Ian Paisley / The Times 12.9.2014

Lord Bannside, more commonly known as the Rev Ian Paisley, died an enigma, a puzzle to both his supporters and detractors.

No public figure did more in his lifetime to inflame sectarian hatred in Northern Ireland, widen the province’s divisions or wreck successive efforts to achieve peace through compromise. But towards the end of his life Ulster’s perennial “Doctor No” astonished the world by championing peace and co-operation with the very republicans that he had spent decades furiously fighting and denouncing.

For the better part of half a century Paisley was the most prominent and formidable representative of hardline Ulster Unionism. He bitterly opposed the 1973 Sunningdale Agreement, the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement, the 1998 Good Friday Agreement — indeed any concessions at all to Dublin or Ulster’s growing nationalist population. Even mainstream Unionists abhorred his stubbornness, extremism and incendiary language, and every Ulster Unionist leader from Brian Faulkner in the 1970s to David Trimble in the early years of the new millennium could ascribe their downfall to the forces of obduracy that Paisley seemed able to range against them.

He was a man of thunderous, apocalyptic rhetoric whose battle cries were “No surrender”, “Not an Inch” and “Never, Never, Never”. He was imprisoned twice. He flirted with para-militarism and harnessed the power of the mob. He was ejected from the European Parliament in Strasbourg after telling Pope John Paul II: “I denounce you, Antichrist”. He said of Roman Catholics: “They breed like rabbits and multiply like vermin.”

In 2003 every last shred of hope inspired by the Good Friday agreement appeared to have been dashed when Paisley’s Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) finally overtook the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) to become the largest party in the Northern Ireland Assembly. On the nationalist side, Sinn Fein had likewise overtaken the Social Democrat and Labour Party (SDLP), leaving the two hardline parties to confront each other.

“I am not going to sit down with the bloodthirsty monsters who have been killing and terrifying my people,” Paisley had once declared, but he underwent a breathtaking conversion. In May 2007 he and the DUP agreed to share power with Sinn Fein, a party of whom he had said only the previous year: “They are not fit to be in partnership with decent people.”

At his inauguration as First Minister he declared: “I believe that Northern Ireland has come to a time of peace, a time when hate will no longer rule. How good it will be to be part of a wonderful healing in our province.” He then astonished both his supporters and detractors by working so happily with his deputy, the former IRA chief-of-staff Martin McGuinness, that they were dubbed the “Chuckle Brothers”.

The “Big Man”, as Paisley was known, was certainly a complex man. Reviled for much of his life as a sectarian bigot and preacher of hatred, he was also in private a man of considerable charm and humour with a nice line in self-deprecation. He was a man of enormous energy who, in his mid-seventies, was simultaneously an MP, MEP, member of Northern Ireland’s Assembly, leader of the DUP and Moderator of the Free Presbyterian Church of Ulster. He condemned Catholicism as vehemently as he decried homosexuality, alcohol, smoking and miscegenation, but as an MP he had a reputation for helping Catholic and Protestant constituents equally assiduously, once campaigning against the demolition of a convent.

Ian Richard Kyle Paisley was born in 1926, the second son of a Baptist pastor. He was raised and educated in Ballymena, a deeply conservative town that later became his political power base, and at the age of 16 delivered his first sermon in Sixmilecross in Co Tyrone. “It lasted two-and-three-quarter minutes,” he later recalled. “I sat down in total confusion. I needed to be taught a good lesson not to be proud.”

He attended the Barry School of Evangelism in South Wales and the Reformed Presbyterian Theological Hall in Belfast. He was ordained by his father and became pastor of the Ravenhill Evangelical Mission Church in East Belfast, which consisted chiefly of defectors from the local Presbyterian church. His mother marked the occasion by giving him a text from Isaiah: “No weapon that is formed against thee shall prosper; and every tongue that shall rise against thee in judgment thou shalt condemn.” He took it to heart and repeated it whenever occasion demanded.

The Ravenhill congregation rapidly became the stronghold of the Free Presbyterian Church of Ulster, which Paisley and a group of kindred spirits established at Crossgar, Co Down, in March 1951. In the 1960s it was rebuilt as the Martyrs’ Memorial Church with seating for 2,000, and the faithful (and the curious) from Ulster and abroad flocked to hear Paisley fulminate against his opponents.

He ruthlessly exploited the acute personal rivalries and arcane doctrinal disputes of Irish presbyterianism to swell the ranks of the Free Presbyterians. They proselytised, spread and multiplied until the church boasted more than 100 branches as far afield as Africa, Australia and Canada. Paisley was elected Moderator every year for 57 years until January 2008 when his position as Northern Ireland’s First Minister obliged him to protect gay rights and other social doctrines abhorrent to his church. Paisley had routinely denounced homosexuality, once launching a campaign called “Save Ulster from Sodomy”.

