Michelle O’Neill was never supposed to be here. When the Northern Ireland Assembly was established following the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, which ended 30 years of sectarian bloodshed known as the Troubles, it established a delicate system of power sharing. Traditionally Protestant British unionists, who wanted to preserve Northern Ireland’s status within the U.K., and traditionally Catholic Irish nationalists, who aspired to reunify with the independent Republic of Ireland, would govern together. Still, no one imagined that anyone other than a unionist might one day hold its top office.
And yet here stands O’Neill, a 47-year-old Catholic woman and the first nationalist leader of a province she one day hopes to abolish. “The north of Ireland was built in such a way that someone from my background
