Anna Lo, who has died aged 74 of cancer, was Northern Ireland’s first minority ethnic elected representative. She represented South Belfast for the Alliance party in the Northern Ireland Assembly from 2007 to 2016.
There she established all-party groups on subjects ranging from ethnic minorities to human trafficking. Having been a founding commissioner in the Equality Commission for Northern Ireland in 1999, she led calls for Peter Robinson, the first minister, to apologise in 2014 after he defended a pastor who called Islam “satanic”. His executive then published a draft racial equality strategy for which Lo had lobbied.
As environment committee chair, she helped compel the environment minister Mark Durkan to restore NGOs’ funding after budget cuts. She inserted language in the marine bill requiring the Department of Environment to promote sustainable development. On abortion rights, she pushed, successfully, for guidelines clarifying Northern Ireland’s abortion law for healthcare professionals.
Lo’s entry into politics happened quite unexpectedly. A trained social worker, she had spent many years in community work and from 1997 was director of the Chinese Welfare Association. One morning in December 2006, the Alliance party deputy leader, Naomi Long, arrived at her office and asked her to stand in south Belfast for the Assembly elections in March 2007.
Northern Ireland had never had a non-white politician. Rightwing critics questioned whether, as a non-native, she was qualified. But after winning the seat, she was the first legislator other than the Speaker to speak in the new assembly, calling on it to value the contributions of minority ethnic communities and reject racism.
In 2011, she won re-election, topping the poll and doubling her first-preference total. She took on the environment committee’s chairmanship, to which she added the deputy chairmanship of the standards and privileges committee, during contentious investigations of Robinson and his wife Iris.
Born in Hong Kong, Anna – whose Chinese birth-name was Man-Wah – was the daughter of Lo Ping-Fai, a civil servant who later worked for a shipping company after developing tuberculosis, and Wai Kam-Ping, granddaughter of a wealthy merchant with businesses in China, Hong Kong and Honolulu. Little of the family fortune remained, and when Man-Wah was six, her family moved to new low-rent housing on Hong Kong’s northeast coast.
Her early years were spent in her grandparents’ family home in Wan Chai with her five siblings – and her parents teaching ballroom dancing in their lounge.
After leaving Shaukeiwan technical school, Lo undertook clerical work, and then became a personal assistant at an advertising company. At a cousin’s wedding banquet, she met the Belfast journalist David Watson, who was about to join the South China Morning Post.
In 1974 she went to London and enrolled in a three-month secretarial course in Earl’s Court. She began a relationship with Watson, who returned home to work at the Belfast Telegraph. When the Home Office rejected Lo’s work-permit application, Watson suggested getting married.
She moved to Belfast five months after the Ulster Workers’ Council strike brought down the first power-sharing executive in 1974. The couple lived in east Belfast, near the Rev Ian Paisley, and Lo found work as secretary to the editor of the local agricultural newspaper Farmweek.
In 1976 Lo joined BBC Northern Ireland as a production secretary, and eventually the World Service. Besides affording a chance to meet politicians (Paisley joked to her in the lift about his dieting successes), it led to her recording features for the BBC’s Chinese External Services about the Chinese community and the Peace People organisation, founded that year by Mairead Corrigan-Maguire and Betty Williams.
She established an evening English class in 1978 for Chinese immigrants at Rupert Stanley College, where her mother-in-law lectured. This grew into a social hub for immigrants who rarely ventured out from home and work, with weekend expeditions to the Giant’s Causeway. When Lo met a senior police officer at a dinner party it led to her being invited to translate for Chinese speakers for the Royal Ulster Constabulary’s aliens department.
In 1987, she became an interpreter in the Chinese Welfare Association (CWA) in south Belfast. Then, after studying at the University of Ulster, she became Northern Ireland’s first minority ethnic social worker. She was in a new Chinese Health Project formed by the CWA and Barnardo’s, and helped found Chinese women’s groups in Belfast and Craigavon.
Her career went from strength to strength. As vice-chair of a new Northern Ireland Council for Ethnic Minorities in 1994, she successfully lobbied for a Race Relations (Northern Ireland) Order 1997, prohibiting discrimination in the workplace, housing or public services – the UK’s 1976 Race Relations Act had exempted Northern Ireland. In 2000 she was appointed MBE.
As director she professionalised the CWA, overseeing the construction of a £1.4m Chinese Resource Centre, opened in 2011, and a 41-unit sheltered housing scheme.
Lo’s political career ended almost as suddenly as it began. The experience of encountering a group of abusive loyalists in an east Belfast shopping centre in 2014, two months after she called the Northern Irish border “artificial”, convinced her not to stand in the 2016 elections.
Her first marriage ended eventually in divorce. In 2010 she married Gavin Millar, a former fireman. They divorced the following year.
She is survived by her partner, Robert Barry, the sons from her first marriage, Conall and Owen, her siblings Henry and Mary, and two grandchildren.
• Anna (Man-Wah) Lo, politician and community worker, born 16 June 1950; died 6 November 2024
