Nigel Alexander Dodds, OBE, PC, MP, (born 20 August 1958) is a barrister and Northern Irish unionist politician. He is Member of Parliament (MP) for Belfast North, and deputy leader of the Democratic Unionist Party. He has been Lord Mayor of Belfast twice, and from 1993 has been General Secretary of the DUP. Since June 2008 he has also been Deputy Leader of the DUP. Dodds became North Belfast's MP in the 2001 UK general elections. He has served in the past as a member of the Northern Ireland Assembly, and as Minister of Finance in the Northern Ireland Executive.

Nigel Dodds was born in Derry, Northern Ireland, and was educated at Portora Royal School, Enniskillen, County Fermanagh and St John's College, Cambridge (First class law MA) where he won the university scholarship, McMahan studentship and Winfield Prize for Law. Upon graduation, he returned to Northern Ireland and after studying at the Institute of Professional Legal Studies at Queen's University, Belfast (IPLS) was called to the Northern Irish bar . After working as a barrister he worked at the Secretariat of the European Parliament from 1984 to 1996.

Donna Traynor (born 31 October 1965 in Lisburn) is a Northern Irish journalist. She is currently the main female anchor of BBC Newsline.

Traynor began her career in broadcasting by gaining work experience at Downtown Radio before moving to RTÉ in Dublin.

Traynor joined the BBC in 1989. She presented news bulletins on BBC Radio Ulster, and was the duty newsreader at the station who first broke the news of the Provisional IRA ceasefire in August 1994. Around this time, Traynor began reading television news bulletins, and became the

In addition to her work for BBC Newsline, Traynor has also presented Country Times, various educational programmes and coverage of the Balmoral Show for BBC Northern Ireland, and she has also presented BBC Northern Ireland's coverage of Children in Need.

Traynor was born in Lisburn, but moved to Dublin with her family as a child. She went on to study journalism at university in England.

Traynor is deaf in one ear. She is married to broadcaster Ronan Kelly.

Gerry Adams (Irish: Gearóid Mac Ádhaimh; born 6 October 1948 in Belfast, Northern Ireland) is an Irish republican politician and Teachta Dála (TD) for the constituency of Louth. From 1983 to 1992 and from 1997 to 2011, he was an abstentionist Westminster Member of Parliament for Belfast West. He is the president of Sinn Féin, the second largest political party in Northern Ireland and the largest nationalist party. From the late 1980s onwards, Adams was an important figure in the Northern Ireland peace process, initially following contact by the then Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) leader John Hume and subsequently with the Irish and British governments and then other parties. In 2005, the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) indicated that its armed campaign was over and that it is now exclusively committed to democratic politics. Under Adams, Sinn Féin changed its traditional policy of abstentionism towards Oireachtas Éireann, the parliament of the Republic of Ireland, in 1986 and later took seats in the power-sharing Northern Ireland Assembly. However, Sinn Féin retains a policy of abstentionism towards the Westminster Parliament, but since 2002, receives allowances for staff and takes up offices in the House of Commons.

Peter Gerald Hain (born 16 February 1950) is a British Labour Party politician, who has been the Member of Parliament (MP) for Neath since 1991, and served in the Cabinets of both Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. He was the Leader of the House of Commons from 2003 to 2005 and Secretary of State for Northern Ireland from 2005 to 2007 under Blair, and as Secretary of State for Work and Pensions and Secretary of State for Wales from 2007 to 2008 under Brown. In 2007, he ran for the Deputy Leadership of the Labour Party, coming fifth out of six candidates, although his failure to declare donations during this contest led to his resignation in 2008. He later returned to the Cabinet from 2009 to 2010 as Welsh Secretary, before becoming Shadow Welsh Secretary in Ed Miliband's Shadow Cabinet from 2010 until 2012, when he announced his retirement from front-line politics.

He came to the UK from South Africa as a teenager, and was a noted anti-apartheid campaigner in the 1970s. He was an enthusiastic supporter of the ill-fated Alternative Vote system campaign in May 2011, together with his close friend and fellow former Young Liberal Richard Burden.