Oliver Napier

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Sir Oliver Napier (born July 11, 1935) was the first leader of the Alliance Party of Northern Ireland. In 1974 he served as Legal Minister and head of the Office of Legal Reform in the power-sharing executive set up by the Sunningdale Agreement.

Napier was educated at St. Malachy's College, Belfast and the Queen's University of Belfast before serving as a solicitor. In 1970 he became a founding member of the Alliance Party of Northern Ireland, which sought to become a political force that could command support from across the divided communities of the province, offering an alternative to what Napier described as the sectarianism of the Ulster Unionist Party. He served as the party's leader from 1972 until 1984. Under his leadership Alliance participated in successive assemblies that sought to solve the debate on the province's position. In 1979 he came closer to winning a seat in the Westminster Parliament than any other Alliance candidate in history when he was less than a thousand votes behind Peter Robinson's winning total in Belfast East in a tight three-way marginal. When Napier stepped down as leader in 1984 he received many plaudits for his work. The following year he was knighted and in 1989 he stood down from Belfast City Council, seemingly to retire. However in 1995 he returned to the political fray when he contested the North Down by-election for the Alliance, standing again in the 1997 general election. In 1996 he was elected to the Northern Ireland Peace Forum for North Down. He currently serves on the Board Of Govenors of the first integrated school in Northern Ireland, Lagan College.