Dark record of a rabble-rouser

IT is a very sorry state of affairs when a bigot like Ian Paisley finds ready apologists for his injustices and tyranny in the pages of the Irish Examiner (Ryle Dwyer, March 24).

Even if he becomes first minister this won’t change what he is or what he has done, or the fact that he has never apologised for his direct role in the evils of Northern Ireland. Why has he not apologised? Because thus far he doesn’t appear to have that fundamental Christian virtue of humility.

Does Ryle Dwyer approve of Paisley’s attitude to the abduction of a teenage girl after her parents objected to her joining the Free Presbyterian Church in the 1950s?

Or the fact that on June 17, 1959, at a Belfast rally, he publicly chastised “the men of the Shankill for allowing papists, pope’s men, and papishers” to live on the Shankill Road. Angry crowds subsequently went to the addresses called out by Paisley, burned out the occupants and looted their homes.

Can Ryle Dwyer come up with even a remote parallel to this in the history of our ‘sectarian’ State in the South?

On another occasion, having incited loyalists to burn Catholic families out of their homes, here’s how this ‘Christian’ minister justified his behaviour: “Catholic homes caught fire because they were loaded with petrol bombs; Catholic churches were attacked and burned because they were arsenals and priests handed out submachine guns to parishioners; and the massive discrimination in employment and shortage of houses for Catholics were simply because they breed like rabbits and multiply like vermin”.

This is the kind of language used by the Nazi propagandists.

Freddie Parkinson, a leader of the UDA, stated in 1984 that Paisley was “a tarantula who spreads the venom of further conflict and has been a major contributor to our prolonged tragedy”.

Paisley’s academic credentials are also suspect. Both his ‘degrees’ are from disreputable correspondence schools, classified as degree mills by the US Department of Education. His doctorate is described as ‘honorary’.

Have I anything good to say about Paisley? Yes. This bigot who once publicly mocked Catholic belief in the eucharist, in Oxford, will ensure that no unborn children, Catholic or Protestant, Christian or non-Christian, will be aborted in Northern Ireland. Therein lies the ultimate irony, that the so-called defenders of the minority Catholic community, Sinn Féin, who pay lip service to equality, yet don’t know the meaning of an equal right to life, will have their pro-abortion agenda thwarted by the Ballymena armchair general.

Yes, God not only possesses infinite wisdom, but he sows goodness out of evil and has a powerful sense of irony, too.

Martin Daly

Amana Estate

Ballina

Co Mayo