Mary Lou McDonald grew up in a republican household in Dublin to a backdrop of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. “My family’s connections with the IRA would have been in the 1920s,” she says. But it was the death of the hunger strikers in the Maze prison in 1981, when she was 12, that prompted her own political awakening.

“For everybody of my age group those moments were absolutely defining, even though you didn’t realise it at the time,” the Sinn Fein leader says. “There was huge upset across everybody’s homes. We all remember asking: why is this happening and who is Margaret Thatcher? There was a profound sense of injustice all across Ireland and in my generation a sense of rage.”

Only 30 years