Michelle O'Neill

Michelle O'Neill (née Doris; born 10 January 1977) is an Irish politician who has been First Minister of Northern Ireland since February 2024 and Vice President of Sinn Féin since 2018. She has also been the MLA for Mid Ulster in the Northern Ireland Assembly since 2007. O'Neill was previously deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland from 2020 to 2022. O'Neill served on the Dungannon and South Tyrone Borough Council from 2005 to 2011.

In 2007, she was elected to represent Mid Ulster in the Northern Ireland Assembly. She served as the first female Mayor of Dungannon and South Tyrone from 2010 to 2011. She has been serving as Vice President of Sinn Féin since 2018. In 2011, she was appointed to the Northern Ireland Executive by deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness as Minister for Agriculture and Rural Development. In 2016, she was promoted to Minister of Health. In January 2020, she became deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland after the New Decade, New Approach agreement restored the power-sharing executive.

O'Neill automatically relinquished her office following Paul Givan's resignation as first minister on 3 February 2022. Sinn Féin became the largest party after the 2022 Assembly election, putting O'Neill in line for the position of First Minister of Northern Ireland; however she did not take up the position until two years later because the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) refused to nominate a deputy First Minister, citing its opposition to the Northern Ireland Protocol. On 3 February 2024, O'Neill was appointed First Minister of Northern Ireland. This marked the first time that an Irish nationalist had held the title of First Minister in Northern Ireland.

O'Neill was born in Fermoy, a town in County Cork, Republic of Ireland. She comes from an Irish republican family in Clonoe, County Tyrone, Northern Ireland. Her father Brendan Doris was a Provisional IRA prisoner and Sinn Féin councillor. Her uncle Paul Doris is a former national president of the Irish Northern Aid Committee (NORAID). A cousin, Tony Doris, was one of three IRA members killed in an ambush by the Special Air Service in 1991. Another cousin, alleged IRA volunteer Gareth Malachy Doris, was shot and wounded during the 1997 Coalisland attack.

O'Neill attended St. Patrick's Girls' Academy, a Catholic grammar school in Dungannon, Tyrone. She subsequently began to train as an accounting technician, before pursuing a political career.

O'Neill became involved in republican politics in her teens, assisting her father with constituency work in his role as a Dungannon councillor. She joined Sinn Féin after the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, at the age of 21, and started working as an advisor to Francie Molloy in the Northern Ireland Assembly. She kept this role until 2005, when she was elected to represent the Torrent electoral area on Dungannon and South Tyrone Borough Council, taking the seat that had been vacated by her father. O'Neill was elected as an MLA for Mid Ulster in the 2007 Assembly election, succeeding her Sinn Féin colleague Geraldine Dougan.

Whilst a backbencher in the Assembly, she sat on Stormont's education and health committees. In 2010, she became Mayor of Dungannon and South Tyrone. O'Neill was the first woman to hold the position of Mayor, as well as one of the youngest people. She held the council position until 2011.

O'Neill succeeded Michelle Gildernew as Minister for Agriculture and Rural Development in the Northern Ireland Executive after the 2011 Assembly election. One of her key decisions in the role was the relocation of the Department of Agriculture and Rural Development's headquarters from Belfast to a former British Army barracks in Ballykelly, County Londonderry in a bid to decentralise civil service jobs. The decision overruled an internal report on the matter, which recommended Strabane as a more appropriate location.