Hello, in this programme I'm talking to someone who's made a quite remarkable political journey

about his formative influences and experiences.

Today, he's Minister of State at the Northern Ireland office, a friend of Boris Johnson

and a keen admirer of the late Margaret Thatcher, but he began life in altogether different

circumstances, born into a Catholic nationalist family in

Belfast. Connor Burns, welcome to Red Lines. Thank you very much. I want to talk about that

political journey in some detail in this conversation, but let's go back to your youth. Is there a time or a place

you can point to is the moment you realised you were interested in politics.

I think everybody who grew up in Northern Ireland at the time that I did, albeit we left when I was still relatively young, sort of eight and a half, was surrounded by politics.

Now, not surrounded by politics in a

party political sense, but Northern Ireland was a deeply, still is to some degree, a deeply

political society. The troubles were in full swing and it was not unusual for conversations

around my grandmother's kitchen table or dining table to descend into quite heated debate between my dad and his brothers, my uncles.

And I think I sort of just, by a process of osmosis, absorbed politics.

Politics was at the core of society in Northern Ireland. So I grew up

just surrounded by and aware of the importance of politics, in a very funny sense, failed politics.

You were born in 1972. You moved away from your home city of Belfast in 1980 when you were, as you say,

eight and a half.

So you were young, but you do remember those early years in the city of your birth.

When Belfast was a very troubled place and pretty awful things were happening,

not terribly far away from where you were growing up, in fact,

in North Belfast.

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