Rev. Ian Paisley, approaching his 80th birthday, mounts the pulpit of his church and prepares to do battle with the devil.
Paisley, a Protestant iconic figure who for half a century has embodied Northern Ireland’s stubborn refusal to make peace with itself, is a large man with a shock of white hair and a penetrating gaze. He is armed with the Bible and a righteous anger.
On this Sunday, his wrath is aimed not at his old mortal enemy, the Irish Republican Army, but at new legislation proposed by British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s government that is meant to eliminate street prostitution by moving it into small, licensed brothels.
“The spirituality of our nation is being slowly but deliberately drained away,” he tells the gathered faithful. “Evil and Satanic powers have taken over the leaders of this country, and we have the darkness of apostasy upon us.”
He warns that without “a mighty national cleansing revival, there will be no hope for this nation. It will go down the drain.”
Paisley is a master preacher of the old school. He shuns the microphone. “I think microphones have destroyed public speaking. You don’t get the real rhythm, the real melody of the human voice,” he explained afterward.
His unamplified voice can rattle the rafters of the church, and even when it drops to a whisper, his words are perfectly audible.
There is something almost Shakespearean to these Sunday performances.
“He is one of our greatest actors,” said Paul Bew, a political scientist at Belfast’s Queen’s University. “When it comes to politics and thespian skills, his only rival is Tony Blair.”
Known as `The Doc’
But little more than five years ago, “The Doc,” as his friends call him, was being written off as yesterday’s man. With the signing of the Good Friday agreement in 1998, it seemed that moderates on both sides of Northern Ireland’s sectarian divide had finally prevailed. Paisley’s sworn enemies–the IRA and its political wing, Sinn Fein–agreed to give up the armed struggle and decommission their weapons.
Only Paisley rejected the power-sharing deal and vowed to destroy it. When 71.7 percent of voters in Northern Ireland, including 55 percent of Protestant voters, approved the agreement in a referendum, it appeared that Paisley’s days in politics were over.
His health deteriorated in 2004, and there were doubts that he would live much longer.
But quite unexpectedly, Paisely is back, his health restored and his political stock soaring. In last May’s general election, Paisley’s Democratic Unionist Party, or DUP, emerged as the most powerful of Northern Ireland’s four major parties, with nearly 34 percent of the vote. Sinn Fein was second with 24 percent. The moderates who brokered the Good Friday deal were shunted aside. Nobel Peace Prize winner David Trimble failed to win in his own constituency.
Few see Paisley’s comeback as a good sign for Northern Ireland.
“No constituency which gives its political support to such a leader as Paisley possesses a plausible vision of its own future,” Max Hastings, the journalist and historian, wrote in The Guardian newspaper. “We are witnessing the last writhings of a society left beached by the march of history.”
Despite the relative calm brought by the Good Friday agreement, the political center in Northern Ireland has collapsed, mostly because the IRA was slow to decommission its arms and because of a growing sense among the mainly Protestant unionists that the Catholic republicans had somehow gotten the better of the deal. Unionists, or loyalists, want Northern Ireland permanently linked with Britain; republicans, or nationalists, want the north to be united with the Republic of Ireland.
Self-rule in Northern Ireland was suspended three years ago after the discovery of an IRA spy network inside Stormont, the government headquarters. Talks aimed at restarting self-rule are supposed to get under way next week, and Paisley, as leader of the largest party, could hold the top job as the Northern Ireland chief executive.
But he would have to share power with Sinn Fein, something his whole life has argued against.
On Wednesday, the Independent Monitoring Commission, which keeps tabs on Northern Ireland’s paramilitary groups, issued a generally upbeat report saying that while there was evidence that some members of the IRA are still involved in criminal activities, and that a few still possess weapons, “We are of the firm view that the present [IRA] leadership has taken the strategic decision to end the armed campaign and pursue the political course which it has publicly articulated.”
It was hoped that a favorable report would open the door to political talks next week aimed at restoring self-rule. Peter Hain, Britain’s Northern Ireland secretary, declared the IMC report “positive,” and Blair underlined that “there has been a strategic decision by the leadership to give up the armed struggle.”
But that was not good enough for Paisley.
