CVSNI

Patricia MacBride is married with two children.

She worked as Project Manager for the Bloody Sunday Trust during the hearings of the Bloody Sunday Tribunal of Inquiry and was involved in the development of the Museum of Free Derry and National Civil Rights Archive. She was a Victims’ representative on the inaugural Northern Ireland Civic Forum.

In 2003, she was awarded a Winston Churchill Fellowship and carried out extensive research work in the USA and Argentina, examining best practice in the area of oral history and truth recovery. In 2005 she was appointed as a lay Magistrate.

Ms. MacBride’s father and brother were shot and wounded during a sectarian attack on their home in 1972, her father dying later as a result of his injuries. Her brother was an IRA volunteer who was killed by the SAS in 1984.

She is founder and Senior Partner of an award-winning public relations company and has worked on a number of world championship sporting events and with clients in the financial, telecoms, retail and public sector.

Brendan McAllister

Brendan McAllister is married with three adult children.

After an earlier career in the probation service, Brendan has been a professional mediator since1992. As Director of Mediation Northern Ireland he has been responsible for leading his organisation’s contribution to the development of mediation in the Northern Ireland situation. He has worked on a wide range of contentious issues including civic dialogue; policing; prisons; inter-community conflict; parades & protests; housing; health provision; victims and restorative justice.

He is a Neighbourhood Renewal Advisor for England and has led Mediation Northern Ireland’s work there on Community Cohesion and gangs and gun violence.

Brendan has wide-ranging international experience, contributing to the theory and practice of mediation for peace-building.

Previously a member of the SDLP, he left party politics in 1982 to become active in the peace movement. He led community responses to violent incidents and Troubles-related deaths in his home town of Newry and has extensive experience in Community Relations work.

He is a member of the Corrymeela Community.

Bertha McDougall OBE

Bertha McDougall is widowed with three grown-up children.

She was appointed in October 2005 as the Interim Commissioner for Victims and Survivors for a period of one year. She is a Trustee of the RUC George Cross Foundation and is Chairman of the victims' group, Forgotten Families, which was set up to lobby on behalf of pre-1982 RUC widows. She is a Trustee of the Phoenix Energy for Children Charitable Trust.

Her husband Lindsay, a Civil Servant and part time RUC reservist was shot dead in January 1981 whilst on duty in Belfast.

She was a primary school teacher for fifteen years before being seconded to the Northern Ireland Council for Educational Development where she was a co-ordinator for EMU (Education for Mutual Understanding) in cross community projects. She subsequently worked for the Schools Examinations Council. Her last position in education was as Principal Officer with the Council for Curriculum Examinations and Assessment (CCEA).

Michael Nesbitt

Michael Nesbitt is married with two children.

He has over twenty years experience as a broadcast news journalist, working for BBC Northern Ireland from 1979 to 1989 and UTV from 1992 to 2006. In between, he had a spell as Managing Director of Anderson-Kenny Public Relations.

His work includes four years presenting Good Morning Ulster for BBC Radio Ulster, and thirteen years with UTV Live and Insight, specialising in politics and the peace / political process. This entailed reporting news of major incidents, and giving a voice to victims and survivors of atrocities from Enniskillen, through Shankill and Greysteel, to Omagh, as well as recording news of hundreds of individual deaths and injuries.

Michael has not lost any family member to a Troubles-related incident, but in 1973 the family’s linen business was destroyed in a terrorist attack.