LAST Thursday, Queen’s University invited me to make a keynote lecture to mark becoming Honorary Professor of Practice in Politics and Public Affairs.

It was truly humbling, and even more so to see the number of people who turned up to listen.

In my world, I am more used to writing speeches for others to deliver than giving those speeches myself.

It was an exceptional honour because I was the first in the Kelly family to go to university in the early 1980s, just over a hundred years after my great-great-grandfather, also Tom Kelly, was thrown off his tenant farm in Mullaghbane.

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He ended his days labouring at Newry Port, only to die from exhaustion in the workhouse.

The journey from workhouse to becoming an honorary professor at a Russell Group university would have been unimaginable for Thomas Kelly in 1885.

I was brought up in a single-parent family. My dad was a carpenter (readers will be glad to know he was not a much-vaunted toolmaker, like the father of the UK PM) and the son and grandson of carpenters too.

Most Catholic/nationalist families have travelled similar journeys between three to four generations or less.

It’s one of the reasons the Catholic community put such an emphasis on getting an education.

Most had nothing much to give or leave in financial terms, so they focused on supporting children learning and bettering themselves.

Americans believed it was a mark of success for one generation to improve the........

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