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Tag Archives: People of Northern Ireland


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Birth of David Ford, Northern Irish Politician

David Ford, former Northern Irish politician, is born on February 24, 1951, to Irish and Welsh parents in Orpington, Kent, England. He serves as leader of the Alliance Party of Northern Ireland from October 2001 until October 2016 and is Northern Ireland Minister of Justice from April 2010 until May 2016. He is a Member of the Northern Ireland Assembly (MLA) for South Antrim from 1998 to 2018.

Ford is educated at Warren Road Primary School, Orpington, and Dulwich College, London. He spends summer holidays on his uncle’s farm in Gortin, County Tyrone, and moves to Northern Ireland permanently in 1969 when he goes to study Economics at Queen’s University Belfast (QUB). There he joins the university’s student Alliance Party grouping. After graduating, he takes a year out to work as a volunteer at the ecumenical Corrymeela Community in Ballycastle, County Antrim, before starting work as a social worker in 1973.

Ford stands unsuccessfully for Antrim Borough Council in 1989 and enters politics full-time when he becomes general secretary of the Alliance Party. In that role, he is best known as a strong supporter of the then-leader John Alderdice and an advocate of better political organisation and community politics. He is elected to Antrim Borough Council in 1993, 1997 and – after leaving the Council in 2001 to concentrate on Assembly business – again in 2005.

In 1996, Ford stands unsuccessfully for election to the Northern Ireland Forum in South Antrim. In 1997, he obtains 12% of the vote in the general election in South Antrim, and in 1998 is elected to the Northern Ireland Assembly in the constituency of the same name. He sought South Antrim again in the 2000 South Antrim by-election and in the 2001 and 2005 United Kingdom general elections.

In 2001, Seán Neeson resigns from the Party leadership following poor election results. Ford wins the leadership election on October 6 by 86 votes to 45, ahead of Eileen Bell.

Ford gives Alliance a stability which it has lacked since the departure of John Alderdice, but the Party has declined seriously in the late 1990s and all he can do is stabilise the situation. Within a month of taking over the leadership, however, he has a chance to establish Alliance’s relevancy in the post-Good Friday Agreement environment. On November 6, 2001, the Northern Ireland Executive is to be re-established. Due to defections within his own Ulster Unionist Party (UUP), First Minister David Trimble has insufficient support within the Unionist bloc in the Assembly to be re-elected to his post. Ford and two of his five colleagues re-designate as Unionist for just 22 minutes in order to secure Trimble’s position and thereby enable the devolved institutions to operate for another year. However, Alliance fails to make any political gains from their move, and the UUP and Sinn Féin fail to reach agreement on the decommissioning issue, ensuring that the institutions collapse again in October 2002.

In the 2003 Northern Ireland Assembly election, Ford’s seat in the Assembly is perceived to be under severe threat from Sinn Féin’s Martin Meehan, with many commentators expecting him to lose it. However, his expertise in nuts-and-bolts electioneering stands him in good stead. Although Alliance’s vote almost halved, his own vote in South Antrim increases from 8.6% to 9.1%. Meehan’s vote increases dramatically, from 7.3% to 11.5%, and he starts the election count ahead. Ford has much greater transfer appeal and finishes 180 votes ahead of Meehan at the end of a dramatic three-way fight for the last two seats, with Thomas Burns of the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) just 14 votes ahead of Ford. Despite the dramatic fall in vote, Alliance holds on to its six seats in the Assembly, which remains suspended.

In 2004, Ford makes good his leadership election pledge to work with other parties, as Alliance joins with the Workers’ Party, Northern Ireland Conservatives and elements of the Northern Ireland Women’s Coalition to support Independent candidate John Gilliland in the European elections, achieving the best result for the centre ground for 25 years.

Ford’s greatest triumph comes in the 2007 Northern Ireland Assembly election, when the party achieves its highest vote share since Alderdice’s departure and picks up a seat in what is an otherwise poor election for the moderates. Despite media predictions once again of his demise, Ford himself is elected third in South Antrim, with over 13% of the poll.

On April 12, 2010, Ford is chosen by the Assembly to become Northern Ireland’s first Justice Minister in 38 years. He is supported in the Assembly by the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), Sinn Féin, the Alliance Party, the Green Party and the Progressive Unionist Party (PUP). Separate candidates for the position are put forward by both the UUP and the SDLP, being Danny Kennedy and Alban Maginness respectively.

In the 2011 Northern Ireland Assembly election, the Alliance Party manages to increase their vote by 50% gaining an extra seat in Belfast East and surpassing the UUP in Belfast.

