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  • Arlene Foster, who announced her resignation Wednesday as Northern Ireland First Minister, is an ultra-conservative who led the province's main pro-British party during the Brexit storm, ultimately paying the price for growing discontent over its consequences. Foster's central role in the Brexit drama marked an astonishing rise for the 50-year-old child of "The Troubles" that killed thousands in Northern Ireland and defined the core of her beliefs. The passion and fervour of those blood-soaked years of violence over British rule in Northern Ireland came through in the way Foster spoke about political "red lines" over which she vowed she and her province would not be pushed. "The red line is blood red," she once remarked. Unionists had hoped that the 2016 vote would draw Northern Ireland closer to London, and away from the orbit of Dublin, which remained in the European Union. But they ended up being bitterly disappointed by the eventual deal, as London ignored their demands and imposed new controls on goods travelling to the province from the rest of Britain in order to keep its border with the Irish republic open. Tensions were already rising among the pro-Britain unionists as demographic shifts wiped out their majority in the regional assembly. They recently exploded into violence as Brexit realities hit home. Foster was just eight when her policeman father barely survived a 1979 attack by Irish Republic Army (IRA) paramilitaries. It forced her family to flee the small farm where they lived for the relative safety of the nearby town. Violence underpinned Northern Irish life in Foster's youth. She was 16 when her school bus was blown up in another attack by the IRA aimed at assassinating its driver for being a part-time member of the UK security forces. "It is part of who I am and can't be denied," Foster said of those attacks in a 2015 interview with The Belfast Telegraph. "It informed my teenage years. It informed my political decisions." Foster went on to graduate from Queen's University in Belfast with a law degree and met her husband Bryan while practising as a lawyer. They have three children. Foster honed her politics at university as a member of the youth wing of the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) -- the dominant force in Northern Ireland since its creation in 1922. She followed her election to the local assembly in 2003 by switching allegiance the following year to the blossoming DUP group founded by the fundamentalist Protestant preacher Ian Paisley. Foster acknowledged the difficulties of working in a male-dominated party that shared socially traditional views about family life and the role of women. But she managed to quickly rise through the ranks and held various ministerial posts before becoming the provincial government's leader in 2016-17. Foster battled through largely unscathed as infighting and a corruption scandal brought down her government. Yet she was unable to weather the storm created by the DUP's failure, in the eyes of her community, to honour its central Brexit commitment: that Northern Ireland must remain wholly British and keep an open border with Ireland. zak/jwp/phz/jz
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  • Arlene Foster: Troubles' war child pays price of Brexit
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