The Lord Alderdice

As one of the key negotiators of the Good Friday Agreement and Member of the House of Lords since 1996, Lord Alderdice has substantial experience of political conflict and international terrorism.

Lord Alderdice has been Leader of the Alliance Party of Northern Ireland from 1989 to1998. He led his party in all-party talks on the future of Northern Ireland and was one of the negotiators of the Good Friday Agreement (1998).

From 1998-2004, Lord Alderdice served as Speaker of the Northern Ireland Assembly. At the same time (1999-2003), he was Vice-President of the European Liberal Democrat and Reform Party, and then served as President of Liberal International (2005-2009), the world federation of liberal and progressive democratic political parties.

From 2004 to 2010, he has been serving on the Independent Monitoring Commission (IMC) that was established by an intergovernmental agreement between the Irish and British Governments to monitor and report on paramilitary activity across Ireland as a whole, and to monitor the security normalization measures undertaken by the British Government in the North.

Lord Alderdice has been Convenor of the Liberal Democrat Parliamentary Party in the House of Lords 2010 and Member of the UK Committee on Standards in Public Life since 2010. In February 2014,  he stepped down as Convenor in order to establish a conflict resolution centre at Oxford University.