Alliance Party leader and Northern Ireland Justice Minister Naomi Long is somebody who is rarely interviewed or profiled by the Southern media, and almost never appears on public platforms in the Republic. But she is an impressive woman. I was at the latest ARINS (Analysing and Researching Ireland North and South) event in Dublin last month to hear her talk about ‘My Identity’. This working class East Belfast woman comes from tough circumstances: her father worked in Harland and Wolff shipyard, partly losing his sight and hearing as a result, and died young; her mother was a courageous and independent-minded woman who worked in the Belfast ropeworks.

She has a vivid childhood memory of an incident when a group of Southern Irish construction workers were building apartments opposite her family’s terraced house off the lower Newtownards Road. Local men appeared at their door before 12th July seeking a financial contribution to paint the street’s kerbstones red, white and blue as an aggressive message to the Irish workers. Her mother refused to contribute, making it clear she wanted no such painting outside her house. The following morning they woke up to see a huge Union flag painted on the road outside, with the slogan ‘No Surrender – Remember 1690’. The neighbours were curious to hear her reaction to this. “Those workers will now have the joy of driving up and down over the Union flag all summer” was her response. “It felt like bullying and I hated that”, said Long. “What are those symbols for? Why were we using them to intimidate people?”

She feels her identity is a layered one, since “nobody you’d want to spend time with is just one thing.” “I see myself as Irish. I grew up in the Church of Ireland; I became a member of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland. But I also grew up as British. My first passport was British. That was my nationality by dint of where I was born…Being from Northern Ireland is another layer of that identity. It’s a unique experience having lived in Northern Ireland during the ‘Troubles’. That’s a shared experience we have which other people on this island and in other parts of these islands don’t share.” However being a European is also very important to her (she served briefly as an MEP before the UK left the EU). She quotes her pragmatic mother on the subject of roots: “Roots are important, but God gave you feet as he expects you to move.”

Most Alliance Party members will acknowledge that “there’s a bit of both British and Irish in them. But national identity is not what the party is about. We come together around common values and a vision about how we can make people’s lives better in Northern Ireland…We’re also about good relationships: North/South and East/West.”

She respects the fact that flags and symbols are important to people in the North. “But I am also weary of symbols being used as weapons, and of disrespect for other people’s symbols,” she says. “I’m tired of flags on lamp posts marking territory. I don’t have any hostility to the Tricolour or the Union flag, but I’m tired of seeing them abused to cause offence to other people, to make them feel excluded. The purpose of flags should be to bring people together, but that’s not how they’re used in Northern Ireland.”

“I grew up in a deprived neighbourhood. Across the ‘peace wall’ in the similarly deprived Catholic area of Short Strand they believed that [as a unionist working class area] we had it good. In our area we had the same belief. But actually we had the same issues of poverty and deprivation. Instead of working together to resolve those issues, we were being sold a lie that we were better off. People in those working class unionist communities believed their politicians were looking after them and thus they were better off – but they weren’t.”

Because of her mother’s strong views and willingness to articulate them, she grew up with a belief in “battling for the underdog”. Also that “when something is wrong, you should speak out about it.” She recalls the “totemic moment” when Gordon Wilson said he forgave the IRA men who killed 11 people, including his daughter Marie, in the 1987 Enniskillen Remembrance Day bombing. “I believe that small acts of courage and kindness like that can change communities.”

Long is passionate about the value of integrated education in beginning to tackle the kind of segregation which means that around 90% of people in Northern Ireland continue live in communities that are 90% segregated from the other community. This means that children have “no real lived experience of anyone who is different from them…they get one set of messages over and over again and these are never challenged. But that’s not real life, where you go out into the world and you’re going to be mixing with people from different backgrounds and with different opinions and you’ve got to learn to accommodate that difference and diversity.”

She remembers a time in her childhood when she went on a cross-community school trip and her bus was stoned. “I was unaware of how hated I was as a Protestant child.” An added irony was that a child on her bus pointed to a Catholic child stoning the bus and said “that’s my cousin”. Even across the sectarian barriers in East Belfast, there was inter-marriage.

