Carál Ni Chuilín is the New Culture Minister for Northern Ireland

All change at Stormont today, with the newly elected Northern Ireland assembly meeting for the first time since the elections a fortnight ago. I was listening to the radio as Mark Carruthers on "Good Morning Ulster" pushed Sinn Fein's John O'Dowd to see would the Department of Culture, Arts and Leisure minister be Martina Anderson? It made sense. Derry born and bred, with the inaugural UK City of Culture there in 2013. But no. While it is a female minister at DCAL, it is a West Belfast woman, New Lodge woman, born and bred. Carál Ní Chuilín. Do a Google search and you can see that she's a former Belfast City Councillor, an MLA since 2007 and a former IRA prisoner. Today, she took the political office of the Minister for Culture, Arts and Leisure. I spoke to her today just hours after the announcement and she seemed all too aware of the job ahead, but telling me she was delighted. She told me today she won't interfere in the artistic side of any festival programming or museum exhibitions. This was in answer to how she would steer away from the controversy surrounding the previous Minister Nelson McCausland and his intervention in the Belfast Festival at Queens programming in which he asked the festival to consider including pro-Israel points of view and Christian music. This came off the back of previous comments about museums giving more prominence to Ulster-Scots, the Orange Order and alternative views on the origin of the universe.

So as she digests her brief tonight, she could catch up on a few episodes of the HBO/Belfast made tv mini series"Game of Thrones", familiarise herself with the funding situation and looming cuts, and then get in touch with her inner Picasso and enter a self portait for a competition for MLAs being run by the Metropolitan Arts Centre, the MAC, which will be judged by BBC Radio Ulster's Wendy Austin and NI'sTweet King political journalist Eamon Maillie.

Talking of tweets, the new Minister has been tweeting her musical taste, including Rod Stewart, Led Zeppelin and Seasick Steve. Now there's a concert line up, if a Culture Minister wanted to influence!