Anna was not a religious person. As a humanist, she believed in the goodness of people and their ability to transcend division. She exemplified that, every day of her life.
Naomi Long in the Northern Ireland Assembly, 11 November 2024
Anna Lo was a trailblazing member of the Northern Ireland Assembly who broke new ground as the first Chinese parliamentarian in UK history. Lo was a steadfast, and sometimes lone, voice on the causes that mattered to her, including reproductive rights, racial justice, and environmental action. She was also a humanist and an active supporter of Northern Ireland Humanists, whose vision of a society rooted in compassion, equality, and human rights underpinned her working life and political career.
I recall a veteran politician… giving me a piece of advice soon after I got elected as we sat beside each other in a coach to attend a conference. He said, ‘Anna, you have a niche in politics and that’s a good thing for any politician — but you must stop claiming to be pro-choice. That’s going to lose you votes.’ I appreciated his good intentions, but I had not been thinking only about gaining votes when I got into politics.
Anna Lo, The Place I Call Home: From Hong Kong to Belfast-My Story (2016)
Anna Lo was born in Hong Kong in 1950, first moving to Belfast, Northern Ireland in 1974. She worked in a range of roles, including for the BBC and the Royal Ulster Constabulary, and swiftly lent her energies to supporting Belfast’s Chinese community. This included, in 1978, starting the first evening class for Chinese immigrants living in Northern Ireland, and later championing the creation of sheltered housing for elderly people from the Chinese community. Lo qualified as a social worker at Ulster University, working for the Chinese Welfare Association, and later becoming vice chair of the Northern Ireland Council for Ethnic Minorities. She was made an MBE for her work with the Chinese immigrant community in the 2000 New Year Honours.
Elected MLA for South Belfast in 2007, Lo made history, becoming the first ethnic-minority politician elected to the Assembly, and the first China-born legislator in Europe. Following her re-election in 2011, Lo was appointed chair of the Northern Ireland Assembly’s Environment Committee–reflecting a passionate commitment to protecting the natural world. She served as Alliance Party MLA for Belfast South from 2007 until 2016, but after suffering targeted racial abuse from Ulster unionists, she did not stand again.
That year, 2016, Lo helped to launch Northern Ireland Humanists at an official launch event. She was courageous in identifying publicly as non-religious even in Northern Ireland’s religiously charged political arena. In 2015, she was the only one of seven non-religious MLAs identified by the BBC who was willing to be publicly identified as non-religious and interviewed on that basis.
In her autobiography, The Place I Call Home, published in 2016, Anna Lo was forthright about her life and her beliefs. She wrote candidly of her own experiences of financial hardship, discrimination, and domestic violence, as well as her heartache in seeing the suffering of others. All of these directly influenced her efforts to challenge inequality and uplift the dispossessed. She expressed particular anger where she perceived others to display a lack of compassion or common sense, both of which underpinned her commitment to extending abortion access in Northern Ireland (Lo was one of only four publicly declared pro-choice MLAs while in the Assembly), and her unwavering support for equal marriage.
From 2007, Lo lived with non-Hodgkin lymphoma, a type of blood cancer. She died in Belfast City Hospital on 6 November 2024.
On reflection, I believe I made some difference in the Assembly that hopefully will benefit our society as a whole.
Anna Lo, The Place I Call Home: From Hong Kong to Belfast-My Story (2016)
Reflecting on her impact in The Place I Call Home, Lo listed some of the issues she’d spent decades addressing, and expressed her sense of a growing ‘momentum for change’ even in those areas not yet transformed. Lo wrote with justified pride of her efforts to tackle racism and racial inequality, to raise the issue of human trafficking, to extend abortion access and champion the rights of women and the LGBT community, and to share her passionate concern about environmental issues.
Lo believed in, and worked for, the future of Northern Ireland as a cosmopolitan, egalitarian society where public policy is based on evidence, human rights, and democratic consensus, and where religion and historical difference do not entrench division. In addition to her public work, she was a much loved partner, mother, family member, and friend. As Naomi Long said in the Northern Ireland Assembly following Lo’s death:
Anna was not a religious person. As a humanist, she believed in the goodness of people and their ability to transcend division. She exemplified that, every day of her life. Good things do, indeed, come in small packages, and Anna Lo was the best of us. She was my friend: warm, witty, funny, fierce, courageous and kind. I will miss her enormously, but she will live on in her legacy and in the hearts of all those whom she touched with her kindness.
Naomi Long in the Northern Ireland Assembly, 11 November 2024
Anna Lo, The Place I Call Home: From Hong Kong to Belfast-My Story (2016)
Those who, like myself, are in communication with the advanced thought and thinkers throughout the world know that hundreds —nay, […]
Thomas Hardy was an English novelist and poet, renowned for his apparently bleak outlook, but finely tuned to life and […]
Free thought means fearless thought. It is not deterred by legal penalties, nor by spiritual consequences. Dissent from the Bible […]
As well as being one of the most distinguished musicians of his time, he was, like Sir Hubert Parry before […]