Ford announces his resignation as Leader in October 2016 on the fifteenth anniversary of his election as leader noting, “The team is working well, and I think it’s an appropriate time to hand over to a new leader who will lead the party forward in the next stage of its development and growth.”

Ford and his wife Anne have four grown children and live in rural County Antrim. Until the spring of 2013, he is an elder in the Second Donegore congregation of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland. He is removed from his role as a ruling elder over differences with fellow congregants on the subject of same-sex marriage. In a 2016 interview he says he is still hurt by the decision by his fellow elders who chose not to work with him because of his support for equal marriage. “It saddened me that there was, if I may put it, a lack of understanding from some people about the role I had as a legislator, compared to the role I have within the church.”


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The Killing of Richard Jameson, Businessman & Loyalist

Richard Jameson, Northern Irish businessman and loyalist, who serves as the leader of the paramilitary Ulster Volunteer Force‘s (UVF) Mid-Ulster Brigade, is killed on January 10, 2000, outside his home in Portadown, County Armagh, Northern Ireland, during a feud with the rival Loyalist Volunteer Force (LVF). Following his death, the feud between the UVF and LVF escalates into a series of retaliatory killings. These go on intermittently until the LVF disbands in 2005.

Jameson is born in Portadown to a Protestant Church of Ireland family in about 1953, one of five sons. He has a twin brother, Stuart. A former reservist in the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) (1973-81), he works as a manager in the Jameson Group, a building firm which is a family-owned business. The building firm is regularly awarded government contracts to carry out work for the security forces and it is for this reason that his brother David loses a leg in a 1991 Provisional Irish Republican Army bombing attack. He is a member of the Orange Order‘s Drumherriff Star of Erin LOL 8 Portadown district.

It is not known exactly when Jameson becomes a member of the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) nor the leader of its Mid-Ulster Brigade. The Portadown unit of the Mid-Ulster Brigade had been officially stood down by the Brigade Staff in Belfast in August 1996 when it carried out an unauthorised sectarian killing while the UVF were on ceasefire. The Mid-Ulster Brigade’s commander at the time, Billy Wright, was expelled from the UVF. Wright brazenly defies a Combined Loyalist Military Command (CLMC) order to leave Northern Ireland or face execution by establishing the breakaway Loyalist Volunteer Force (LVF), taking most of the Portadown Mid-Ulster UVF with him. The units of the Mid-Ulster Brigade that remain loyal to the Brigade Staff continue to operate and Jameson becomes commander. He is said by The Guardian to be a “staunch supporter of the Good Friday Agreement.”

In the weeks prior to his killing, Jameson is in a violent street altercation with LVF member Muriel Gibson, whom he accuses of involvement in drugs and slaps forcefully in the face. This is followed by a fracas at the Portadown F.C. Social Club on December 27, 1999, where LVF members are commemorating the death of their comrade Billy Wright, shot and killed inside the Maze Prison by the Irish National Liberation Army (INLA) exactly two years previously. When he enters the club, several LVF men begin to push and jostle him and challenge him to a fight, telling him to hit them instead of women. Deeply offended, he leaves and soon returns with a UVF gang armed with pickaxe handles and baseball bats. In the violent brawl that ensues, twelve people, including three LVF prisoners out on Christmas parole, receive severe injuries. The LVF leaders subsequently make the decision that Jameson is to pay for the attack with his life.

One of the LVF members, who lives near Dungannon, gets in touch with a family of north Belfast loyalists who had been members of the UVF but who had left after Wright’s expulsion. From these former UVF members the LVF obtains the gun with which to shoot Jameson. On the evening of January 10, 2000, Jameson returns from work and drives his Isuzu Trooper jeep into the driveway outside his home on the Derrylettiff Road near Portadown. Waiting in ambush, a single gunman suddenly approaches from the passenger side of the parked jeep. Before Jameson can emerge from the vehicle and with the engine still running, the gunman opens fire through the window with a 9mm semi-automatic pistol, shooting Jameson five times in the head and chest. His assassin escapes to a nearby getaway car. He is rushed to Craigavon Area Hospital but dies of his wounds minutes after his arrival. The RUC immediately begins a murder inquiry. Within hours of the killing, the UVF Brigade Staff convene an emergency meeting at “the Eagle,” their headquarters on the Shankill Road, where they compile a list of all those they believe to be involved in Jameson’s death and plan their retaliation against the LVF.

