Naomi Long: ‘I said, I’ve done something a bit mad. I’ve joined the Alliance Party’

Naomi Long is home. As a child, these few streets off the lower Newtownards Road in east Belfast were her entire world; at its heart is the house – originally her grandmother’s - that she grew up in, surrounded by her primary school, her church, the Oval football ground and, towering above, the famous yellow cranes of Harland & Wolff.

Inside St Christopher’s – once a functioning Church of Ireland church, now the Larder food bank – the Alliance Party leader points out the font where she was baptised and where she sang in the choir.

Long is in no doubt; these east Belfast streets were “the place that formed me and my values and the church in particular, my mum had a very deep Christian faith and we were heavily involved in the church and I have a very strong faith as well and it shaped, I suppose, who I am and my views.

“I lived in this constituency, I went to school in this constituency, I moved to Dundonald, which is in [suburban] east Belfast, but for me it was just too far out, I like being near the heart of things and near the main road, the Newtownards Road. It just keeps drawing me back.”

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It also introduced her to the Alliance Party. Since 2001 she has represented the constituency, initially as a councillor and subsequently as an MLA (member of the legislative assembly). Leader of the Alliance Party since 2016, she is the current Minister for Justice and is a former MP and MEP.

This month she led Alliance to its best Assembly election result , more than doubling its representation to 17 seats to become the third largest party in Northern Ireland. Such success, by a party that does not designate itself as either unionist or nationalist, is unprecedented and is reflective of how the North is changing.

“I had teacher in primary school, Miss Adair. She was amazing . . . people used to write things like ‘UVF’ on the board and I remember her coming in and cleaning it off and saying, ‘Do not write this on my board, these are bad people’.

“Somebody said, ‘Phh, who do you vote for, Miss?’ and she said, ‘I vote for the Alliance Party’.

“I remember going home and telling my dad, my teacher votes for the Alliance Party and he laughed and he said, ‘You tell her she needs to be careful, you stand in the middle of the road long enough you get knocked down’.”

This is something that has been said to Long many times since, “and this is where I learned my retort, because me being an innocent child I went back and told her this, and she said, ‘That’s true, but better there than in the gutter, dear’.

“I said, good for you, I like this, and I went home and told my daddy and he said, ‘Touché, that was a good answer’.

“That was really the first time I ever heard of the Alliance Party.”

Long was born in 1971 into what was a “very traditional working-class unionist community”. Her father James Johnston worked in the shipyard as a sheet metal worker; “he was in the Orange Order and the Black Preceptory [a similar institution] and I think it was just part and parcel of living in this neighbourhood, it was just what men did in those days, you went to the lodge on a Friday night and you went to the shipyard on a Monday morning.”

Her mother Emily worked in the ropeworks “right up to the point where she was married and had me, and in the 70s you weren’t allowed to work and have children, outrageous.”

She grew up in the terraced house – “two up, two down, outside toilet” – her grandmother moved in with her 10 children after the Belfast blitz in 1941. “Their house had a direct hit, so they went to the air raid shelter and came back homeless.” It was where her mother grew up, where she set up home after she married, and remained the “crossroads of the family”.

“It wasn’t a wealthy community, it wasn’t well off by any means but there was a real sense of community and there were generations of families who had grown up just doors apart and they all knew each other, and people kind of laugh when you talk about leaving your door unlocked and stuff but people did.”

It was, says Long, “a really happy upbringing” but also a “sheltered” one. Although she had all the Troubles experiences “that anybody my age would have” of bomb scares and bag searches in Belfast city centre, she also has a clear memory of her mother preventing her, as a child, from going to watch rioting on the Newtownards Road.

“I was fortunate, I didn’t lose any family in the Troubles, but there were times when it did cut into my life.”

‘I’ve never been afraid’

One of those times was in 1987. Long was a Girl Guide and was performing in a Guide show in Belfast’s Grand Opera House, where Northern Ireland’s head Guide, Lady Cecily Gibson, was due as the guest of honour.

“She was travelling home with Lord Justice Gibson when they were killed. She was coming to our show, and we were waiting because we knew she was coming.”

Lady Gibson and her husband, one of the North’s most senior judges, had been killed by an IRA bomb on the Border as they drove home from holiday.