Although there is now a programme by which parents in a state (mainly Protestant) or Catholic school can sign a form to say they want to ‘transform’ their school into an integrated one, the Northern Ireland Education Authority insists that this must not threaten the viability of existing segregated schools. Long says this has led to the absurd situation where she knows of 14 villages with two unviable segregated primary schools which cannot amalgamate into one integrated school. The probable result, she says, is that one or the other (or both) of these schools will close, children will be bussed to a school in another village, families will eventually leave and the village will die. Despite this, she believes that “ultimately parent power will transform the education system in Northern Ireland.”

Long also spoke honestly about her religious faith. “Faith has played a big part in my life; it played a big part in me engaging with my community as a politician. I’ve always believed in service, at home and abroad (in international development) through my church.” However she started to feel uncomfortable in her Presbyterian church because comments made by members against migrants and homeless people did not fit with what she understood to be Christ’s teachings: “Jesus was a migrant for the early part of his life, and he wandered around preaching and relied on the charity of others.”

She finally parted company with the Presbyterian Church over its treatment of LGBTQ people: “they treated these marginalised people appallingly and bullied the people in the church who were trying to reach out to them, to show kindness and inclusion following the example of the Good Samaritan…The church has become very pious, rather than a place for people who are broken and need healing.” She saw her predecessor as Alliance leader, fellow-Presbyterian David Ford, being pilloried and taken to a church court for his stand on equal marriage. The last straw came when the church said it would no longer baptise the children of gay people. She regrets that many Protestant denominations in the North have become “aligned with a very narrow right-wing agenda which is not a reflection of my understanding of the Bible.”

On the constitutional question, she quotes a survey carried out by the Liverpool University academic, Jonathan Tonge, for a recently published book on the Alliance Party¹ ,which found that a Border poll did not rank among the top 10 priorities for party members. He found that “the vast majority of members are ‘neithers’ who reject both unionism and nationalism as political philosophies that will advance society. They are really not interested in that conversation; they are interested in education, housing, poverty and the environment. There are also people like me who are interested, but that interest is driven not by ideology, but by what the future will hold, what it will look like, and how we can shape it. It will be a decision people will reach based on pragmatic and practical considerations if and when the time comes.”

She remains a passionate European. “People like me valued the European project because it was part of something bigger, that overarching European identity we could all buy into. The brilliance of the EU was that it was trying to diminish the impact of borders. I’m not a natural nationalist of any description (British or Irish) – I think nationalist politics is the road to no town. In the EU project there was less emphasis on borders and division, and more on cooperation, collaboration, working together and harmonising our systems so that the Border almost became an invisible thing.”

Brexit “frustrated me hugely and baffled me,” she says. It was driven by a combination of “British nationalism, wartime nostalgia…and an underlying xenophobia that I found really grim… It was led by people who were disingenuous, who said ‘ we don’t want those [European] elites ruling us’, and then you’d look at them and say ‘but you are the elite!’.

Brexit had also dramatically changed something in North-South relations. “The re-emergence of the question – What will happen to the Border? – was a really toxic infection in our politics at that time; another focus on division rather than what we could do together. We were like the children of divorcing parents. Both governments were at loggerheads and some of our politicians [she clearly means the DUP] saw an opportunity to play them off against each other to see if they could get something for Northern Ireland out of it.” What they got was the trade border down the Irish Sea, which Long said she could see coming soon after the 2016 vote, although the unionist parties apparently couldn’t. “It was the logical choice. If you’re the [British] government, are you going to police the 200-300 miles of the land border, all farms and lanes and sheughs [Northern Irish for ditches], or put customs posts at the seven ports and airports?”

During question time, Long returned to the issue of the Border poll. She accepted that Alliance was largely ignored in the Republic, although she believed this was part of the larger weariness with the North by Southern politicians, the media and the public as they dealt with more immediate problems like the Covid pandemic and the housing crisis. “We’re not relevant to them these days – we’re a place apart.”

However she went on: “Actually, we are the group of people they should be interested in. Because if there’s ever a Border poll, we’re the group who will make the key decision. Nationalists will vote nationalist, and Unionists will vote unionist, and it will be the people who haven’t made up their minds yet who will decide what actually happens. So we’re the group of people who they should be most interested in because we’re going to be the ones who will be the deciding factor.”

This Alliance Party leader who talks so much sense on a range of issues never spoke a truer word.

¹ Jonathan Tonge and others, The Alliance Party of Northern Ireland: Beyond Unionism and Nationalism, 2024