Rosemary Byrne
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Rosemary Byrne (born 3 March 1948, Irvine) is a Member of the Scottish Parliament (MSP) for the South of Scotland. She is a member of Solidarity (Scotland) after she and Tommy Sheridan left the Scottish Socialist Party (SSP).
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.
Following a controversial defamation case in 2006 between fellow SSP MSP Tommy Sheridan and the British tabloid newspaper The News Of The World both Sheridan and Byrne split from the SSP. They then formed a new socialist party which they named Solidarity.
During the trial, in which Sheridan sued the News of the World for defamation and won, Byrne gave evidence supporting Sheridan. On the 1st of October 2006 the News of the World published fresh evidence which it claims proves that their allegations were true and Sheridan had thus lied to the Court of Session during the trial. The new evidence provided by the newspaper is a taped conversation and it is not yet clear if this evidence is genuine [1] or what the legal ramifications will be to all sides including Byrne. The transcript, and excerpts from the tape, can be found on the News of the World website[2].
Both she and Tommy Sheridan are accused by the IWW and the NUJ of betraying workers by unilaterally removing funding from the collective body which employed parliamentary staff [1]
