Sheelagh Murnaghan

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Sheelagh Mary Murnaghan, OBE (26 May 1924 – 14 September 1993) was an Ulster Liberal Party politician and barrister in Northern Ireland. She served as a Member of Parliament in the Northern Ireland House of Commons at Stormont, representing Queen’s University Belfast from 1962 to 1969.

Born in Dublin as the eldest of six children, her grandfather was the nationalist politician George Murnaghan. She studied law at Queen’s University Belfast, graduating in 1947, and while there she captained the hockey team (1955–56) and led the Literary and Scientific Debating Society. She joined the Ulster Liberal Association in 1959 and became one of the few women elected to Stormont’s 52-seat Parliament. As an MP, she campaigned to abolish the death penalty and to promote a bill of human rights. When her university seat was abolished in 1968, she left Parliament and later unsuccessfully ran for North Down in 1969 and Belfast South in 1973. In the 1970s she sat on bodies such as the Industrial Relations Tribunal and the Equal Opportunities Commission, and she continued to practice as a barrister, focusing on harassment cases. She died in Belfast in 1993 at age 69.