Hello, I'm Mark Carruthers and today I'm talking face to face with someone whose involvement

in frontline Northern Ireland politics might have been stepped back in recent years,

but whose carefully timed interventions often create headlines nonetheless.

He remains involved in active politics as a member of the House of Lords

and he has challenging and sometimes surprising views on a range of topics, from religion to dealing with paramilitaries to the possible outcome of a border poll.

We'll come on to that issue later, but John Alderdice, Lord Alderdouse, welcome to Red Lines.

Thanks very much, Mark.

What age do you think you were when you first became aware

of politics being discussed at home?

I don't know that I ever really remember a time when it wasn't.

My father came from South Armagh

between Bessbrook and Yuri.

And my mother came from Belfast. And her mother would have been a quite

fundamentalist Protestant, not of the DUP Paisley variety, but I remember when I did eventually go into politics, she said,

oh, well that's nice, but isn't it a pity he didn't go into the Ulster Unionist Party?

And, you know, she really neither entirely understood me nor appreciated what I was trying to do.

But I remember right from an early age, they lived up the top of the Ormore Road, and I remember her anxieties about how the demography of the area was changing and so on.

So one side of the family living close to the border, another side living close to demographic borders within Belfast,

from a very early stage, I would hear these things talked about.

That was the ambient noise, was it, around the breakfast table?

It was, yes, because my father was a Presbyterian minister, as you know, and he was conscious

of his pastoral and his spiritual responsibilities, but that was never divorced from what

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