May Blood

Expert Spotlight

Having finished secondary school without enough education to “make something of herself,” May Blood intended to work in her local linen mill for a few weeks while figuring out what to do with her life. She stayed for 38 years. The mill, specifically its union organization, proved to be a better source of education than she had anticipated. May is now Baroness Blood, Labour member of the House of Lords, founding member of the Northern Ireland Women’s Coalition (NIWC), and holder of three honorary doctorates. Through the NIWC and her community volunteer work, she has played a pivotal role in the creation of peace and security in Northern Ireland, and leads the movement for integrated education. Her success has made her an icon of women’s involvement and leadership.

Ms. Blood was born into a humble West Belfast home that she shared with her parents and six siblings. Her family, “by today’s standards, would be known as a ‘poor’ family. …but we didn’t know we were poor because we had no social workers to tell us!” Growing up during the 1940s and ‘50s, her neighborhood was religiously “mixed,” and she socialized freely with both Catholics and Protestants. She wasn’t conscious of any division, “because we all shared a common factor—poverty—and the labels Protestant and Catholic simply didn’t come into it.” Three decades later, Ms. Blood would fight to reintegrate that same population.

Against her father’s objections, May Blood joined the Transport and General Worker’s Union while working at the Blackstaff Linen Mill. She campaigned for better pay and safer working conditions, building an understanding of how the political process works. In a mill staffed by both Catholic and Protestant women, Ms. Blood found that women were often capable of transcending the distrust and animosity so prevalent at the time. While at the mill, she also began working as a volunteer to improve living conditions in her community. When she retired in 1994, she began working fulltime as a volunteer in her community. It was concern for her community that led Ms. Blood into the political arena as a founding member of the Women’s Coalition, and it was the respect afforded her by the community that brought her success.

In 1994, the Protestant and Catholic factions responsible for “The Troubles,” the violence that Northern Ireland had suffered under for 30 years, declared a ceasefire and began negotiations. Concerned that half the population would be effectively excluded from the process, May Blood wrote to the minister asking whether women would be present at the peace talks. Her experiences in the mill taught her that women were capable of playing a unique role in negotiations, in part because they were seen as non-threatening. The minister responded by saying that women would be present if they were elected. Taking his response as a challenge, Ms. Blood began working to organize a coalition of women that could operate as a political party, one that would campaign not only for the concerns of women, but for the community as a whole. Six weeks later the fledgling party, called the Northern Ireland Women’s Coalition (NIWC), garnered enough votes to gain two seats at the negotiations.

Their chosen representatives, one Protestant and one Catholic, were met with both confusion and animosity. Even in the 1990s, in a “developed” nation, it was unusual for women to stand at the forefront of political actions. During the negotiations, the NIWC argued vehemently for safer communities and greater support for integrated education, often through jeers and booing more associated with sports arenas than an international negotiations body. The Belfast Agreement (also known as the Good Friday Agreement) was signed on April 10, 1998. It included provisions for the support of integrated education. Later that same year, May Blood was awarded her first honorary doctorate, from the University of Ulster.

The following year saw her elevated to the House of Lords, becoming Baroness May Blood of Blackwatertown, County of Armagh. A member of the government since 1999, she continues to believe that the most important progress Northern Ireland has made is the result of community groups, rather than national and foreign governments. As she says, almost everyone has a close friendship with a member of the “other” community, because “we are a small country here – it would be very difficult for it to be otherwise.” Many of those friendships began during primary school, one reason that integrated education—the education of Protestant and Catholic schoolchildren under the same roof—is a crucial step toward lasting security.

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