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.
