Nuala O'Loan is an English Catholic, a law professor, 47-year-old mother of five sons, tireless human rights champion and, as of yesterday, the first Police Ombudsman for Northern Ireland.

Her mission is to provide an independent, impartial police complaints service, backed by a team of investigators. It is an ambitious undertaking.

"I want a completely fresh and independent approach to the issue," she said in a recent interview with The Irish Times. "I have been given considerable powers and I can be very determined."

Human rights will be paramount at every stage. "There's the right to privacy, to protection of your home, to fair trial. If in any way delivery of the police service is getting in the way of those rights, the circumstances will be scrutinised.

"Every complainant has the right to be heard, to have the complaint properly investigated. We now have independent investigation of the police."

Police officers in turn, she adds, are entitled to the same human rights as the person making the accusation. There must be no immediate assumptions; the approach will be open minded, the facts established by rigorous investigation.

"Where the complaint is substantiated, I will take action." She adds: "My duty is not to police society. That's for the DPP. It's rather to provide a system which will give redress when people have a complaint against the police. The powers given to me are extensive and very new."

The no-nonsense consumer lawyer has unflinchingly highlighted human rights abuse. She sees the post as "the culmination of all the areas of activities I had been involved in over the last 10 years".

As chairwoman of the Northern Ireland Electricity Consumers' Council, she has contested the sole right given to the only supplier to assess the amount of electricity used when a meter has been tampered with.

"In law you are obliged to pay for the quantity of electricity the company calculates has been used, according to a table. So on this issue the firm is allowed be judge, jury and executioner . . . and that is wrong law."

Involved with her local diocesan child abuse investigation team, she has questioned forthrightly the policy of immediate banishment of priests accused of child abuse - without any right of reply.

As a Police Authority member since 1997 and a lay visitor to police stations, she "learned a lot . . . about the structure of the police and how the service is delivered, and serious issues that Patten raised."

Legal issues have always been a huge interest for Nuala O'Loan. Her father, a Dubliner named Herbert, was a solicitor's clerk in Hertfordshire, England. Nuala was the eldest of eight children and was 13 when he died.

She attended a convent boarding school in Harrogate where she absorbed the school's ethos that each person had a duty to contribute to society.

A keen tennis and lacrosse player, she never wavered from an early decision to work with law. She entered King's College, London with flying colours - winning its undergraduate entrance exhibition examination.

At a university function she met a young Ulsterman named Declan O'Loan, a student of mathematics at Imperial College. They shared interests in music, art and travel. Married, they lived in Kent, Nuala training as a commercial-consumer lawyer in the City.

As soon as Declan graduated (lustrously) they returned to Northern Ireland, to jobs in academia - he teaching in a local grammar school, she as a lecturer at the then Ulster Polytech.

She was still new in the job in 1976 when tragedy struck. During a public lecture, a bomb blast shuddered through the building, sending the lecture hall ceiling crashing down in a huge shower of flying rubble. She was three months pregnant. She lost the baby.

"I never expected life to deal me a blow like that. I have never ceased to think about that child. So many people carry wounds from the Troubles nobody knows about."

She was already mother to two-year-old David in 1980 when, famished for adventure, she and Declan upped and went to Kenya. Her sons Patrick and Damian were born there, without any of the adjuncts of modern maternity care.

But by way of compensation, Africa offered visual delights she could never have imagined: "the wide open space . . . the light," she enthuses nostalgically.

After three years, when David was of school age, they came back and resumed their jobs.

In 1992 she was made the University of Ulster Jean Monnet professor - in an EU-funded scheme to develop and teach European law across member-state institutions. Among those she taught as law students were the Northern Ireland Chief Commissioner of Human Rights, Mr Bryce Dickson, and the Social Security Appeal chairman, Mr Kenny Mullan.

Of herself she says: "I never generalise"; "I have no preconceptions other than an informed opinion"; "I would not want to prejudge" and: "I have always taken a view that because the law exists, that is not enough reason for it to continue to exist."

At home, in spite of the huge male presence - her husband Declan, a local district councillor, and five boys aged 12 to 21 - she copes without outside help. A highly committed Catholic, she still finds time to act as a Catholic marriage guidance counsellor, write for the serious Catholic press, and even tackle demanding spiritual authors.

She says: "There are never enough hours. I struggle from day to day . . . and act on opportunities. I never dreamed I would be Police Ombudsman. Yet I am convinced the future holds a good police complaints system for Northern Ireland."