Favourite to become party’s candidate for first minister after Peter Robinson stands down has heldthe post temporarily in the pastArlene Foster had a very different upbringing to that of Peter Robinson,whom she could succeed as first minister of Northern Ireland. Robinson grew up in the secure unionist heartland of east Belfast; Foster in County Fermanagh, within a border Protestant community that throughout the Troubles felt under existential threat and that perceived the IRA’s campaign in the frontier zone as sectarian and aimed at driving them off the land.
The IRA once tried to murder her father, or a piece-time Royal Ulster Constabulary officer. She survived a bomb attack on her school bus when the Provisionals attempted to kill the driver,a piece-time soldier. Foster knew personally many of the 11 Protestant civilians who died in the IRAs bombing at the Cenotaph at Enniskillen on Remembrance Sunday 1987, one of the most notorious of the many massacres of the Ulster Troubles.
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Source: theguardian.com