Roy Beggs Jr

rdf:langString Roy Beggs Jr

rdf:langString Roy Beggs Jr

rdf:langString Roy Beggs Jr

rdf:langString Northern Ireland

rdf:langString Engineer

rdf:langString Glenoe, County Antrim

rdf:langString Sandra Beggs

rdf:langString MLA for East Antrim

rdf:langString Roy Beggs Jr (born 3 July 1962) is an Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) politician, who was a Member of the Northern Ireland Assembly (MLA) for East Antrim from 1998 until March 2022. Beggs is the son of the politician Roy Beggs, who was the UUP Member of Parliament (MP) for East Antrim from 1983 to 2005. He served as a local councillor on Carrickfergus Borough Council from 2001 to 2011. During this period he had been elected as Chairman of the District Policing Partnership and vice-chairman of the Local Strategic Partnership and of the Community Safety Partnership. In 2011 Beggs was elected as a Deputy Speaker of the Northern Ireland Assembly. He served as a member of the Assembly's Social Development Committee, Public Accounts Committee, Health Committee, Environment Committee, Finance Committee, Deputy Chairman of the Agriculture Committee and Regional Development Committee. He is the Ulster Unionist Party spokesperson on Social Development. In 2003, Beggs succeeded in having Irish rebel music removed from the in-flight entertainment of Aer Lingus airplanes. He complained of the "blatant promotion of militant, armed republicanism" on a music channel during a flight from Dublin to Boston after seeing that Derek Warfield had a radio channel dedicated to his music. Beggs, it was the same as "the speeches of Osama Bin Laden being played on a trans-Atlantic Arabian airline." Aer Lingus removed the material from their flights stating: "It is something that should not have been on board and we removed it immediately we became aware of it." He lost his seat in the 2022 Northern Ireland Assembly election.