Mickey Brady, Sinn Fein MP for Newry and Armagh and committed supporter of the peace process

Michael Brady was born in Ballybot on October 7 1950, one of five children of Willie Brady and his wife Sally, who had been born in 1909, three weeks before work began on building the Titanic. She lived to be 106, and at Brady’s adoption meeting for the 2015 election Sinn Fein’s then president Gerry Adams welcomed her as a witness to history, “having been born in a united Ireland”.

Mickey attended Abbey Christian Brothers’ Grammar School in Newry, then went to university in Liverpool. On graduating, he returned to Northern Ireland and took a job in the DHSS.

In 1981 he took his knowledge of the system to the welfare rights centre in Newry run by the Confederation of Community Groups, dealing with benefits and housing issues there until his election to the Assembly.

Brady took time to become active in Sinn Fein and did not stand for the Assembly until 2007, holding one of the party’s three seats in the six-member Newry and Armagh constituency. Narrowly re-elected in 2011, he was deputy chair of the Assembly’s Department for Social Development committee.

Prior to the 2015 general election, Newry and Armagh’s Sinn Fein MP Conor Murphy, who had won the seat from the Social Democratic and Labour Party in 2005, announced his retirement, and Brady was adopted in his place.

He paid tribute to the hunger strikers, especially Bobby Sands, who would have been 61 that day, saying: “We are standing on the shoulders of giants. If it wasn’t for their sacrifice, we wouldn’t be where we are today.” But he campaigned on his record on welfare, and one councillor remarked: “When it comes to advice on welfare issues, if Mickey Brady doesn’t know it then it’s not worth knowing.”