A merciless scourge of the Presbyterian establishment, Paisley once fomented serious disorder outside the Presbyterian General Assembly in Belfast and went to prison for three months. He occupied himself by writing a 191-page commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, which earned him a doctorate from the Christian fundamentalist Bob Jones University in South Carolina.

Paisley was convinced from the outset that the defence of Protestant Ulster required him to be as active in the political arena as well as the religious one. Within weeks of his ordination in 1946, he helped to organise an Irish base for the National Union of Protestants, which denounced any political development containing the slightest hint of advantage for the Catholic Church.

Paisley lacked a coherent political philosophy. Initially he argued that Northern Ireland should be integrated into the United Kingdom — the formula of old-fashioned Unionism. Later he demanded the re-establishment of devolved government with full control over local affairs. The one consistent thread was the principle of Protestant supremacy.

He first achieved notoriety during the 1964 election when his demand that the police remove a small Irish tricolour in West Belfast (to which a blind official eye was normally turned) precipitated the worst rioting for 30 years. As tension mounted, Paisley steadily increased his political strength, assisted by the growth of militant Protestant organisations such as the revived Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) though he always denied any links with those who resorted to violence. Paradoxically, though viewed as the embodiment of ultra-loyalism, Paisley became a figure of derision for terrorists in the UVF and Ulster Defence Association. He was accused of inciting violence with his biblical hyperbole and then denouncing loyalists when they carried out atrocities. They nicknamed him “the Grand Old Duke of York”, metaphorically marching his men up the hill then down again.

What sealed Paisley’s rise to prominence was his hostility to the nationalist Civil Rights Movement, which he regarded as the start of a new IRA offensive, in the late 1960s.

In 1968 he was jailed for a second time, serving six weeks for organising an illegal counter-demonstration against a civil rights march in Armagh. Such incidents won great sympathy for the cause of reform in Northern Ireland and were exploited by the IRA, but many Unionists were convinced that Paisley was the uncompromising leader that they needed at this hour.

Paisley stood for Bannside in the Stormont elections of February 1969 and very nearly beat Captain Terence O’Neill, the Northern Ireland prime minister. The following May he won that seat, and proceeded to excoriate political reforms to address the nationalist minority’s grievances embarked on by Major James Chichester-Clark and, subsequently, by Brian Faulkner when he in turn became Northern Ireland’s prime minister. Paisley particularly opposed the abolition of the B-Specials, the auxiliary police force that had a prominent role in combating the IRA. While forging his early extremist reputation, he produced and mocked a Roman Catholic Eucharist wafer during a televised speech to the Oxford Union, denouncing those who believed it sacred, and he famously threw snowballs at Jack Lynch, the Irish prime minister, when he visited Northern Ireland in 1967.

Paisley’s wife, Eileen, a shopkeeper’s daughter whom he had married in 1956, was never far from his side. His favourite election slogan was, “Vote for my wife’s husband.” She always called him “Honeybunch”.

He was elected to the House of Commons in 1970 with a comfortable victory over the official Unionist candidate in North Antrim, one of Northern Ireland’s safest Unionist seats. This was a spectacular triumph over the Unionist establishment, and one confirmed by his subsequent successes in February and October 1974.

In those second two elections, however, he made common cause with the the official UUP, which had joined him in repudiating the Sunningdale agreement, a comprehensive constitutional settlement proposed by Edward Heath’s government that proposed a power-sharing executive and a Council of Ireland to establish closer co-operation between the North and the South.

A province-wide Loyalist strike in May 1974 brought down the new power-sharing government. Paisley was involved in preparations for the strike though, with an unfailing instinct for self-preservation, he cautiously withheld unqualified support until it became apparent that it had massive backing. The executive’s collapse represented a total victory for Paisley.

Three years later Paisley staked his political future on a second general strike, a trial of strength designed to secure the restoration of Stormont with enhanced powers for the majority plus stronger security measures against the IRA. This time he declared that he would resign from Westminster if it failed, but the authorities were better prepared. The strike committee failed to bring out the power station workers whose support had been crucial in 1974, and the strike collapsed after ten days. Paisley did not resign, but his alliance with the UUP, now led by James Molyneaux, broke down irretrievably.

For a while Paisley’s fortunes fluctuated. He consistently topped the polls in Northern Ireland’s European elections after 1979; but in 1981 he attracted criticism, and some ridicule, when he declared that he would mobilise, and if necessary arm, Northern Ireland’s loyalists in the manner of Sir Edward Carson during the controversy over Home Rule before the First World War.

