Ian Paisley: A man of contradictions who finally found peace

BELFAST, Northern Ireland — Ian Paisley was no saint. God only knows the secrets this former fire-and-brimstone preacher — an angry outsider who eventually made peace to take his place at the top table of Northern Ireland politics — will take to his grave.

He was a man of many contradictions, who for most of his adult life has been at the forefront of the most troubled region in the United Kingdom.

At one time he was widely despised by Irish Catholics and nationalists, and especially Irish republicans, because of his vicious anti-Catholic rhetoric and bitter opposition to Irish reunification. Yet he would eventually shake hands with Martin McGuinness, a former Irish Republican Army leader on the streets of Derry, who was among those on Friday paying tribute to a man who had held center stage for so long in the city’s turbulent political life and violent past.

A few weeks before Paisley died, McGuinness visited him and his devoted wife, Eileen, at the couple’s home, McGuiness told BBC Ulster. They shared a pot of coffee and reminisced about their time together as first and deputy first minister. Paisley cut a sorry figure, fatigued and sad, and when McGuinness climbed back into his car, he said knew it would be the last time they would meet. Like so many before involving these two, it was a private and intimate conversation.

Their warm and considerate relationship is one of the greatest mysteries of British and Irish politics. With the exception of Paisley’s hard-line Democratic Unionist Party, all sides in Belfast, Dublin and London signed on to and endorsed the 1998 Good Friday Agreement — the eventual road map to the establishment of the power-sharing Northern Ireland Executive. A trenchant and unrepentant Paisley vowed he would never enter government with Gerry Adams and Sinn Fein, whose long-term aim is the ending of partition, which split Northern Ireland’s six counties from the remaining 26 in the Irish Republic in 1921.

Then suddenly and without a great deal of warning eight years later, Paisley emerged from the margins and did what so many U.S. presidents, British prime ministers and Irish taoisigh (PMs) believed unimaginable: He sat down and made peace with Adams and McGuiness.

With Adams he felt uncomfortable, but not — remarkably — with McGuinness, a Sinn Fein vice president. It was a unique partnership. Was it because the IRA guns had finally fallen silent after the renewal of their cease-fire in 2006? Or was it because an aging and more generous Paisley was beginning to review his own mortality and find a place that would allow history to judge him in a new light? We may never know.

He argued, fought and fell out with everyone. He flirted with unpredictable and dangerous loyalist paramilitaries and once called the pope the anti-Christ. It was classic Paisley and typified a scatter-gun approach to dealing with religion. He always had the inside knowledge, especially on matters of a security nature but politically was always an outsider, a wrecker who was never happy unless he was spoiling for a fight.

Thirty years ago, after returning from a foray in the dead of night to Dublin 100 miles away — where he and some associates had plastered “Ulster Is British” posters on the iconic GPO Building on O’Connell St. — he called together a few media people for a debriefing on the first floor of the Europa Hotel in Belfast. He was belligerent and in no mood for hostile questions.

“Sure, you’re only an [Irish] republican,” he bellowed across a coffee table at me. It was the sort of wrong accusation that — when the IRA campaign of shootings and bombings was at its peak — could have caused a journalist serious problems. Two days later, when the tensions had eased, I challenged him on the fringes of his party’s annual conference. He apologized without hesitation. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I was wrong, and shouldn’t have said it.”   That was another side of Paisley that his supporters and enemies didn’t often see: soft and conciliatory, mischievous, witty and wonderful company.

He had what virtually all unionist politicians in Northern Ireland fail to possess; he could work a room. It did not matter where — Capitol Hill, Parliament in London, the home of the Irish president in Dublin or the kitchen of one of his constituents in rural North Antrim. But Paisley’s charisma and dynamism were always something to behold. Even his harshest critics marveled at him.

And yet many in Northern Ireland as well as in Britain and the Irish Republic blame Paisley and his uncompromising and militant Protestant views for maintaining the difficulties and strife for so long. It erupted initially in Derry and then Belfast, when the mainly Catholic civil rights movement took to the streets to call for equality in housing and jobs in 1968. The demands were not unreasonable, but back then Paisley deemed it as plot by the IRA, with the blessing of the Catholic hierarchy in Rome, for a republican takeover.

The IRA fought an ugly and dirty war with the British in the hope of driving them out of Ireland. Loyalists opposed to a united Ireland also played their part in the bloodshed and so much grief. But this was conflict going nowhere. And even though a few of their men claimed it a surrender and a sellout, an overwhelming majority of republicans shared Sinn Fein’s view that politics was the only way forward. It took several more years for the penny to drop with Paisley before he accepted that he needed to put his name to a settlement.

The ongoing peace is far from perfect. There are fears the institutions might not last because of a lack of agreement and the failure by the parties at Stormont to deliver on good and sound government. Paisley’s legacy has yet to be fully determined. His funeral will be restricted to his close family circle. There will be no public sendoff but possibly a memorial service at some stage in the future when his life and times will be honored. Very few in Belfast today had a bad word for him. It clearly wasn’t the time or place for recrimination or vengeance but maybe a time to leave the dead to rest in peace. It wasn’t always like that. 

Deric Henderson is a former Ireland editor of the Press Association.