“The criminal activity of the IRA has not altered one iota. Their enlisting of people, their training of people in arms may not be as open as it was, but it’s still going on,” he said during a recent interview in his Stormont office.
“No, I think the IRA/Sinn Fein must really go out of existence. You can’t have in government any body of men that as a last resort have the final veto of the gun. All the times that there had been any attempt to do business, Sinn Fein at the end of the day had that threat,” he said.
Paisley wants to renegotiate the Good Friday agreement to get a better deal for the unionists. The nationalist parties and the governments of both Britain and Ireland say that is a non-starter.
So Paisley probably will be content to sit back and just say no.
“I think now we are in a position to at least put a veto on anything a British government would want to do–or a southern government would want to do in alliance with the British government–that would really be the destruction of our heritage. I think it’s as simple as that,” Paisley said.
If there has been one constant in Northern Ireland’s “Troubles” over the past 50 years, it has been the booming voice of Ian Paisley saying no.
In person, Paisley can be gracious and engaging, and he is pleased to reflect on a political career and spiritual ministry that often intertwined.
The son of a rural Baptist preacher, Paisley said he underwent a personal conversion at age 6. As a teenager, working on a farm in County Tyrone, he heard the calling to follow in his father’s footsteps.
He began theological studies at the Barry School of Evangelism in Wales and later at the Reformed Presbyterian Theological Hall in Belfast. A few years after his ordination, he helped establish the fundamentalist Free Presbyterian Church in Ulster, which he now leads.
Paisley was close friends with Bob Jones Jr., the American evangelist, and the honorific “Doc” that Paisley enjoys derives from an honorary degree awarded to him by Bob Jones University in Greenville, S.C.
“Yes, I’m a literalist as far as the message of the Bible is concerned,” Paisley said. “I believe the Bible says what it means and it means what it says. I know that Christ is real, he’s a living person, and I know that the devil is real.”
Called pope Antichrist
Not surprisingly, he also sees politics in stark terms of good versus evil, with the “good” embodied by the “Protestant throne of Britain” and “evil” by the Roman Catholic pope, whom Paisley believes to be the Antichrist. Back in 1958, he accused Princess Margaret and the Queen Mother of “spiritual fornication and adultery with the Antichrist” after they had an audience with Pope John XXIII.
He emerged on the political scene in the 1960s as a forceful and often belligerent spokesman for maintaining Protestant prerogatives in Northern Ireland. Once, in a debate with firebrand Catholic civil rights activist Bernadette Devlin, Paisley declared he “would rather be British than be fair.”
Paisley was frequently at the forefront of marches or protests that would turn violent and he was a master at using his rhetorical gifts to whip up the mob’s anger. To most of the world, he appeared a crude rabble-rouser, a clownish character, certainly a demagogue.
Paisley rejects the demagogue label. “I had a right to be angry, because the things that were happening in my country would have made any patriot unhappy,” he said.
He chuckled when reminded of the occasion in 1988 when he attempted to disrupt a speech by Pope John Paul II to the European Parliament. Paisley, who was a member of the parliament from 1979 until he retired in 2004, rose from his seat and shouted out, “I denounce you as the Antichrist.” Other parliamentarians set upon him with kicks and punches, while the pope was reported to have looked on “with bemused pain.”
Paisley counts this as a great triumph: “What I said was carried in every newspaper in the world, whereas there was very skimpy mention of the pope’s message. … I won the day, but I got a terrible hiding. My tailbone was fractured by the kicking I got.”
As the Northern Ireland talks get under way next week, all eyes will be on Paisley and the DUP.
He rejects the suggestion that he is holding up progress.
“I am holding up nothing,” he said snappishly. “It’s the IRA that’s holding it up. They refuse to be democratic. And I refuse to sit in a government with them because they have shown, by their own admissions and activities, that they are not democrats.”
Paisley’s DUP is more than a one-man band. A generation of younger men, including one of Paisley’s sons, Ian Paisley Jr., manages the DUP’s day-to-day business. Some from this generation are seen as political and ideological pragmatists, willing to deal with Sinn Fein to reap the rewards of their own party’s electoral strength.
But they will have to wait their turn.
“Assuming Paisley’s good health, there is no likelihood of a deal in 2006,” said Queen’s University’s Bew.
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thundley@tribune.com