Newspapers were treated to a first glimpse of these preparations in the middle of a February night on a hillside in Co Antrim. Five hundred men were drawn up in military formation. At a nod of command they presented not arms, but the certificates entitling them to be held. Paisley then embarked on a so-called “Carson trail”, stumping Ulster with a new covenant swearing resistance to the “conspiracy” to incorporate Northern Ireland in an all- Ireland republic. Later that year he vowed to make the Province “ungovernable” and raise a “third force” of armed men, 50,000 strong, to tackle the IRA. Only 5,000 appeared at a rally he addressed that November.

The Anglo-Irish Agreement of November 1985, which gave the Dublin Government a consultative role in Ulster’s affairs, brought Paisley back on to the political stage, bellowing defiance at British ministers and denouncing “the lying, treachery and betrayal to which Unionists had been subjected”.

The campaign of opposition produced serious disorder in 1986 after several thousand of his supporters had drilled in the streets of Hillsborough, Co Down, one July night. Thereafter, however, he was increasingly restrained by the leader of the UUP, Jim Molyneaux, with whom he had an uneasy alliance.

When serious inter-party talks resumed after 1991, he felt deeply uncomfortable about Dublin’s involvement, but was unable to prevent his Unionist allies from pursuing discussions. Similarly, as John Major advanced the search for a comprehensive political settlement, Paisley’s threats of obstruction were largely ignored. When he accused Major of lying, Paisley was ejected from Downing Street in 1994. No other British politician had treated him with such firmness, and the forces of comparative moderation seemed at last to have regained the ascendancy.

The DUP boycotted the negotiations that produced the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, and campaigned vigorously against an outcome that Paisley and many Unionists regarded as a surrender to the IRA. The DUP’s refusal to co-operate hampered the subsequent Assembly, and the revelation of an IRA spy network within Stormont led to its suspension in 2002.

Unionist disillusionment grew in the years that followed, and in the assembly elections of November 2003 the DUP overtook the UUP as the largest party in the province. At the same time Sinn Fein replaced the SDLP as the biggest nationalist party. Ironically the Good Friday agreement had helped Northern Ireland’s two most extreme parties to supplant the province’s two main moderate organisations. Paisley, once denounced as a political dinosaur, had, in the 21st century, become more powerful than ever.

Yet, for all the DUP’s condemnation of the agreement, Paisley and his colleagues did eventually sit down to share power with Sinn Fein. Part of the lure lay in the financial incentives promised by London, and the restoration of devolution. Paisley followed his appointment as First Minister in May 2007 with an official visit to the formerly reviled “Free State” where he and Bertie Ahern, the Irish prime minister, visited the site of the Battle of the Boyne, where William of Orange had secured the Protestant ascendancy.

He forged a working relationship with McGuinness that brought significant benefits to Northern Ireland and symbolised its progress. McGuinness said: “It wasn’t a show, it wasn’t an act — we had, I think, a real friendship and a real understanding of our role in history, our place in history and the need to provide good leadership.”

But in May 2008, Paisley suddenly announced his intention to step down as First Minister. He had for some years been suffering from ill-health. The previous month he had also been embroiled in a small scandal when it emerged that his son, Ian, was on his parliamentary payroll as a researcher in spite of being a member of the Stormont Assembly and a junior minister. He was succeeded as First Minister by Peter Robinson.

In March 2010 Paisley announced he would be leaving the House of Commons later that year; his North Antrim seat was won by his son, Ian, continuing a political dynasty.

Paisley’s wife was elected to the Belfast City Council in 1967 and sat in the Northern Ireland Assembly. She was made a life peer, Baroness Paisley of St George’s, in 2006. One of his three daughters, Rhonda, an artist who had a canary called Matisse, represented the DUP on the Belfast Council and served as Lady Mayoress in the mid-1980s; Cherith at one stage edited her father’s magazine, Protestant Blueprint, while Sharon married a Belfast engineer. Their second son, Kyle, is a Free Presbyterian church minister.

Paisley himself was made a life peer in 2010 — an accolade that sealed an astounding transformation from pariah to elder statesman. But even in ailing health he never lost his feistiness. During one of his sermons in which he ruminated on death, he said: “If you hear in the press that Ian Paisley is dead, don’t believe a word of it. I’ll be more alive than ever. . . I’ll be singing as I sang never before.”

The Rev Ian Paisley (Lord Bannside), politician and First Minister of Northern Ireland, 2007-08, was born on April 6, 1926. He died on September 12, 2014, aged 88