Mal O'Hara (Green Party) | Oireachtas source

Go raibh maith agat, a Chathaoirligh. Dia daoibh, Seanad Éireann. I thank everybody, the staff, the Senators, the elected Members and their staff, who have made me feel exceptionally welcome over the last few days. I am delighted to be here. I thank my Green Party colleagues for the nomination and other parties that, as Senator Boyhan noted, did not contest the election. I believe people saw the importance of replacing one Northern voice with another. I pay tribute to the former Senator, Niall Ó Donnghaile. On his resignation, his party leader said that he was a great voice for Northern nationalists. I want to build on those foundations and strive to be a Senator for all voices from the North.

I thank my mum, my aunt and my wider family. My dad cannot be here today. They taught me the value of education and a curious mind, to be unafraid and to stand up for what you believe in. They taught me to use the tongue in my mouth and to be myself. Those values gave me the courage and strength to come out and be my authentic self. Some 14 years ago, I met someone whom I love and with whom I am building a life. I now have my own family, something a nervous 14-year-old boy struggling with his sexual orientation would never have thought possible. I want to be a Senator for all communities in Northern Ireland. I am the son of a republican and from an extended working-class nationalist republican family in north Belfast. I am proudly clan O’Hara. I am a child of free school meals and born on an interface. We had a grille over our window and one of my earliest memories is our next-door neighbour being firebombed. If you know Belfast, that was the interface between the New Lodge and the Shankill. The mid-1980s were too dangerous and we moved, but stayed in north Belfast.

After studying and working in Birmingham, England, where I became an Anglophile, I returned to Northern Ireland and began to work in the community and voluntary sector, and did so for the best part of two decades. I worked in the most disadvantaged areas of the city, specifically north and west Belfast, and for more than seven years, I managed health services at Ireland’s largest LGBT organisation.

It is lamentable that 26 years after the Good Friday Agreement and its promise of an anti-poverty strategy, we still do not have one, and the areas that were the most deprived in western Europe in 1998 are still the most deprived. The promise of peace has largely been delivered but the promise of reconciliation and the promise of prosperity have only come for some.

I am an activist. I am the former chair of the equal marriage campaign in the North. I led a campaign about air pollution in the city of Belfast and my first motion at Belfast City Council was to establish a climate unit, putting that city on a path to net zero.

I also became a harbour commissioner. The symbolism of a changing Northern Ireland was that the son of a man who stood at the dock gates, hoping for work but not sure that he would get it because of his name and background, became a commissioner.

I served on the board of a local suicide prevention charity for eight years in north Belfast and a regional mental health charity for four years. For me, mental health is personal, political and professional.

During the pandemic, I worked with others and, using my links in the community sector, we set up a soup kitchen to deliver meals to the most vulnerable. In just over three months, we delivered 17,000 meals across north and west Belfast. It was a cross-community project we built from the ground up, working with loyalist ex-prisoners on the Shankill led by a Green Party councillor called O’Hara, the son of a republican. I could still be running that soup kitchen, but I did not get into politics to run soup kitchens; I got into politics to change the conditions so that people do not need to rely on soup kitchens.

I am keen to work with all here. It is a testament of my ability to work cross-party that last year at Belfast City Council I got the support of 60 members from all eight different parties together and not a single one of them voted against the establishment of an overdose prevention centre.

It is these links with activists and community, my professional background and my political allegiance as an other and therefore not predetermined on the constitutional outcome that position me to be a Senator for all. I intend to use the privilege of sitting in this House to amplify all voices from the North. In the coming months, I will be inviting them here and I hope that Senators may even sojourn north and meet those groups. I want to be a Senator for all in a Seanad for all.