With Paul Givan as Northern Ireland first minister and Edwin Poots as leader, the patriarchs are in no mood for compromise
Regardless of politics, the DUP’s Paul Givan might have gained a little bit of everybody’s sympathy on Tuesday when, just hours after being nominated first minister, he had to listen to his dad saying on the BBC that he was afraid his boy might be a bit young and inexperienced for the role. “We just hope and pray that he makes a job of it,” Alan Givan said. However, Givan Jr, who is 39, clearly has the full confidence of his political father figure, Edwin Poots. He started out as Poots’ constituency assistant when he was still a teenager, and has not been seen without a wide grin on his face since Poots became the DUP’s leader a few weeks ago.
Givan Sr was a prison officer; Givan Jr has said that at the age of 16 he had been “captured emotionally” by the Rev Ian Paisley. He has strong tastes – those were the years when Paisley was raving about bitter harvests and apocalypse if the Orange Order was not let walk through the Catholic part of Portadown, and vowing to “smash” the Good Friday agreement, which he depicted as a “partnership with the men of blood”. (The old sectarian warriors who took him literally at the time and killed Catholics to prove it are champing at the bit again these days. Northern Ireland, we are told, is under the “jackboot” of the EU).
