LONDON: The fate of Boris Johnson’s draft Brexit agreement rests with Arlene Foster, a Northern Irish ultra-conservative whose father was shot in the head by the IRA.

Johnson’s negotiators and the EU on Thursday reached a provisional agreement that might just see Britain leave the bloc by the Oct 31 deadline. But the deal’s chances of getting through the British parliament as soon as Saturday depend on whether Foster’s Democratic Unionist Party can be brought on side.

Foster’s central role in the crisis marks an astonishing rise for a 49-year-old child of “The Troubles” that killed thousands in Northern Ireland and defined the core of her beliefs.

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. 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.

Infighting and a corruption scandal that Foster battled through largely unscathed brought down the government.

Yet her government’s fall has done little to bend the defining Brexit position of the DUP: Northern Ireland must remain wholly British and keep an open border with Ireland once a UK-EU frontier goes up.

“It is a principle we have and that will forever be there,” she said on Tuesday. “We have to be integrally within the UK.”

Published in Dawn, October 18th, 2019