Opinion

Fionnuala O Connor: Imagine if Arlene Foster showed she is much more than the snide retorts

First Minister Arlene Foster said a two-week period of lockdown to try to halt the spread of the virus – a so-called circuit breaker – could not be ruled out.
First Minister Arlene Foster said a two-week period of lockdown to try to halt the spread of the virus – a so-called circuit breaker – could not be ruled out. First Minister Arlene Foster said a two-week period of lockdown to try to halt the spread of the virus – a so-called circuit breaker – could not be ruled out.

At the best of times, and here and now we’re heading in the opposite direction, dallying over ‘what ifs’ (posh name apparently ‘counter factuals’) can be mere self-indulgence. But sometimes the most obvious subjects are in bad need of re-casting.

The current first minister at Stormont has surely soaked up reporting time and analysis. Stop groaning at the back. The contrast between at least some of her early performance to today’s woeful trudge still holds questions.

True, there are potential, bleak answers. Maybe she is simply the narrowest of unionists from the most un-giving strand. Maybe she lacks the support and the brainpower, the bandwidth that it would take to turn the DUP around. And no maybe about it, the republican she is twinned with has shown no more potential.

Foster would have had to ignore the darkening visage of deputy leader Nigel Dodds, move gently past the elephant traps of Sammy and Junior, detour around the more subtle Jeffrey Donaldson and Gavin Robinson. Yet decades back, interviewing her for La Repubblica of all places, her disinclination to dwell on the IRA attack on her father was impressive, like her clear desire to define unionism so that Italians might empathise. She was comfortable in herself. It was no stretch to talk to an interviewer from very different background.

Everyone knows what came later, with promotion. Pressure in the shape of a hard question, always the snidery in response. Innate? Or inherited from predecessor and mentor Peter Robinson, dab hand at the snips and snides? So, the other day to Sam McBride, the News Letter’s remarkable political editor: bogus smile, ‘glad you’re still consistent in what you write every day Sam’. Because he asked if she was just too weak to stop Sammy Wilson saying whatever he wanted.

First woman to lead a party that played to misogyny and harboured feminist-baiters - remember the junior Paisley with his moo-ing at the Women’s Coalition. Foster wasn’t a game-player, a Robinsonian intriguer. A woman, and from another political gene pool, odds huge against her, perhaps she simply could not have firmed up the move away from the Doc’s fundamentalism. Perhaps she lacked interest in taking unionism out of the siege. Did apparent ability to think on her feet disguise lack of seriousness? As she indelibly snapped back to the political correspondent of this paper, why should she be ‘across every jot and tittle’ of the RHI scheme? The even more damning ‘crocodiles’ was another flick of that snide tongue.

In the community that contains most of this paper’s readership, at a guess few would now agree that Foster once looked more charismatic than Michelle O’Neill. Yep, Foster, who again the other day declared of herself ‘I lead the country’, thus becoming a tall female incarnation of nails on a blackboard to half the population.

Yet more advice from ‘the others’ to be ignored: try calling it something bland, Arlene, like a jurisdiction. Calling it a country in the teeth of approximately half its people is not likely to convert it in their minds into a country. And no, you do not lead it on your own. You are one half of its supposed political leadership.

But this she knows. The News Letter’s McBride is enemy Number One because he did the work on RHI and is now reporting daily briefings against her to him and others. The trouble, this time, is that now (as for several years) Foster may call herself the DUP leader until red, white and blue in the face, with the same positive effect as calling Northern Ireland a country. Offensiveness is fallback kit, a gauge of failure.

Probably too late now, probably never likely, but what if the two women who supposedly share the job of leading the Stormont Executive had become an inspiration? Clear-eyed, with enough charisma to fire up the deadwood behind them - imagine. It’s a time for imagination.