Sinn Féin MP says she never felt like a second-class citizen in NI

Sinn Féin’s MP for Fermanagh and South Tyrone has said she never felt like a second-class citizen growing up in Northern Ireland during the Troubles.

Pat Cullen, who was elected to Westminster in 2024, said she was regularly stopped and searched by the Army as a young girl growing up in Carrickmore, County Tyrone.

She said this had become “normal” but did not make her feel like she was inferior.

“I always knew we were on the right side of history,” she added.

The youngest of seven children, Cullen said her mother made them say the rosary every night and sprinkled holy water over their car to keep them safe.

Her mother, who died when Cullen was 18, also made her leave the house over an hour earlier to collect her sister from work in Omagh just 15 minutes away in case she was stopped.

The MP, who is married with two children, recalled an encounter with a young soldier in the 1980s, when she was 17.

“It was about the fifth time he had stopped me that week,” she told the BBC’s Red Lines podcast.

“I remember saying to him: ‘Why are you doing that, why are you doing this to me?’

“He said, ‘I have no choice’. I remember standing looking at him and he wasn’t, I’m sure, much older than me.

“I remember saying to him: ‘We all have choices’.”

Cullen followed four of her sisters into a career in nursing which included working as a community nurse in north and west Belfast in the 1980s.

As a mental health nurse, she did not wear a uniform and said this aroused suspicion from the Army as she travelled frequently between nationalist and loyalist areas.

“The women in those areas made things much easier for us and took us under their wing and supported us as we moved back and forward to do our jobs,” she said.

After a number of senior roles in nursing, including with the Public Health Agency and as an advisor to health officials at Stormont, Cullen joined the nurses’ union the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) before becoming its general secretary and chief executive.

She said she joined the RCN because it was a non-striking union yet, during her tenure, she led members in unprecedented strikes as part of a campaign for better pay and conditions, first in Northern Ireland then in England and Wales.

Lobbying at Westminster brought her up against former Conservative Health Secretaries Matt Hancock and Steve Barclay and she said her presence was perhaps not always welcome.

Cullen recounted on one occasion when an unnamed assembly member, who was visiting London, was encouraged to “take that Irish woman back home” with him.

The republican politician had particular praise for the Democratic Unionist Party Strangford MP Jim Shannon for his support during the nurses’ strike.

“Just as I was about to go on Sky TV [in London], I get a tap on the shoulder and it was Jim Shannon. He had seen me on the television and knew I was there,” she said.

“I appreciated that very, very much because it was someone from home and it was someone who understood.

“That was a decent thing for him to do and I’ll not forget it.”

You can listen to the full interview with Pat Cullen on the BBC Red Lines podcast on BBC Sounds.

The interview was recorded before the recent killings in Maguiresbridge.