Miller was also very active in the Church and was also chairman of the United Church’s Education Commission.
He leaves behind widow Kemorine and three children.