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.
“Growing up along the border marks her unionism,” said Tom Elliott, a former Ulster Unionist MP who knew Foster and her farming family. “Those at the edge of the union like Arlene are the ones that value the union more than say those in the east of the province.”
Foster was aged just eight when at 9.30pm one evening her father, John Kelly, went out to close the animals in for the night at their farm.
“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.”
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, where Foster hid under the bed covers at night in fear the terrorists would return.
Foster was born Arlene Isobel Kelly 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.
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. The girl she was sat next to almost died. It left Foster feeling “very bitter”, she later said.
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 Jackie McDonald, a leader of the loyalist paramilitary group, the UDA, while canvassing in south Belfast.
Her leadership of the DUP since 2015 has nevertheless cemented its transition into unionism’s big tent. It had emerged in the early 1970s from Paisley’s Christian Free Presbyterian church, which regarded the Pope as the anti-Christ and used its influence on district councils to lock up playgrounds on a Sunday. But Foster came from the mainstream Anglican Church of Ireland tradition and 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”.
“She is in a party that has blocked gay equality but she is no homophobe,” he said.
Eoghan Harris, a southern Irish political strategist, met Foster this year and found her “humble and funny”.
“Like most cradle Catholics, I have an antenna for a Protestant bigot but I knew straight away that Arlene was no bigot,” he said. “Which is some moral achievement when you think she saw her own father bleeding on their kitchen floor after an IRA murder attempt.
“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.”
