John, Lord Alderdice

John, Lord Alderdice, was born in Northern Ireland in 1955, and educated at The Queen’s University of Belfast, graduating in Medicine in 1978. He specialised in psychiatry and psychotherapy and was appointed Ireland's first Consultant Psychotherapist in 1988. He is a Fellow and Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, an Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians of Ireland, an Honorary Professor in the University of San Marcos in Lima, Peru, a Visiting Professor at the University of Virginia and an Honorary Affiliate of the British Psychoanalytical Society.

To apply his psychological ideas to political conflict resolution he entered Northern Ireland politics. In 1987 he was elected Leader of the cross-community Alliance Party. He was also from 1989 to 1997 a member of Belfast City Council. As Alliance Leader he was involved in inter-party and inter-governmental talks about the future of Northern Ireland from 1987 through until 1998, and was one of the key negotiators of the Good Friday Agreement, which was concluded in April of 1998.

After the elections to the new Northern Ireland Assembly established under the Agreement, he stepped down as Alliance Leader and was immediately appointed the first Speaker of the Assembly. He retired from that position six years later in February 2004, having already been appointed as one of the four members of the new International Monitoring Commission being set up by the British, Irish and American governments to monitor the terrorist cease-fires and the security force normalisation process in Northern Ireland.

He was appointed to the House of Lords in 1996 and sits on the Liberal Democrat benches. Since 2005 has been the President of Liberal International, the world-wide federation of liberal political parties. He is also Joint Chairman of the Critical Incident Analysis Group and the Chairman of the World Federation of Scientists Permanent Monitoring Panel on Motivations for Terrorism.