Jennifer McCann

Jennifer McCann MLA (born 1 March 1960) is an Irish republican politician in Northern Ireland, who was elected in 2007 to the Northern Ireland Assembly as a Sinn Féin member for Belfast West.

McCann was born in the Twinbrook area of Belfast, and was friends with Bobby Sands and his sister Bernadette. She joined the republican movement as a schoolgirl, becoming a member of Cumann na mBan then joining the Provisional Irish Republican Army aged 17. McCann was arrested aged 20, after shooting a Royal Ulster Constabulary police officer, and subsequently sentenced to 20 years imprisonment.

McCann was released from prison after serving just over ten years of her sentence, and began working for Sinn Féin in the POW Department and Women's Department. She is active on a number of projects in her community, including the Sally Gardens Community Centre Committee, the Safer Neighbourhoods Project, the Colin Community Festival, and the Falls Community Council's Community Drugs Programme.

Disappearance of Madeleine McCann

Madeleine Beth McCann (born 12 May 2003) disappeared on the evening of 3 May 2007 from her bed in a holiday apartment in Praia da Luz, a resort in the Algarve region of Portugal, sparking what one newspaper called "the most heavily reported missing-person case in modern history."

Madeleine was on holiday from the UK with her parents, Kate and Gerry McCann, her younger twin siblings, and a group of family friends and their children. She and the twins had been left asleep at 20:30 in the ground-floor apartment, while the McCanns and friends dined in a restaurant 50 metres (160 ft) away. The parents checked on the children throughout the evening, until Madeleine's mother discovered she was missing at 22:00. At first the Portuguese police seemed to accept that it was an abduction, but after misinterpreting a British DNA analysis came to believe that Madeleine had died in the apartment, which placed a cloud of suspicion over her parents. The McCanns were declared arguidos (suspects) in September 2007, but were cleared in July 2008 when Portugal's attorney-general closed the case.

Minister (government)

A minister is a politician who holds significant public office in a national or regional government, making and implementing decisions on policies in conjunction with the other ministers. Some ministers are more senior than others, and are usually members of the government's cabinet. In some countries the head of government is designated the "prime minister". A government minister with responsibility for religion, such as the Israeli Minister of Religious Services, may be a layperson or cleric but the title should not be confused with the religious position of "Minister (Christianity)" or the activity of Christian ministry.

Etymology

In some countries and territories, including Hong Kong, the Philippines, the United Kingdom, and the United States, holders of some posts equivalent to ministries are called secretaries of state, sometimes referred to simply as secretaries (e.g., the Home Secretary).

The term "minister" is also used in diplomacy with the quite different meaning of second-level diplomats (heads of legations). The term minister comes from Middle English, deriving from the Old French word ministre, originally minister in Latin, meaning "servant, attendant", which itself was derived from the word 'minus' meaning "less".

Sinn Féin

Sinn Féin (/ʃɪn ˈfeɪn/ shin-FAYNIrish pronunciation: [ʃɪnʲ ˈfʲeːnʲ]) is an Irish republican political party active in both the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. The name is Irish for "ourselves" or "we ourselves", although it is frequently mistranslated as "ourselves alone". Originating in the Sinn Féin organisation founded in 1905 by Arthur Griffith, it took its current form in 1970 after a split within the party (the other party became the Workers' Party of Ireland), and has been historically associated with the IRA.Gerry Adams has been party president since 1983.

Sinn Féin is currently the second-largest party behind the Democratic Unionist Party in the Northern Ireland Assembly, where it has four ministerial posts in the power-sharing Northern Ireland Executive, and the fourth-largest party in the Oireachtas, the parliament of the Republic. Sinn Féin also received the second highest number of Northern Ireland votes and seats in the 2015 Westminster elections, behind the DUP.