Who is Arlene Foster?
Une dirigeante façonnée par le conflit nord-irlandais.
Début décembre, le Royaume-Uni et l’Union européenne sont arrivés à un premier compromis sur le Brexit. Dans l’ombre des négociations, Arlene Foster, la chef de file du parti unioniste nord-irlandais, le DUP, a su imposer à Theresa May ses conditions. Qui est-elle ? Le quotidien britannique The Guardian brosse le portrait d’une dirigeante intransigeante, profondément marquée par les violences qui ont ensanglanté l’Irlande du Nord dans sa jeunesse.
In an age of marginal political figures seizing centre stage, it is apt that the most powerful person in Britain this month was not the prime minister but Arlene Foster, a 47-year-old solicitor and the first woman to lead the Democratic Unionist party (DUP) in Northern Ireland.
2. After June’s general election, she and her band of DUP MPs kept the nation waiting while she
wrung £1bn out of Theresa May to prop up the Conservatives’ parliamentary minority. Critics were aghast at the power being wielded by such a social conservative who opposes abortion and gay marriage. However, she seems to be playing her hand strongly right now.
3. On December 8, she extracted a further price from Downing Street in the form of a guarantee
Northern Ireland would not be set adrift from the rest of the UK because of difficulties over the Irish border in the first phase of the Brexit agreement.
THE BLOODY ERA OF THE ‘TROUBLES’
4. The politics of the border has always been fundamental to Foster. She is the daughter of a farmer and part-time police reservist in the
border county of Fermanagh, where during the Troubles the IRA regularly murdered farmers.
5. Foster was aged just eight when one evening her father, John Kelly, went out to close the animals in for the night at their farm.
6. “I was in the kitchen and my mother was sitting on the edge of the table and she just froze when the gunshots went off,” she later recalled. “I didn’t know what they were until my father came in on all fours crawling, with blood coming from his head.”
7. Her father had been shot in the head by the IRA but survived. The terrible thing, Foster later said, “was knowing one of his neighbours must have set him up”. The family were moved for their protection to a Belfast council house.
8. Foster was born in 1970, just in time for the bloodiest era of the Troubles. Her parents had created a “very simple, happy, rural life” at their farm near Roslea, but in the first two years of her life nearly 500 people were killed in Northern Ireland.
9. A few years after the attack on her father came another near miss. While she was at Enniskillen Collegiate Grammar School for Girls she was almost killed in a bomb attack on a school bus driven by a part-time soldier in the British army’s Ulster Defence Regiment. It left Foster feeling “very bitter”, she later said.
A DIVISIVE FIGURE
10. Both Martin McGuinness and Foster served as ministers in the Northern Ireland executive throughout its existence from 2007 to 2017. For the last two years she worked alongside the former IRA commanderturned Sinn Féin politician. She was first minister and he was deputy first minister. It was not always easy. When McGuinness died in March, it took a lot of “soul-searching” for her to attend his funeral. The former IRA commander had delivered an oration at the funeral of Séamus McElwaine, the man suspected of shooting her father.
11. Foster’s brinkmanship can be seen as rooted in the “cut and thrust” and “nasty” brand of northern Irish politics from which she emerged.
12. Her long experience in the detailed negotiations of Ulster politics also imbued in her “an awareness of the significance of language – not just what it says, but what it can lead to”, said Peter Weir, Northern Ireland’s former education minister who has known Foster since they met as law students in 1989.
13. So it was never likely she would let pass Downing Street’s ambiguous language on the
throughout pendant / alongside au(x) côté(s) de / former ancien / to turn ici, devenir / Sinn Féin parti nationaliste irlandais / deputy vice- / soul-searching questionnement/débat intérieur / to attend assister à / funeral oration oraison/éloge funèbre. 11. brinkmanship politique de la corde raide / to see, saw, seen ici, percevoir / to be rooted in découler de (root racine) / cut and thrust lutte acharnée; ici, compétitif / nasty agressif, hostile / brand marque (de fabrique), image (de marque), style. 12. to imbue imprégner, remplir; ici, susciter / awareness (prise de) conscience / significance importance, portée / law ici, en droit. 13. to be likely être probable. border question about “regulatory alignment” between the Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland.
14. Foster remains a divisive figure. Earlier this year she compared republicans to “crocodiles” and during the general election she was heavily criticised for talking with a leader of the loyalist paramilitary group, the UDA.
15. Her leadership of the DUP since 2015 has nevertheless cemented its transition into unionism’s big tent. While the DUP has blocked gay marriage in Northern Ireland, the Rev Chris Hudson, who preaches at Belfast’s All Soul’s church, the spiritual home of LGBT Christians, believes “Arlene has many gay friends and is comfortable with the gay community”.
16. “Like most cradle Catholics, I have an antenna for a Protestant bigot but I knew straight away that Arlene was no bigot,” said Eoghan Harris, a southern Irish political strategist. “Which is some moral achievement when you think she saw her own father bleeding on their kitchen floor after an IRA murder attempt.
17. “I told her the Irish language should not frighten unionists given the role played by Presbyterian scholars in keeping written Irish alive,” he said. “She listened carefully and shortly afterwards she visited a Roman Catholic school, spoke some Irish and tried to reach out. She got little thanks for her effort.”
18. Her performance this month is likely to win her greater applause from her allies.