Among those who condemn the killing is Northern Ireland’s First Minister David Trimble who releases the following statement: “This is exactly the sort of thing we thought we had finally put behind us. I’m shocked by the news.”

Jameson’s funeral is held on January 13 at the Tartaraghan Parish Church and attended by several thousand mourners including Progressive Unionist Party (PUP) leaders David Ervine and Billy Hutchinson. Drumcree Orangeman Harold Gracey and Gary McMichael, the son of slain Ulster Defence Association (UDA) brigadier John McMichael, also attend as does local politicians representing the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) and Democratic Unionist Party (DUP). The service is officiated by Reverend David Hilliard who speaks out against vengeance and describes Jameson as a “man admired and loved by many” and who “had been so cruelly murdered.” He is buried in the adjacent churchyard.

Despite Reverend Hilliard’s pleas and LVF leader Mark “Swinger” Fulton‘s claim that his organisation had nothing to do with Jameson’s shooting, the UVF/LVF feud intensifies. In the immediate aftermath members of Jameson’s family are filmed angrily defacing LVF murals in Portadown. A month after his killing, two Protestant teenagers, Andrew Robb (19) and David McIlwaine (18), are savagely beaten and repeatedly stabbed to death in a country lane outside Tandragee, County Armagh by a local UVF gang. The young men, believed to have been LVF members, are targeted by their UVF killers after they leave a nightclub together in search of a party. However, neither teenager is part of any paramilitary organisation and only Robb had tenuous links to the LVF. It is reported in the Belfast Telegraph that according to court hearings Robb had made disparaging remarks about Jameson’s death. Two of the UVF men, Stephen Leslie Brown and Noel Dillon, are infuriated by the comments and afterward Brown drives the victims to Druminure Road where he, Dillon and another man carry out the double killing. One of Jameson’s brothers, Bobby, is among the mourners at David McIlwaine’s funeral. The West Belfast Brigade of the Ulster Defence Association, whose brigadier Johnny Adair is close to the LVF, briefly becomes involved in the feud after Adair attends Andrew Robb’s funeral and joins LVF members at the Drumcree conflict. After the UVF track down Jameson’s killer to the Oldpark area of Belfast and attempt to shoot him, he is taken away under the protection of the West Belfast Brigade. The tit-for-tat killings continue intermittently until 2005 when the UVF makes a final assault against the LVF, leaving four members dead and the LVF leadership with no alternative but to order its military units to permanently disband.

Jameson’s family has persistently denied that he was a UVF member. They maintain that he was a vigilante who was murdered in retaliation for the firm stand he had taken against drug dealing in the Portadown area. The late PUP leader David Ervine expressed the same opinion the day after the killing by stating, “Mr. Jameson had been murdered by drug dealers masquerading as loyalists because he had been a bulwark in his community against dealers.” Ervine also described him as having been a “fine and honourable man, widely respected in the community.” Northern Ireland security sources, however, have repeatedly named Jameson as the Mid-Ulster UVF commander. He is listed as a UVF member in the CAIN: Sutton Index of Deaths, an online University of Ulster-sponsored project which chronicles the Northern Ireland conflict. It also emerges that for several days prior to his killing, he had been working at the Ballykinler British Army base. Immediately after his murder by the LVF, his family begins an anti-drug campaign in Portadown by putting up posters and handing out leaflets to passing motorists.


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Death of Henry Armstrong, Politician & Member of Parliament

Henry Bruce Wright Armstrong, Northern Irish barrister, politician and Unionist Member of Parliament (MP) for Mid Armagh from June 1921 until 1922, dies on December 4, 1943.

Born on July 27, 1844, at Hull House, Sholden, Kent, England, Armstrong is the second surviving son of William Jones Wright Armstrong, Justice of the Peace (JP), Deputy Lieutenant and High Sheriff of Armagh, and Frances Elizabeth, widow of Sir Michael McCreagh, and daughter of Major Christopher Wilson. He is educated at The Royal School, Armagh, and Trinity College, Cambridge, gaining a BA (2nd Class Law Tripos) in 1867 and an MA in 1870. He is called to the English bar (Inner Temple) in 1868. He practises in England for four years. During this period, he also travels widely in Europe, the East, and the Far East, witnessing the last of the German army leave France after the Franco–Prussian War (1870–71) and acting as a copy carrier for The Daily News while in Metz in 1873.

