Paula Bradshaw

Paula Jane Bradshaw (born 1 November 1972) is an Alliance Party of Northern Ireland politician. She has been a Member of the Northern Ireland Assembly (MLA) for South Belfast since the 2016 election and in 2024 was appointed Alliance Party Chief Whip.

Early life and career Bradshaw attended Whiteabbey Primary School and then Belfast High School. She subsequently completed a degree in European Business at Ulster University at Coleraine, before returning to study law and government part-time at the Jordanstown campus. She cited comments made by Ulster Unionist leader Tom Elliott, who said he would never attend Pride or a GAA match, as well as her treatment in a selection whereby members had questioned her ability to be an Assembly member as a working mother. She first took public office when she was elected to Belfast City Council as a representative for the Balmoral electoral area in May 2014.

Bradshaw was selected to replace Anna Lo as the lead Alliance candidate for Belfast South in the 2016 Assembly elections, winning election with 9.1% of first-preference votes. In the 2017 snap Assembly election, she was re-elected with 13% of first-preferences. She currently serves as the Alliance Party's health spokesperson and, in 2020, was appointed Assembly Private Secretary at the Department of Justice to support Minister Naomi Long. She was re-elected at the 2022 election, at which the Alliance Party became the largest party in South Belfast for the first time and her running mate Kate Nicholl was also elected.

Personal life

She is married to fellow Alliance Party activist Ian Parsley. It is her second marriage. In a 2017 Belfast Telegraph article about women in the public eye, Bradshaw spoke about her first marriage "I got married to Martin (43) when I was 26 and we were together for seven years. It was an acrimonious split." I had my first child at 27 and my second at 30.