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The new leader of the Alliance Party, David Ford
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Northern Ireland's cross community Alliance Party today elected Mr David Ford as its new leader. The 50-year-old South Antrim Assembly member defeated deputy leader Eileen Bell by 86 votes to 45 in the contest in East Belfast.
Mr Ford succeeds Mr Sean Neeson who stepped down after three years in charge of the party, last month. He faces a tough task in re-establishing the party’s relevance in the eyes of Northern Ireland’s voters.
In its heyday in the 1977 district council elections, the Alliance took 14.4 per cent of the vote and was a former party of government, participating in the 1973 power sharing executive with the Ulster Unionists and the nationalist SDLP.
In this year's local government elections, its vote dropped to 5 per cent. It has five Assembly members (excluding the Speaker of the Assembly, former leader Lord Alderdice) and 28 councillors.
Mr Ford first came to prominence in party in 1989 when he stood as a candidate for Antrim Borough Council. He served as Alliance General Secretary in 1990 and succeeded in winning a council seat in Antrim in 1993 which he retained in 1997.
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The defeated candidate: Eileen Bell
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The father of four soon rose through Alliance's ranks as part of the leadership team which served in the Northern Ireland Forum and took part in the negotiations leading to the Belfast Agreement.
As the party's farming spokesman, Mr Ford played a prominent role in the Forum's agriculture committee at a time when the industry in Northern Ireland was fighting for special exemption from the European Union's ban on UK beef.
He also forged close links with the Liberal Democrats in Westminster, inviting their then agriculture spokesman Mr Charles Kennedy to the province to take up its farmers' cause.
Following the endorsement of the Belfast Agreement in referendums in 1998, Mr Ford managed to secure the last of South Antrim's six seats in the Stormont Assembly.
The shock departure of leader Lord Alderdice as Speaker and Mr Sean Neeson's elevation to leader led to the South Antrim MLA being appointed chief whip at Stormont.
On the floor of the House, he campaigned aggressively for improvements to the Northern Ireland rail network and fought for greater international recognition of the problems faced by the province's beleaguered beef industry.
The death of South Antrim Ulster Unionist MP Mr Clifford Forsythe last year prompted him to run in the bitter by-election contest which followed. When the DUP's Rev William McCrea defeated the Ulster Unionists' Mr David Burnside, he was accused by UUP supporters of handing the seat to a fierce opponent of the Belfast Agreement. He finished in fifth place with 2,031 votes.
Undeterred, he stood again for Westminster in the June General Election securing 1,969 votes as Mr Burnside recaptured the seat.
During his leadership election campaign, he stressed the need for Alliance to be more aggressive in its approach to Northern Ireland politics.
"We have to stress our opposition to the way other parties are operating because it is quite clear that they were given the opportunity by the people of Northern Ireland as the result of a referendum and have failed to live up to their responsibilities," he told PA News.
North Down MLA Ms Bell is the current deputy leader. She has been both chairwoman and general secretary and was a former leading member of the Peace Train Organisation which was formed in defiance of IRA bomb attacks on the Dublin-Belfast railway line.