Known principally for his contribution to Ulster politics at local level, Armstrong serves as JP and is appointed High Sheriff of Armagh for 1875 and High Sheriff of Longford for 1894. He is a County Councillor for Armagh from 1899 to 1920, and a Member of the Irish Convention in 1917–18. Vice-Lieutenant of County Armagh in 1920, he is a Senator of Queen’s University Belfast from 1920 to 1937.

Armstrong is returned unopposed to the Imperial House of Commons for Mid-Armagh in the 1921 Mid Armagh by-election, at the advanced age of 76, becoming one of the oldest first-time MPs whose birth date is recorded. Certainly, he immediately becomes the oldest member of the current House of Commons. He is a Senator of Northern Ireland from 1921 to 1937, and Lord Lieutenant of Armagh from 1924 to 1939. For twenty-five years he is a member of the Representative Body of the Church of Ireland. He is Chairman of the County Armagh Education Committee from 1925 to 1931, and President of the Association of Education Committees of Northern Ireland. In 1932, he is made a Privy Councillor for Northern Ireland, and in 1938 he serves as a Justice for the Government of Northern Ireland in the absence of the Governor.

In his later years, Armstrong provides financial support for Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi-occupied Europe.

In 1883, Armstrong marries Margaret Leader, daughter of William Leader of Rosnalea, County Cork. They have five sons and three daughters, of whom C. W. Armstrong also becomes a politician.

Armstrong dies at his home in Dean’s Hill, Armagh, on December 4, 1943, at the age of 99 years.


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Mary Peters Becomes First Irish Woman to Win an Olympic Gold Medal

Lady Mary Elizabeth Peters, LG, CH, DBE, Northern Irish former athlete and athletics administrator, wins the women’s pentathlon on September 3, 1972, at the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, West Germany, becoming the first Irish woman to win an Olympic Gold medal.

Peters is born on July 6, 1939, in Halewood, Lancashire, England, later living at 5 Mere Avenue in Alkrington, where she goes to primary school. She moves to Ballymena (and later Belfast) at the age of eleven when her father’s job is relocated to Northern Ireland. As a teenager, her father encourages her athletic career by building her home practice facilities as birthday gifts. She qualifies as a teacher and works while training.

After Ballymena, the family moves to Portadown where she attends Portadown College. The headmaster, Donald Woodman, and the PE teacher, Kenneth McClelland, introduce her to athletics, McClelland being her first coach. She is head girl of the school in 1956.

At the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, competing for Great Britain and Northern Ireland, Peters wins the gold medal in the women’s pentathlon. She had finished 4th in 1964 and 9th in 1968. To win the gold medal, she narrowly beats the local favourite, West Germany’s Heide Rosendahl, by 10 points, setting a world record score. After her victory, death threats are phoned into the BBC: “Mary Peters is a Protestant and has won a medal for Britain. An attempt will be made on her life, and it will be blamed on the IRA … Her home will be going up in the near future.” But Peters insists she will return home to Belfast. She is greeted by fans and a band at the airport and paraded through the city streets but is not allowed back in her flat for three months. Turning down jobs in the United States and Australia, where her father lives, she insists on remaining in Northern Ireland.

In 1972, Peters wins the BBC Sports Personality of the Year award: “Peters, a 33-year-old secretary from Belfast, won Britain’s only athletics gold at the Munich Olympics. The pentathlon competition was decided on the final event, the 200m, and Peters claimed the title by one-tenth of a second.”

She represents Northern Ireland at every Commonwealth Games between 1958 and 1974. In these games she wins two gold medals for the pentathlon, plus a gold and silver medal for the shot put.

Peters establishes a charitable Sports Trust in 1975 (now known as the Mary Peters Trust) to support talented young sportsmen and -women, both able-bodied and disabled, from across Northern Ireland in a financial and advisory capacity. The trust has made a large number of awards and has a list of well-known alumni that includes Graeme McDowell, Rory McIlroy, Jonathan Rea, Darren Clarke, David Humphreys, Bethany Firth, Ryan Burnett, Carl Frampton, Paddy Barnes, Michael Conlan, Kelly Gallagher, and Michael McKillop.

In May 2001, following her athletic career, Peters becomes a Trustee of The Outward Bound Trust and is Vice-President of the Northern Ireland Outward Bound Association. She is also Patron of Springhill Hospice in Rochdale, Greater Manchester.

Peters is appointed a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) for services to athletics in the 1973 New Year Honours. For services to sport, she is promoted in the same Order to Commander (CBE) in the 1990 Birthday Honours and again to Dame Commander (DBE) in the 2000 Birthday Honours. In the 2015 New Year Honours, she is awarded as Member of the Order of the Companions of Honour (CH), also for services to sport and the community in Northern Ireland, and in 2017, she is made a Dame of the Order of Saint John (DStJ). She is appointed a Lady Companion of the Order of the Garter (LG) on February 27, 2019, and therefore granted the title Lady. She represents the Order at the 2023 coronation.

