Naomi Long, who took over as Alliance Party leader last October, grew up in the heart of east Belfast under the shadow of the giant yellow cranes, Samson and Goliath.
Since she replaced David Ford, the politician nicknamed “The Ginga’ Ninja” because of her standout red hair, has battled to keep Alliance relevant in Northern Irish politics.
She is not afraid of a fight. Four years ago, Alliance proposed a compromise to end the flags protest over the number of days the British Union flag should fly over Belfast City Council’s Donegal Square headquarters.
Instead of flying every day, Alliance recommended that should happen on just 17 days each year.
In consequence, she and others endured months of abuse, including death threats.
Flags and emblems have played a major part in the life of the 45-year-old Long, an only child born in late 1971 just as the Troubles were entering their worst period.
She and her late mother Emily and late father James lived in a terraced redbrick “two-up, two-down house with an outside toilet” in “about as traditional an east Belfast upbringing as you can get”.
The house off the Lower Newtownards Road was in UVF-UDA territory.
When she was a young girl some workmen from the Republic worked for a time on Housing Executive property nearby.
Their presence annoyed local loyalist paramilitary chiefs. So, as Long remembers, a decision was taken to paint the kerbing red, white and blue and erect loyalist bunting to let them know they were not welcome.
Union flag
“Some men came to the door collecting to paint the kerbs but my mother refused to give money,” Long recalls.
“My mother also told them she didn’t want her kerbing painted. So they painted to one side of the house and they started again on the other and left this unpainted gap outside our house. And that was fair enough.
“But in the morning she got up and looked out her window. And they had painted overnight a massive union flag on the road outside our house with ‘Remember 1690 – No Surrender’ on it. It was fairly obvious it was a message to her to mind your own business and not get involved.”
Her neighbours anxiously waited for her mother’s reaction. Her mother was blunt, saying republicans would have “great fun” driving “up and down over the flag”.
“Her basic instinct was that it was wrong that those men were being intimidated and she did not want any part of it. She would not back down and that was a pretty courageous thing for her.”
Long herself needed some of her mother’s courage during the flags protest as she faced bullets in the post, bomb threats, protests outside her offices and a petrol bomb attack on a police officer guarding her office.
“It was an unpleasant experience but it stiffened my resolve to stick with politics,” she says, adding that her strong Presbyterian faith helped her keep the political faith.
Her faith helped, too, after she was diagnosed with malignant melanoma in April 2013, a cancer from which she has thankfully recovered. “Check out those moles,” she strongly advises.
Her father, a shipyard worker from the age of 14 died aged 62 when she was 10. He was a master of his local Orange Order Pride of Ballymacarrett lodge.
Each year the band and the Orangemen assembled at their house for the Twelfth parade.
“The flag went up on July 1st and came down after July 12th but beyond that there was not much political talk in the house,” says Long.
Became more sinister
She liked seeing her father and her uncle in the parade but after he died she gradually lost interest. “Things changed, there was a change in tone, there was a tension there, there was more violence surrounding parades.
“I remember growing up there would have been murals on the walls. They would have been of King Billy on his horse and then gradually during the Troubles it was more about UDA and UVF murals.
“It became more sinister, it was fairly violent imagery with gunmen, it was much more sinister and dark.”
She studied engineering at Queen’s University, Belfast from 1990-1994 which, she says, was an “eye-opener” for her about a different, more cross-community way of life.
She also worked as a civil engineer for 10 years before entering full-time politics.
In her local Presbyterian church youth group as a 14-year-old she had met Michael Long, now a Belfast councillor and practising dentist who came from a leafier part of east Belfast. They married when she was 23.
Both she and Michael joined Alliance in 1995 because Northern Ireland was still “a volatile and dangerous place and we just felt we wanted to change that”.
She was elected to the council. Two years later, she was elected an Assembly member for east Belfast.
“I had my first death threat in 2002,” she recalls. That was after Alliance supported Sinn Féin’s Alex Maskey for lord mayor of Belfast. “It was from the UVF – all the moments in your life that you look back on, your marriage, your first death threat . . .,” she adds, laughing.
Long dismisses charges that Alliance is a “unionist-lite” party. She has, she says, been branded as a “Sinn Féin sleeper”.
“Neither is true, it just says a lot about some people’s needs to pigeon-hole other people and put them in a box.
Cash-for- ash fiasco
So, is she Irish or British? “I am Northern Irish and I have the beauty and the richness of being part of a society where I can be fully British and fully Irish. The two are not in conflict in me.”
The issues of “a united Ireland or retaining the union would not get me out of bed in the morning to do politics”, she said.
“If you took the Border away tomorrow it’s not as if our problems would disappear with it.”
Long has no particular fellow female feeling for Arlene Foster and believes that the DUP leader’s “imperiousness in the face of criticism” over the cash-for- ash fiasco created the crisis and the collapse of Stormont.
“Unionism almost seems congenitally incapable of showing any generosity when they are in a position of power. That ultimately has been the undoing of the Executive.”
In 2010, Long took Democratic Unionist Party first minister Peter Robinson’s House of Commons east Belfast seat – still a happy memory, even though the DUP took back the seat in 2015.
Alliance can hold its eight seats in the Assembly it won last May, even though the Assembly will be reduced from 108 to 90 seats, she believes – even though she makes no predictions about what will happen afterwards.
However, Stormont must get back up and running quickly, she argues: “My fear would be that a prolonged period of direct rule, of whatever form that might take, would be very destabilising.
“ I don’t believe that the current [British] government, to be blunt, has the sensitivity to what is going on in Northern Ireland to be able to do the job in a way that will not create serious problems for us,” she says.
