Profile: Ian Paisley
No figure looms larger over the recent history of the six counties than the Reverend Ian Paisley. He represented the unrepentant voice of loyalist pig-headedness from his emergence in the late 50s until his acceptance of the First Ministership in 2007. Equal parts bigoted, conniving and cunning, Paisley showed an high level of adeptness to remain relevant throughout the tumult of the troubles.
This piece will chronicle Paisley’s activities before, during and after the troubles before reflecting on Paisley’s relationship to Loyalist violence and the continuing impact of his religious extremism on the politics of Northern Ireland.
An Abridged History of Ian Paisley
Beginnings to 1969
Paisley first emerged as a political figure in 1956 when a 15 year old Catholic girl named Maura Lyons came to him for spiritual guidance. Ms Lyons was then smuggled to Scotland by members of Paisley’s Free Presbyterian Church. Paisley refused to reveal her location, saying he would go to jail before returning her to her Catholic family. Lyons would eventually return to both her family and her faith.
Bizarre child kidnappings aside, Paisley cut his teeth during the IRA’s disastrous 1956 border campaign. Paisley was prominent in establishing Ulster Protestant Action (UPA) which coordinated vigilante groups in Protestant areas in anticipation of conflict with the IRA.
The Border campaign is an important point to reflect on as the complete collapse of the IRA (until their re-emergence in 1968) saw the main opposition to Unionist Party hegemony shift away from militant republicanism to the non-violence advocated by the Civil Rights Movement. This shift in the tenor in Northern Ireland’s politics allowed Paisley and the UPA to firmly separate themselves from the Unionist establishment.
While the Unionist Party now led by Terrence O’Neill would flail around trying to make excuses and deny the reality of the institutionalised discrimination in housing, employment, and basic civil rights; Paisley and his acolytes would accept the premise that Northern Ireland was fundamentally discriminatory against Catholics, though assert that this was a good thing and should be preserved.
Paisley and his followers relentlessly picketed, threw stones, and disrupted Civil Rights marches. Most notably his key lieutenant Ronald Bunting led the ambush at the Burntollet Bridge where a loyalist horde descended on a People’s Democracy (the left wing faction of the Civil Rights movement) march, attacking them with stones, iron bars and nails. Paisley in this period also began to actively campaign against the Unionist government of Terrence O’Neill; he came within a whisker of unseating O’Neill in the 1969 Northern Ireland Parliamentary Elections. I’ve written about Paisley’s role in the collapse of Unionist hegemony more extensively here (The Sad and (not so) Tragic Demise of the Democratic Unionist Party — Togatus).
1969–1985 Highs and Lows
Paisley’s rise as a major political figure from 1956–1969 was nothing short of meteoric. The consistent upward trajectory that had defined his early career would be curtailed in the years to follow. Paisley would at times dominate the politics of Northern Ireland in dramatic fashion and at other times be an irrelevant sideshow.
In 1970 he finally got elected to the Northern Ireland Parliament where he and his Protestant Unionist Party (PUP) won the Bannside seat of Former Prime Minister Terrence O’Neill. In 1971 the PUP would be wound up and replaced with the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP). This period of Paisley’s career is defined by vehemently opposing even the most tepid of reforms proposed by O’Neill’s successors James Chichester-Clarke and Brian Faulkner. However, at this particular juncture Paisley’s career his influence appeared to be waning as two distinct forces challenged his ascendency as the dominant voice of loyalism.
His success in undermining O’Neill had seen the outbreak of an internal civil war within the ruling Unionist Party. Hardliner and former Cabinet member WIlliam Craig had broken away from the Unionist Party to set up Vanguard. Vanguard had considerable advantages over Paisley and the DUP owing to Craigs close ties to Belfast’s loyalist associations and the Right Wing of the British Tory Party.
The second threat to Paisley was the Ulster Volunteer Force which emerged out of the Shankill road area of Belfast in 1965. Following the huge civil unrest following the battle of the Bogside in Derry the UVF sprung into action to “defend” loyalist areas in Belfast. This “defence” was mostly characterised by Sectarian Burning and the creation of the Barricades that would ghettoise Belfast until the end of the troubles. Both Vanguard and the UVF sapped away at Paisley’s support base especially in Belfast, limiting him to his Bible thumping base.
Paisley would make a stunning political comeback in 1974 with his opposition to the Sunningdale agreement. Before discussing this though it’s important to contextualise why the Sunningdale agreement was even a thing, which means discussing the collapse of fifty years of uninterrupted Unionist Party rule.