Northern Ireland’s premier athletics track, on the outskirts of Belfast, is named after Peters. A statue of her stands within it.

In April 2009, Peters is named the Lord Lieutenant of the City of Belfast; she retires from the post in 2014, being succeeded by Fionnuala Jay-O’Boyle. She is a Freeman of the Cities of Lisburn and Belfast.

Peters now lives in Derriaghy, within the Lisburn and Castlereagh district, just outside Belfast.


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Birth of James Molyneaux, Northern Irish Politician

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James Henry Molyneaux, Baron Molyneaux of Killead, Northern Irish unionist politician and leader of the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) from 1979 to 1995, is born in Killead, County Antrim on August 27, 1920. He is a leading member and sometime Vice-President of the Conservative Monday Club. An Orangeman, he is also Sovereign Grand Master of the Royal Black Institution from 1971 to 1995. He is an unrelenting though peaceful supporter of the Protestant cause during the factional conflict that divides Northern Ireland from the 1960s until the early 21st century.

Molyneaux is educated at nearby Aldergrove School. Although he is raised an Anglican, as a child he briefly attends a local Catholic primary school. He leaves school at age 15 and works on his father’s poultry farm. When a Catholic church near his home is burned down by Ulster loyalist arsonists in the late 1990s, he helps to raise funds for its rebuilding.

In World War II Molyneaux serves in the Royal Air Force between 1941 and 1946. He participates in the D-Day landings in FranceFrance and in the liberation of the Belsen-Belsen concentration camp, and occasionally gives interviews about what he sees there. On April 1, 1947, he is promoted to flying officer.

After demobilization Molyneaux establishes a printing business with his uncle, and in 1946 he joins the UUP. He is first elected to local government in 1964 and enters Parliament six years later. He staunchly opposes all power-sharing deals, notably the Anglo-Irish Agreement (1985) between British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and Irish Taoiseach Garret FitzGerald, which gives Dublin an official consultative role in the affairs of Northern Ireland and paves the way for devolution.

Molyneaux lacks the firebrand public image of his longtime rival Ian Paisley, who in 1971 breaks with the UUP to form the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP). He never acquiesces to the Good Friday Agreement, which calls for the devolution of Northern Ireland’s government from London to Belfast, however, unlike Paisley and David Trimble, who in 1997 succeeds Molyneaux as the UUP leader and in April 1998 signs the devolution accord.

On retiring as UUP leader, Molyneaux is knighted as a Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire (KBE) in 1996. The following year, after standing down as an MP at the 1997 general election, he is created a life peer on June 10, 1997, as Baron Molyneaux of Killead, of Killead in the County of Antrim.

James Molyneaux dies at the age of 94 in Antrim, County Antrim, Northern Ireland on March 9, 2015, Commonwealth Day.


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Death of Open Champion Fred Daly

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Frederick J. Daly, Northern Irish professional golfer best known for winning The Open Championship in 1947 at the Royal Liverpool Golf Club, Hoylake, dies on November 18, 1990.

Born in Portrush, County Antrim, Daly is the only Irishman from either side of the border to have won The Open until Pádraig Harrington wins it in 2007 and the only Northern Irish major winner until Graeme McDowell wins the U.S. Open in 2010. Daly wins the Open in 1947 while professional to the Balmoral Club in Belfast. He wins with a score of 293, a single stroke ahead of runners-up Reg Horne and amateur Frank Stranahan.

During his acceptance speech at Royal Liverpool, Daly says he is very honoured to receive the Claret Jug and take it back to Northern Ireland. He goes on to say that the trophy has never been to Ireland and that he is hoping that the change of air will help it. There is much applause and laughter at his humorous comments.

In addition, he adds the News of the World Match Play tournament, which is the main British Match Play Championship, becoming the first since James Braid (1905) to win both the Open and the Match Play title in the same year.

Daly is the only Ulsterman to win the Irish Open until 2016, when Rory McIlroy wins at The K Club. Daly wins in 1946 at Portmarnock, and plays on four Ryder Cup teams, in 1947, 1949, 1951, and 1953. Daly is awarded the MBE in the 1984 New Year Honours “for services to golf.”

Fred Daly, age 79, dies in Belfast on November 18, 1990, of a heart attack.