Bairbre plays it cool as battle to top EU poll hots up

If Bairbre de Brun is excited at the possibility of topping the European Election poll she's hiding it well.

DUP candidate Diane Dodds is seeking to rally unionist support on the basis that she can stop Sinn Fein taking first place.

But Ms de Brun bats away speculation about the result, stressing that she's concentrating simply on regaining her seat.

Few would bet against that target being achieved.

Asked why people should vote for her, Ms de Brun has what sounds like a well-rehearsed pitch.

“I want to go back to the Parliament to continue the work that I have been doing on jobs and the economy, for local communities, for rural communities in particular, for farm families, on public services and also on the really crucial question of climate change and the environment,” she says.

“We want to build as well on the new relationship we have in Europe — EU Commissioners coming more regularly to the North, our ministers going to Brussels.

“But finally, it's also not just about the EU — it's really important for people in this election to say with their votes that they don't want to move back to the past.

“Collectively as a society we've made enormous progress, we've transformed politics on the island and built a new relationship between unionism and nationalism.”

Bairbre de Brun has had a somewhat lower profile in recent years than in the dramatic period following the Good Friday Agreement of 1998.

She and Martin McGuinness were Sinn Fein's first Stormont ministers in that stop-start period of devolution.

The appointment underlined her position in the party's top team. It also led to her becoming a hate figure among anti-accord unionists.

There were also the substantial challenges of being Northern Ireland's Health Minister at a time of funding pressures, serious waiting list problems and hospital rationalisation decisions.

That period ended in October 2002 following the police “Spygate” raid on a Sinn Fein office at Stormont.

Ms de Brun loudly barracked officers as they conducted their controversial operation.

Northern Ireland politics has changed quite a bit since those days, but Ms de Brun is not at the heart of the action in the new Stormont.

“I'm the type of person that when I move onto something new, that's where my interest is, that's where my attention is,” she says.

“I thought to be truthful that when the Executive was up once again — and I was hopeful that it would be — that I'd miss it more than I actually do.”

As she rose up through the ranks of her party in the 1990s she was described as the model of a new Sinn Fein politician — with no IRA jail sentence history. Born in Dublin in 1954, she became involved in politics through the H Block protests of the late 1970s.

A graduate of Queen’s University, she taught at an Irish language school in west Belfast before a career in full-time politics beckoned.

She has a reputation for being strait laced and strict, which may be a legacy of her days as a teacher.

“People tell me that that shows,” she admits of her classroom past.

She also says: “My family — my nieces and nephews for example — tell me that they don't recognise the public severe, serious, conscientious, hard-working image to quite the same extent. They see me on my days off, they see me when I'm more relaxed, when I'm in my jeans.”

The unmarried MEP does not spend all her waking hours thinking about European or Irish politics. She says she relaxes by swimming, doing yoga and enjoying music.

“I used to do a lot of hill walking but at the moment my timetable just doesn't allow for that. I hope to go back to that soon.”

Belfast Telegraph