Naomi Long(1971–)

Naomi Rachel Johnston was born at the Royal Maternity Hospital, Belfast on 13 December 1971, eldest daughter of Bertie Johnston, an electrical engineer at the Belfast Harland and Wolff shipyard, and Joan Johnston, a school dinner-lady. The family lived in the small terrace house at 14 Strathmore Park North on the Protestant working-class east-Belfast Sydenham estate; the father was at Harland and Wolff through the 1970s post-Titanic-shipyard decline and the troubled small Troubles-era industrial dispute period, the mother ran the Stranmillis Primary School kitchen across the same period, and the children were raised in the Methodist parish congregation of the Sydenham Methodist Church.

She was schooled at the Sydenham Primary School from five and at Bloomfield Collegiate Girls' School from eleven. She took the Northern Ireland senior O-Level and A-Level examinations across 1988 to 1990 and won an open scholarship to Queen's University Belfast to read for the BEng in Civil and Environmental Engineering, taking the degree with first-class honours in 1994 at twenty-two. She worked across the next seven years as a chartered civil engineer at the Department of the Environment Northern Ireland Roads Service and at the consulting firm Kirk McClure Morton on small infrastructure-and-roads-engineering work, took the chartered-engineer qualification through the Institution of Civil Engineers in 1998, and married the fellow Queen's University Belfast civil-engineering classmate Michael Long in 1995.

She joined the Alliance Party of Northern Ireland in 1995 at twenty-three on the standard small post-1994-IRA-ceasefire cross-community political-realignment of the post-Good-Friday Agreement Northern-Irish-electoral landscape. The Alliance Party (the foundational small cross-community, neither-Unionist-nor-Nationalist Northern Irish political party that had been founded in 1970 as the post-civil-rights-movement liberal-centrist response to the older Unionist and Nationalist political tradition) had been the fourth-party position in Northern Irish politics across the post-Good-Friday-Agreement decade. She was elected to the Belfast City Council for the Victoria ward in 2001 at twenty-nine, served as Belfast Lord Mayor in 2009-10 at thirty-eight (the Lord Mayoralty of Belfast that the post-1998 D'Hondt-system rotating-arrangement gave to the smaller cross-community parties on a periodic basis), and was elected MLA for East Belfast in the 2003 Northern Ireland Assembly election.

She took the East Belfast Westminster seat from the Democratic Unionist Party leader Peter Robinson at the May 2010 general election in one of the most-discussed Northern Irish electoral results of the post-2007-Robinson-leadership decade. Robinson, who had held East Belfast continuously since the 1979 general election and was the First Minister of Northern Ireland at the May 2010 election, lost the seat to her by 1,533 votes on a substantial post-Iris-Robinson-marital-scandal voter-shift across the East Belfast Protestant-and-cross-community electorate. The 2010 to 2015 Westminster term gave her the senior Alliance Party platform-position in the Cameron-Clegg coalition Commons. She lost the East Belfast Westminster seat to the DUP's Gavin Robinson at the 2015 general election by 2,597 votes.

She was elected Leader of the Alliance Party of Northern Ireland at the October 2016 small unopposed-leadership-ballot at the Alliance Party Annual Conference, on the retirement of the preceding leader David Ford. She was the first woman elected leader of any of the major Northern Irish political parties (the Unionist parties had been led continuously by male leaders since the 1880s; the Nationalist parties had been led continuously by male leaders since the 1916 Sinn Féin reorganisation; the SDLP had been led by women only briefly under Margaret Ritchie 2010-11 and Colum Eastwood 2015-22; the Alliance had been led only by male leaders 1970 to 2016). She has held the party leadership continuously from October 2016 to the present day. She served briefly as Northern Ireland's MEP in the European Parliament from May 2019 to January 2020 across the post-Brexit-referendum transition period.

She has been Northern Ireland Minister of Justice in the Stormont Executive across two non-continuous tenures: from January 2020 to October 2022 across the Boris-Johnson-government Brexit-and-post-Brexit Stormont period that ended in the DUP Executive-collapse of February 2022 and the subsequent caretaker-period to October 2022; and from February 2024 to the present day on the post-Windsor-Framework Stormont-restoration of February 2024. The Justice ministerial portfolio in Northern Ireland (the post-2010 devolved-justice ministerial-position that the Hillsborough-Castle-Agreement of February 2010 had transferred from Westminster to Stormont) was the senior cross-community ministerial position that the post-2010 Alliance-Party policy-position had been built on. She and Michael Long have lived continuously at the Sydenham east-Belfast home through the period; they have no children. The Long name in the English-side catalogue is the descriptive Old-English *lang* (the tall one); she carries the Belfast-Sydenham-Methodist-engineering-family variant of it alongside the historian and politician bearers of the surname catalogued elsewhere.