Two key events doomed Brian Faulkner’s erratic government. First, was the introduction of internment without trial for suspected IRA members. Internment was the catalyst for much of the dark days of the Troubles from the massacres in Ballymurphy and on Bloody Sunday to creating the conditions that would birth the hunger strikes nearly a decade later. On its own terms internment was also a catastrophe; most of the IRA leadership had been tipped off and slipped across the border before they could get lifted. Second, was the aforementioned Bloody Sunday, where the British Army Parachute Regiment murdered 14 unarmed civilians most of whom were children while they were on a Civil Rights march protesting internment.
Faulkner’s bungling of internment and the mass unrest generated by Bloody Sunday led to the British Government finally losing patience with his hapless administration. In 1972 they imposed direct rule on Northern Ireland, ending 50 years of uninterrupted Unionist Party Rule over the six counties. Bloody Sunday was also the sad, painful death knell of the Civil Rights movement, perhaps the horror of 14 dead civilians saw people turn away from peaceful protest either into total despondency or into the embrace of militant republicanism.
These events are important in understanding what Sunningdale was. From the moment his Government was dismissed, Faulkner had been running around trying to find a way of securing the return of self-administration to Northern Ireland; these efforts culminated in Sunningdale. Sunningdale saw a power-sharing agreement between Faulkner’s Ulster Unionist Party and the moderate nationalist party, the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP). Enter Ian Paisley and the Ulster Workers Council.
Paisley, now a Westmininster MP led a mass resignation of parliamentary seats by Unionist MPs, holding byelections on an explicitly anti-Sunningdale ticket. Soon after, the Ulster Workers Council (UWC)(a sectarian trade union body) called a general strike in opposition to the fledgling Sunningdale administration. The UWC and Paisley, a key spokesperson in favour of the strike, stared down both Faulkner Northern Ireland executive and the Wilson Labour government in Westminster. After power cuts, food shortages and general disorder, the Northern Ireland executive collapsed and power sharing was defeated for nearly a quarter of a century.
As an aside, Sunningdale is often considered one of the great what-ifs of the entire troubles. This is largely because the power-sharing arrangement pioneered in 1974 was central to the peace process in the late 90s. However, the prospect of success of Sunningdale without Paisley and the UWC’s machinations would still be dubious as unlike in the 90s the Sunningdale agreement was not accompanied by any ceasefire or plan to decommission from either the IRA or any Loyalist paramilitaries.
Paisley instigated a failed attempt to recreate the success of the Ulster Workers Council’s strike in 1977 after which he again began to fade into the background. The advent of Margaret Thatcher and her extremist position on the Troubles left little room for Paisley to agitate for a more extreme position. For example, he was an extremely peripheral figure during both Hunger Strikes in 1980 and 1981.
Paisley did re-emerge in earnest in 1985 when Thatcher and Taoiseach Garret Fitzgerald signed the Anglo-Irish agreement. The Anglo-Irish agreement is not really anything particularly special; it acknowledges that the Republic of Ireland exists and that it should be able to advise on the Governance of the North and not much more.
For Paisley and hardcore unionists like him, the Anglo-Irish agreement represented a betrayal by the British government and a backdoor to a United Ireland. This gave birth to the Ulster Says No campaign which peaked when Paisley gave his famous “Never, Never, Never” speech in front of 100,000 people at Stormont. This was the peak of this stage of Paisley’s career, even if the campaign against the Anglo-Irish agreement was unsuccessful (it was) he never had and would never dominate the politics of the North in the way he had in 1985.
1985–2007 The Wilderness
As the mid-80s became the late 80s and then the 1990s, the appetite for continuing the conflict on all sides of the community was massively diminished. Secret talks had begun with Sinn Fein and the IRA leadership about the possibility of a ceasefire, even loyalist paramilitaries were willing to come to the table. In SDLP leader John Hume and to a lesser extent Ulster Unionist leader David Trimble, both the Nationalist and Unionist communities had leaders that were willing to talk about a meaningful long-lasting solution to the conflict.
Ian Paisley became politically isolated during this period, where once his bloviating on secret popery and backdoors to a United Ireland would have riled up loyalist opinion he was now seen as a relic of an era people wanted to forget. This was most obvious in his and the DUP’s quite ridiculous campaign against the Good Friday Agreement. Paisley would go on TV waving around a little Union Jack but his routine wasn’t working anymore. The referendum on the Good Friday Agreement passed in a landslide and the Troubles were over.