“They got us together before we went on stage on the Saturday night and told us what had happened and then we went on and did the show, and I remember afterwards everybody being in floods of tears because it was so hard to do, but even at that age it was, the show must go on.”

“It was just that feeling of almost guilt that we knew she was coming to see us or it might not have [happened].

“There were those moments when even though you were protected, it just cut through. I don’t think any of us were immune to that.”

It was also a matriarchal upbringing. “There were really strong women around me all the time when I was growing up and they didn’t have easy lives but even in the neighbourhood . . . the mums were in charge and kind of ran everything.”

Long’s father died when she was 11. “My mum was a year or two older than I am now when Dad died, and she raised a young child, I just can’t imagine how she did it, I’m kind of in awe of her.

“I suppose one advantage my parents gave me, both Mum and Dad, was that they never told me I couldn’t do things.”

It meant “I’ve never been afraid to be the only woman in a room and say what I think because I was never raised to think that being a woman made my opinions any less valid.

“I’m really grateful now when I think back to all the women I grew up around who didn’t have opportunities galore but who just had real strength of character. I don’t think I would have done all the things I’ve done if I hadn’t been for them.”

As a teenager, this was reinforced at her school, Bloomfield Collegiate. “It was the kind of school where they didn’t encourage you to do ‘girls’ things’, they encouraged you to do whatever you wanted.”

In Long’s case, this was work experience at Harland & Wolff. “I was fascinated by the shipyard, literally growing up under the cranes . . . but also for me it was that connection with my dad.”

It was “the most incredible experience” – “we were 16-, 17-year-old girls and they taught us to arc weld” – and convinced her she wanted to study engineering at Queen’s University Belfast.

“The first time I got a shock was – I went to an all-girls school, went to Guides, had this kind of matriarchal upbringing – and I walked into my first lecture and there were I think 120 of us, and 16 were girls, and I looked round and I thought, wow, this is unusual.”

Queen’s was also, says Long, the first time she found herself outside the overwhelmingly unionist environment she had grown up in, though she had no interest in student politics. “It was that very narrow, constitutional-based politics which didn’t interest me then, doesn’t interest me now.

“I’ve no doubt my engineering background influences my politics . . . I’m very much, if there is a problem, don’t moan about it, fix it.”

Long graduated in 1994; even though “lots of people were going away” she and her husband-to-be Michael Long decided to stay.

“It was partly because I felt I wanted to be here and part of making a difference because I became very convinced as I was going through university that the way our society was working wasn’t working and needed to change.

“I wasn’t really sure how I would do anything about it, but I knew I wouldn’t do it by going away.”

The pair joined the party in the same week – “I phoned Michael and I said, ‘You’ll never guess what I’ve done, I’ve done something a bit mad’, and he said, ‘Oh so have I, you go first’, and I said, ‘I’ve joined the Alliance Party’ and he said ‘Ah you’re kidding, so have I’.”

Long was a reluctant candidate when asked to stand in council elections in 2001. “I was an engineer, I loved what I did and I didn’t really want to be a politician.” Eventually she agreed on the basis she was unlikely to be elected.

Instead, both she and Michael were elected to Belfast City Council. “That’s the lesson I learned the hard way, being told, ‘Ah sure just put your name down, you’ll be fine’.”

Michael remained a councillor and is currently Lord Mayor of Belfast; Long was elected to the Assembly in 2003, which didn’t sit until 2007.

Today, Northern Ireland is again without a functioning Assembly. “I’ve been giving a lot of advice, 17 MLAs means a lot of first-timers, a lot of them walking out of stable, sensible jobs into who knows what and they’re all looking to me.

“I’m saying, it’s exactly what it was like when we did it too, but what I did was I opened my constituency office and I threw myself into what I love doing, which was problem-solving . . . I loved it, I really did.”

It is to state the obvious to point out that in the years since that the political landscape of the North has been challenging, not least during the loyalist flags protests in 2012-13 which saw Alliance representatives and premises attacked. More recent difficulties led to the collapse of the Assembly from 2017-2020 and a fresh political crisis has left the North with no functioning Executive or Assembly.

Long has also faced her own challenges, not least with her health – she was diagnosed with skin cancer during those flag protests, was a long-term sufferer with endometriosis which resulted in a hysterectomy in 2017 and had Covid-19 early in the pandemic, which left her with long Covid.

