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Edwin Poots: a divisive hardliner
Just as the DUP was slowly becoming more progressive under Arlene Foster, their new leader, elected by a narrow margin, looks to drag the party back to the days of Ian Paisley. We could be witnessing the final rattle of the partitionist, Unionist snake, writes FRA HUGHES
Edwin Poots

EDWIN POOTS is now the leader of the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) of Northern Ireland, a party formed in September 1971 by Ian Paisley, a radical firebrand loyalist preacher who would later be brought in from the cold.

Paisley was a fundamentalist Protestant preacher who formed his own ministry with the Free Presbyterian Church of Ulster in 1951. He preached at the Martyrs Memorial Church on the Ravenhill Road Belfast and led the counter-demonstrations to the Civil Rights marches in Northern Ireland in the late 1960s.

His influence was wide-ranging and his fiery orations from both the pulpit and the street gave him a mandate at the polls when he formed the DUP to rival the Ulster Unionist Party which had governed Northern Ireland much like a one-party state for nearly 50 years.

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