In the years that followed peace, both the Ulster Unionists and the SDLP would slowly lose ground to Paisley’s DUP and Sinn Fein, respectively. In a strange way both parties’ predicaments were due to Sinn Fein. The longer Sinn Fein appeared to be sincere in their engagement with the new institutions of Northern Ireland, the more they would peel away support from the SDLP. Parallelly the longer the UUP weren’t wholly antagonistic to Sinn Fein, the more support the DUP would be able to eat away from the UUP.
In 2002, First Minister David Trimble accused Sinn Fein of running an IRA spy ring within Stormont (an allegation that has never been proven) and the Northern Ireland assembly would not sit until 2007. In the intervening period, elections in 2003 and 2007 had seen both the DUP and Sinn Fein overtake the UUP and SDLP as the largest parties from the unionist and nationalist communities. If the assembly was to be recalled it was clear that some sort of arrangement would have to be reached between Paisley’s DUP and Sinn Fein.
The Chuckle Brothers: Paisley in Power
In 2006, Paisley was finally convinced to go into coalition with Sinn Fein. Paisley as First Minister was actually far more conciliatory and aligned with power-sharing than Trimble had turned out to be. He struck up an unlikely friendship with his Sinn Fein counterpart, Martin McGuinness, leading the two of them to be dubbed the chuckle brothers.
This was a stunning about-face for a man who had opposed the peace-process every step of the way. His embrace of power sharing proved unpopular with his core constituency and saw him forced out of the two roles that had defined his career, head of the Free Presbyterian Church and leader of the Democratic Unionist party in 2008. Paisley would be shuffled into the House of Lords as Baron Bannside where he would remain until his death in 2014.
Paisley and Violence
The popular memory of Paisley is of an extremist, but a peaceful extremist. A cultural representation of this is seen in the 2016 film The Journey chronicling the talks between McGuinness and Paisley at St Andrews. McGuinness played by Colm Meaney is continually scolded by Timothy Spall’s Paisley about bombing and violence in general. Notwithstanding the simple fact that Paisley’s actions during the troubles undoubtedly stoked loyalist extremism and violence, Paisley himself openly flirted with creating a paramilitary force in his own image.
Prior to the troubles, Paisley had been an associate of UVF leader Gusty Spence and prior to the UVF being banned, Paisley would thank the UVF in his speeches. Paisley was routinely saw at the funerals of Loyalist terrorists and on two seperate occasions tried to set up paramilitary forces; with the Third Force in 1981 and Ulster Resistance in 1986. His key deputy and future successor as DUP leader and First Minister Peter Robinson would lead an “invasion” of the Republic at one point as well.
What should be clear is that Paisley was no pacifist and certainly was willing to use means outside of the democratic process to achieve his aims.
Religious Extremism and its hold over Northern Ireland
An accounting of Paisley’s political career is that it was one of ups and downs. In the lows of his career, Paisley would preoccupy himself with his religious pursuits. The most famous being his Save Ulster from Sodomy campaign after the European Court of Human Rights had ruled that Northern Ireland had to decriminalise homosexuality. Paisley was also famous for believing that the Pope was the Anti-Christ, something he was thrown out of the European Parliament for shouting at Pope John Paul II.
The grip of this extreme Protestant position is the most lasting part of Paisley’s legacy. Northern Ireland has come to be seen as a basket case when it comes to basic social rights, i.e., gay marriage and abortion both of which had to be passed through the Westminister parliament to be legalised in Northern Ireland. The sticking power of this brand of Protestantism can be contrasted with the complete collapse of Catholic orthodoxy in the South. The massive victories at the ballot box for Gay Marriage and the repeal of the 8th amendment (constitutional ban on abortion) demonstrated the complete collapse of Catholic hegemony.
The troubling thing is that while the DUP remain the largest unionist party, this brand of petty extremism will continue to be amplified as the nature of the power-sharing arrangement in Northern Ireland’s institutions mean that they will be permanently in Government. (that is of course if they can ever reconcile themselves to being the minor partner with Sinn Fein.)
Conclusion
In a couple of weeks, it will be eight years since Paisley’s death. No man since Carson has been able to dominate the politics of Unionism. However, his legacy is one of hatred, contradictions, and lies. He was not a peaceful extremist but an extremist that sought to undermine every opportunity for peace that arose.
