Who is Edwin Poots? Fundamentalist Christian and former farmer elected leader of the DUP 

Who is Edwin Poots? Fundamentalist Christian and former farmer elected leader of the DUP 

Edwin Poots, the newly elected leader of the Democratic Unionist Party, is a conviction politician. One of those convictions includes a belief that the Earth is just 6,000 years old and was created by God in about 4,000 BC. A fundamentalist Christian, Mr Poots, 55, is a member of the Free Presbyterian Church of Ulster, the religious church founded in 1951 by The Reverend Dr Ian Paisley 20 years before he set up the DUP. Not surprisingly, Dr Paisley, one of the towering figures of Northern Ireland politics up until his death in 2014, was Mr Poots’ great childhood inspiration. In 2007, Mr Poots had been asked on a radio programme about his creationist beliefs. "My view on the Earth is that it's a young Earth. My view is 4000BC," he explained. Asked if that meant he dismissed the science of evolution, he was clear. "Yes, absolutely. And you're telling me that all of this evolution took place over billions of years, and yet it's only in the last few thousand years that man could actually learn to write? You're telling me that cosmic balls of dust gathered and there was an explosion? We've had lots of explosions in Northern