Lieutenant-Colonel Charles Edward Henry John Mulholland, 4th Baron Dunleath, DL (23 June 1933 – 9 January 1993) was a Northern Irish politician and Territorial Army officer.
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Early and personal life
Mulholland attended Eton College and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he studied agriculture. He was married to Dorinda (15 February 1929 – 19 March 2022), only daughter of Lieutenant-General Arthur Percival, on 5 December 1959.
Career
Mulholland succeeded as Baron Dunleath in 1956 and entered the House of Lords. As Lord Dunleath, he became a deputy lieutenant of County Down and the commanding officer (lieutenant-colonel) of the North Irish Horse in the Territorial Army. He was also interested in vintage motoring. In August 1967, he was appointed to the BBC's board of governors, taking over from Richard Pim as governor for Northern Ireland.
In the early 1970s, Dunleath was active in the Ulster Defence Regiment and was an Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) member. However, he joined the Alliance Party of Northern Ireland, and was elected for the party in North Down at the 1973 Northern Ireland Assembly election. He held the seat on the Northern Ireland Constitutional Convention.
Dunleath was the only Alliance Party member in the House of Lords. While there, he strongly promoted the Education (Northern Ireland) Act, 1978, which permitted representatives of the Roman Catholic church to take a role in the Protestant-dominated state school system. He also attempted to introduce a bill to liberalise divorce law in Northern Ireland.
Dunleath was chairman of a company which in 1979 bidded for the Independent Television licence for Northern Ireland. In order to place the bid, he was required to resign from his party affiliation; having been elected to Ards Borough Council in 1977, he thereafter sat as an Independent member and as a crossbencher in the House of Lords. However, in 1981 he rejoined the Alliance Party in a personal capacity, and the following year successfully stood as an Alliance candidate in North Down at the Northern Ireland Assembly election, serving for the entire four years of the revived Assembly's existence as both a representative (MPA) and as the Assistant Speaker.
On Dunleath's death from cancer in 1993, his peerage passed to his first cousin Michael Mulholland.