Tanya Jones is to run for deputy leader of the Green Party, The Impartial Reporter understands.

The Fermanagh and south Tyrone Green Party representative, who stood in the 2015 and 2017 General Elections and in the 2016 and 2017 Assembly elections, will discover her fate at the weekend when the annual conference and AGM takes place in Belfast.
It has been reported that Ms. Jones will run against Belfast councillor Georgina Milne.

READ: Assembly Election 2017: Tanya Jones - Voters put under pressure to ‘prop up’ other parties

The position of deputy leader became vacant when South Belfast MLA Claire Bailey quit the role. Ms. Bailey became the party’s second MLA in 2016, alongside party leader Steven Agnew, and she held her seat in the 2017 Stormont election. 

She said: “The time is right for me to step aside and allow another person to develop the role of deputy leader.”

Ms. Jones, who lives in Enniskillen, studied at Cambridge and York Universities and is a former solicitor and teacher. She has lived in County Clare, in England, Italy and the United States and is the author of eight books, most recently the novel Fracking Up. 
She was the founding chair of the Fermanagh and South Tyrone Greens group and was a campaigner in the Fermanagh frack-free movement, holding the role of website editor for the Fermanagh Fracking Awareness Network.

She is married to Martin and has three grown-up children: Gawain, a chess grandmaster; Rory, a musician and poet and Ashley, a student at Queen’s University Belfast and chair of the Young Greens NI.

Ms. Jones received 879 first preference votes in the May 2016 Assembly election and 550 first preference votes in the March 2017 Assembly election. Sources close to the Green Party have indicated that Ms. Jones will contest the deputy leadership.