Mother of two takes over from McGuinness as Sinn Fein chief
MICHELLE O’Neill, a one-time teenage mother and right-hand woman to Martin McGuinness, has been elected leader of Sinn Fein.
Mrs O’Neill, who is 40 and has two grown up children, was hailed for providing a ‘generational change’ for the republican party.
Her late father Basil was a republican prisoner and Sinn Fein councillor while her cousin was one of three IRA men shot dead by the SAS in Coagh in 1991.
Despite her republican pedigree, she is free of the IRA baggage that tarnished the party under her predecessor, Mr McGuinness.
The Mid-Ulster MP said: ‘It’s a huge honour. A really big, big privilege for me to be chosen to be the new leader in the North.
‘It gives me immense pride to say I’m going to lead our party in the future.
‘To follow in the footsteps of Martin McGuinness, who is a political giant, is no mean feat, but it’s a challenge that I’m certainly up for.’
Mr McGuinness said that he and Gerry Adams, the president of Sinn Fein, had decided over the last year that there was a ‘need for generational change within our party’.
‘What is special of today is that a young woman of incredible abil- ity has become the leader of Sinn Fein in the North,’ he added.
Mrs O’Neill has come up through the party ranks as a grassroots activist, a local councillor and a member of the Assembly before serving as a rural and health minister.
She is seen as a grafter and a countrywoman, but also as a liberal. As health minister, she lifted Northern Ireland’s ban on gay men donating blood.
Mr McGuinness invoked a familiar republican phrase, which Mr Adams once used in reference to the IRA, to insist he would still be involved in political activism.
‘I haven’t gone away, you know,’ he said. Mr McGuinness quit frontline politics last week stating that he was seriously ill and would not seek re-election as deputy first minister.
The veteran Sinn Fein politician resigned as Northern Ireland’s deputy first minister last week in protest against the handling of a botched energy scheme, forcing a snap election.