“I’m still kind of finding my way through it, I’m bruised today because I was getting blood taken at the doctor because since then I’ve had a lot of pains, aches, inflammation and I’m working through it.”

Long has received death threats – her first, after her mother had been diagnosed with cancer, was “not easy . . . pretty grim” – as well as sustained personal abuse typical of that directed towards women politicians, particularly on social media.

“I’ve always believed in social media as a conversation and I would go back and argue with people, but I’ve had to step back more because I think, particularly during lockdown, it became really toxic,” she says.

“I think women in public life have always faced misogyny and it’s just a new vehicle for it . . . it gives people anonymity where they can be their worst selves and not be accountable for it, and I think it’s fundamentally dangerous.”

This actively discouraged women from standing as Alliance candidates in the last election, she says. “There were women, really talented women, who could have run in the election and they wouldn’t because they saw the abuse that women in public life get, me in particular but not exclusively, and they said, ‘I couldn’t do that, I couldn’t put myself out there and read that kind of abuse and read that kind of nastiness’.”

As Minister for Justice, she would “love to be able to do more about it” but influencing telecommunications is not within Stormont’s powers.

“A number of candidates for the Assembly election had these deep fake kind of porn videos claiming that they were in them being circulated on WhatsApp, that’s life-destroying stuff, that’s just really hurtful . . . when social media companies won’t deal with it I think that is serious and they need to be held accountable.”

Fresh impetus

Though east Belfast is still less diverse than other constituencies – according to the 2011 census 75 per cent of people there were or had been brought up as Protestant – what was during Long’s childhood an “almost exclusively unionist, loyalist” constituency now has two Alliance MLAs: Long and her colleague Peter McReynolds, who between them took more than 30 per cent of the first-preference vote.

Alliance’s electoral success has, in turn, given fresh impetus to its call for a reform of the North’s political institutions to reflect the growing numbers of “those of us who are in the middle, who don’t see ourselves as unionist or nationalist, who define ourselves in other ways”.

“If anything makes the case for change it is that over 20 per cent of MLAs don’t designate as unionist or nationalist and the fact that we are back where we were five years ago with no Assembly and no prospect of an Assembly,” she says.

The Assembly cannot sit as the DUP has refused to nominate a Speaker as part of its protest against the Northern Ireland protocol; even though the other four Executive parties, including Alliance, are in favour, the DUP’s opposition means it does not have the required cross-community support.

In Stormont on the day the Assembly should have reconvened after the election, Long’s anger was palpable. “If we fix this problem, if we throw people a bone over the protocol or we patch up a crisis somewhere else it will be weeks, months, maybe a year or two, before the next episode of toys out of the pram and everything coming down round us again because as long as people can exercise a veto, they will.”

Therefore, says Long, the structures must be changed so they can no longer be held to ransom by a single party. “That’s the only way they’re going to be sustainable, and what we want is an end to designations because actually, the Assembly doesn’t deal with constitutional questions.” Designation is the requirement for a party to describe itself as unionist, nationalist or ‘other’.

Indeed, says Long, for all the talk of these questions or of a potential Border poll, says Long, Alliance’s success demonstrates that for a growing number of people in the North, “it isn’t their first question, it’s not how they define their politics”.

“I think one of the strengths of the Good Friday Agreement is I can fully embrace my Britishness and my Irishness and I’m proud of both, I’m comfortable with who I am and if I can be comfortable being British, Irish, Northern Irish, an east Belfast woman, Belfast woman, whatever, then surely as a society we can be comfortable with being all those things?”

The previous night, says Long, she watched the finale of Derry Girls “with a bit of a lump in my throat” because it brought her back to 1998 and “how conflicted everybody felt, and actually being hopeful in 1998 was actually taking a massive risk because it wasn’t just about a vote [in the referendum on the Belfast Agreement], it was about being hopeful and opening yourself up to the possibility that things could change knowing that it mightn’t happen.

“We did it. If we did that all the rest should be easy by comparison. I think we just need to get away from people being afraid to hope for better.

“I think we can do it, I think we can change, and I think that’s what we saw in this election . . . society’s changing, people are changing, and people’s priorities are changing, because you don’t need to take a side when you’re working together.”