Hello, in today's red lines, I'm talking face to face to someone whose late career change took everyone by surprise, including, she says, herself.

Of course, my guest was already well known to the public as a high-profile figure in the world of healthcare.

She worked for many years as a community nurse in North and West Belfast before moving into management roles at the Public Health

Agency, the Department of Health and then the Royal College of Nursing, where she rose to become

General Secretary and Chief Executive. Suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere, she was announced

as the Sinn Féin candidate for the Fermanagh South Chiron seat in the 2024 general election,

a contest she won with a majority of 4,500 votes.

Pat Cullen MP, welcome to Red Lines.

Great to be here.

It's true to say then, is it, that at the start of 2024,

you had no idea you'd be ending the year as a Sinn Féin member of Parliament.

That's absolutely true. I had no intentions at that point. In fact, I was in discussion with

the chair of the Royal College of Nursing about staying on for another few years with the Royal College of Nursing as their general secretary,

because if you remember that time, we had the announcement, obviously, of the general election

and the college was clear that a change of leadership wasn't the right thing to do

when a new government was most likely

going to be put in place.

So you probably would have stayed on that job, would you?

Well, I had already almost committed to that, yes.

Yes.

So what you ended up doing and where destiny took you was very different?

It was and I don't regret it by any means.

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