Irish conflict

Ciara Farren, the daughter of Northern Ireland's minister for further and higher education, is to stand in the next general election.

While her father, a former University of Ulster academic, runs in north Antrim, the 29-year-old politics graduate, who has worked in the European Parliament and is a European adviser to John Hume, will try to wrest the fiercely Loyalist east Belfast constituency from Democratic Unionist Party leader Peter Robinson MP. But since no Catholic has been elected in east Belfast, Ms Farren has her work cut out.