![]() I suddenly found it really, really difficult to talk to my 13-year-old daughter or my 13-year-old son or hug them and say ‘I love you’ I’d sit with him while he reminisced about the time. In the early hours of the morning he’d call me downstairs, at 2am, and he’d put on the music that he used to listen to with my mum. And then, at night, my father would be drinking. So, I was coming back from school and lighting the fire, and cooking the dinner and doing everything I had to do. “As a young boy, I was trying to keep the house for my father, who was a working man. And unfortunately for me, being the one in the house – he was never cruel or he was never unkind, but I still got dragged into that grief. I was left with my father, who was grief-stricken by the loss of my mother. “It became difficult because I was the only one left in the house – all the rest of my brothers and sisters had moved out. It was a long and lingering death, and we watched that. “My mother died of cancer, but she had suffered for a good two years before that. It’s literally in your face all of the time.”ĭoug lost his mother when he was just 14 years old. Because Northern Ireland I found actually quite political, whether we like it or not. “Politics for me only came about when I was coming to the end of my military career and when I moved back to Northern Ireland. and I missed the birth of my daughter by about 24 hours. In fact, I didn’t see my son, I think he was about eight weeks old the first time I saw him. I missed the births of both of my children. “I had my family while I was serving within the military, bouncing around the world. “My whole background has been within military,” he explains. Within a year of being married, Doug’s daughter Leigh was born, followed three years later by the birth of his son, Luke.īut at the time of his children’s births and throughout their childhoods, Doug wasn’t involved in politics. I got married, and the moment I did, I knew that I wanted to have children.”ĭoug Beattie, leader of the Ulster Unionist Party, with new granddaughter Skyler. “We always plan to do many things, but when you get older your priorities change. ![]() I always planned to drive a fire engine,” Doug Beattie, leader of the Ulster Unionist Party and father of two, replies, laughing, when I ask if he’d always planned to be a dad.
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