Michelle O’Neill45, the woman who has driven the Sinn Fein to victory in North Ireland, hardly imagined as a teenager that one day he would make history. Things were looking bad for the girl born in a small town, who had a son at the age of 16 and barely managed to finish high school.
In the working-class home in which he grew up, republicanism ran in his veins. his father, Brendan Doris, It was IRA prisoner. One of his cousins, a member of the paramilitary organization, was killed in an ambush by the British army. Another cousin was injured during the attack on a police and army base. “A well-known and respected Republican family that has played a significant role in the Republican struggle for many years & rdquor ;, he would say Martin McGuinnessthe former IRA leader and chief negotiator at Doris’s funeral.
O’Neill joined Sinn Féin after the Good Friday Agreement, when I was 21 years old. Self-taught, with a reputation for tireless worker, was an accounting technician before entering politics. McGuinness chose her as a candidate for the Belfast Assembly in 2007 and she won the seat.
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In 2010 she became the first and youngest woman mayor of Dungannon and South Tyrone. In the autonomous government, she has been in charge of the Department of Agriculture and the Department of Health. In 2017 she succeeded McGuinness as leader of Sinn Féin in Northern Ireland, marking a drastic turn of renewal in the republican movement.
Three years later she was appointed deputy prime minister, a position from which she has had to resign automatically on several occasions when the Assembly has been suspended. O’Neill has been criticized for attending funerals and memorial services for IRA members.