Rosemary Byrne
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Rosemary Byrne (born 3 March 1948, Irvine) is a Member of the Scottish Parliament for the South of Scotland. She is a member of Solidarity (Scotland) after she and Tommy Sheridan left the Scottish Socialist Party.
Byrne lives in Irvine and was a teacher and a trade union activist for several years. In 2003 she was elected to the Scottish Parliament, and scored the SSP's best constituency vote outside Glasgow in Cunninghame South.
At the time of the 2003 election she was arguably the least prominent of the SSP's six MSPs, and she was the only one of the six who was not already a member of the SSP executive. At the February 2005 conference of the SSP she was elected as one of its co-chairs. However she did not stand for re-election to this post or the executive committee at its conference in March 2006, stating that she was standing down for personal reasons.
She is a member of the Education Committee of the Scottish Parliament.
Along with fellow MSP Tommy Sheridan, she has formed a new socialist party, 'Solidarity', after a damaging court case let to them splitting from the SSP. In that court case, in which Serdidan sued the News of the World for defamation and won, Byrne gave evidence supproting Sheridan's assertion that he had not admitted to a SSP NEC meeting that he had frequented a swingers club in Manchester. On the 1st of October 2006 the News of the World published fresh evidence which it claims proves Sheridan had visited the Swingers club and had lied to the Court of Session during the trial.
The evidence is a taped conversation between Sherdian and an associate in which he confesses to visting the clubs and also to confessing this information to the meeting of the SSP NEC. It is not yet clear what the legal ramifications are of the new eveidence or whether it will lead to Byrne being charged with perjury. The evidence can be seen of the News of the World website.
Both she and Tommy Sheridan are accused by the IWW of betraying workers by unilaterally removing funding from the collective body which employed parliamentary staff [1]
