Verbal terrorist Ian Paisley never seems to be out of breath politically
“I do it because there’s a tiger in the area,” gazelle B says.
“But you couldn’t outrun a tiger, no matter how fit you are,” gazelle A points out.
“I don’t have to outrun the tiger, gazelle B responds. “All I have to do is outrun you.”
Put David Trimble in place as gazelle A and Ian Paisley as gazelle B and you get the drift. David Trimble made courageous attempts at visionary leadership and got eaten by the tiger.
What’s left of him, held together by the Nobel Prize, is headed for academia and the lecture tour circuit, where his peculiar mixture of shyness and arrogance will go down a treat.
Meanwhile, gazelle B, in the person of Ian Paisley, is preening his elder self, the tiger not having laid a tooth on him.
Paisley’s survival and latter-day success are often seen, in the Republic, as akin to stories of Japanese soldiers who emerge just in time to collect their old age pension, having spent the past 50 years stuck on remote islands believing World War II to be still ongoing.
How could any man survive and believe himself to be a success, based on half-a-century of bellowed bigotry?
Yet, according to Albert Reynolds, Dr Ian Paisley is just the man to lead change in the North. The former Taoiseach told an Irish-American audience in the US this weekend that the likely installation of Ian Paisley as First Minister in the North was not only a singular honour toward which the Unionist leader had worked all his life, but an opportunity for him to lead his party to a new, bright and peaceful future.
“A unique and historic opportunity will present itself in the next week or so, when the IRA will respond positively to Gerry Adams about their future,” Reynolds said.
The predictive tone of his comments - “will respond positively” - is significant. It doesn’t sound like an Albert speculation. It sounds like a well informed Albert prophecy. If he turns out to be right on that, Reynolds will also be right in his view that a unique opportunity is available to bring completion to the Belfast Agreement and re-establish an Assembly.
Which in turn means power-sharing. Which, according to Gerry Adams this weekend, will not be turned down by Paisley. Adams didn’t quite say that power-sharing is Paisley’s big break and that if he turned it down, he’d be long dead before another similar opportunity came along, but, shorn of the verbiage, that’s what he meant.
On the face of it, the chances of Dr Paisley leading change in the North are somewhere between slim and none. The best predictor of future behaviour is past practice, after all, and Paisley has logged a lot of flying hours on the No Surrender plane.
But to see him as simply a durable bigot is a mistake. This is a clever, charismatic, diligent, courageous bigot. More to the point, he is the most successful politician in these islands. Back when Jim Callaghan was a boy, Ian Paisley was roaring for Ulster. He has outlived a rake of Prime Ministers, from Harold Wilson to Maggie Thatcher, all the time doing his “Talk to the Red Hand” performance, consistently delaying what others see as progress but he sees as the first step over the edge of a cliff.
Other than Fidel Castro, it’s difficult to identify a political figure of such longevity. But then, other than Fidel Castro, it’s difficult to identify a political figure who has managed to withstand such an amount of international contempt while maintaining such local popularity.
ONE of the competences Paisley has, and which Castro notably lacks, is a constantly-developing competence with mass media. He established himself, in the early days of television, as that unique figure: a politician who would march out of the studio if anybody tried to mess with his mind, Jeremy Paxman-fashion and, in the process, get himself twice as much publicity as those who stayed. A verbal terrorist, he took no media prisoners even in the earliest days. Legend has it that when Bill O’Herlihy was a fearless investigative reporter for the programme that became Prime Time’s granny, one of his tougher questions to Paisley caused the Reverend Ian to respond in classic bully fashion.
“Let me smell your breath,” he ordered the reporter, implying that the latter’s courage was Dutch.
He always managed to balance this on-camera aggression with courteous, good-humoured, ironic treatment of print and radio journalists who visited him at home, where his attitude was somewhat akin to the apocryphal patient who, once seated in the reclining chair, grasps the dentist by a sensitive part of his anatomy and says: “We’re not going to hurt one another, are we?”
In contrast, Castro has never come to terms with television, even though he has a literally captive audience. Short of taking to the sea on a raft, Cubans can’t avoid his televisual marathons, which have him warbling on for five hours at a time. (Owning the network clearly serves as a disincentive when it comes to editing oneself.)
Nor is Paisley a bigot when it comes to serving his geographical constituency. As an MEP, he was as accessible to Catholics from his home area as he was to Protestants and was cheerfully willing to co-operate with that other bumptious Big Brain, Padraig Flynn.
Flynn and Paisley have a lot in common, starting with size (although Paisley has shockingly shrunk in recent days) and going on to their shared tendency to present an outsized parody of themselves as a negotiating device to distract opponents from noticing how clever, subtle and strategic the two of them are.
Which didn’t stop Paisley, in a moment of venom, from describing Flynn - to his face - as an irredentist. No disrespect to our own beloved Taoiseach, but you have to admit that, as invective goes, “irredentist” is an upgrade on “You’re only a waffler”. Referring to a political movement in Italy in the 1870s which sought the annexation of neighbouring areas into the Italian state, it means being a member of a party in any country advocating the acquisition of some region included in another country by reason of cultural, historic, ethnic, racial or other ties.
Today, Northerners see the South as having advanced while their six counties have come close to stagnation. Holding on to what you have becomes less attractive when the other guy has something better, and Paisley would want the economic and social development of the North revived, just as he would love to take its governance out of the hands of civil servants. But, above all, he would wish to end his career as First Minister of the state he loves.
To get to that point requires the completion of a major series of historic steps. Although continued obstructionism is the easiest option for the Reverend Ian, one former Taoiseach believes that isn’t the way he’ll go.
“He is the man to lead change,” Albert Reynolds says. “He is the man to deliver change for unionism.”
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