May Blood, Lady Blood, who has died aged 84, was a former Belfast linen millworker, peace campaigner, community activist and member of the House of Lords. She left school at the age of 14 without any qualifications and lived by the tenet that anything was possible for those who were sufficiently determined. She became the first woman from Northern Ireland to be awarded a life peerage.
She was small in stature, but endowed with a forceful personality and relentless energy. In Northern Ireland she was “the wee Belfast woman” or “the Shankill woman” who became famous as someone who was always in the middle of a campaign to improve the lives of working-class people in Belfast through the provision of jobs. Her activism extended across the sectarian divide and led her in 1996 to become a founding member of a cross-community political party, the Northern Ireland Women’s Coalition, of which she was campaign manager.
