evidence: Arlene Foster, Northern Ireland’s first minister and leader of the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), is to stand down from both roles after apparently losing the confidence of her own party. She will be gone by July, she announced just ahead of a leadership vote she looked likely to lose. The vote takes place every year and has only ever been a formality. But this time her party had turned against her. Foster was always an unusual Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) leader. She was the first woman to head a stridently patriarchal party. She is a member of the Church of Ireland, while the DUP remains broadly evangelical in its membership. And she was formerly a Ulster Unionist Party member, defecting over David Trimble’s handling of the early peace process. [...] The DUP now faces its first leadership election in its history. Foster’s replacement will have to find a different way forward for unionism in a much changed landscape. The signs do not look encouraging. One candidate is Edwin Poots, who, as health minister, maintained a ban on gay men donating blood after this rule was scrapped in the rest of the UK. As environment minister, he rejected the idea that the climate change represented a crisis, and as a "young-Earth creationist", he believes the Earth is just 4,000 years old. This hardly suggests that Ulster unionism would be ready to face the future under Poots.