Ian Paisley needed to win in order to change
DID he change, or did he just win? That’s the question that historians will have to answer if a rounded judgement is to emerge about Ian Paisley.
His was a remarkable story that stretched over many decades. Through most of those decades he practised a form of hate politics that succeeded in polarising public opinion in Northern Ireland. But in the end, his transformation made a sustainable peace possible.
I was in Sligo when I heard of his death, and over the next couple of hours, as I drove back to Dublin, I heard the most extraordinary tributes. He was a sadly missed friend to Martin McGuinness, a big man with a big heart to Bertie Ahern, a political giant and spiritual leader to Mary McAleese, and a man of deep convictions to Tony Blair.
That may well be appropriate for now. As Mark Anthony said, ‘the evil that men do lives after them, the good is oft interred with their bones’. On the day a man dies there is a natural tendency to be respectful.
Yet as the day wore on a lot of the comments became more nuanced. And I remembered something David Ervine said to me many years ago.
David Ervine was the leader of the Progressive Unionist Party. Although he never had more than a tiny following, he was enormously instrumental in the loyalist ceasefire that coincided with the IRA ceasefire (and was never broken) and in the apology that accompanied that ceasefire. He had served time for a terrorist offence, but had emerged from prison entirely committed to politics.
He was often in despair at the lack of political awareness of his own people, young working class men and women. It was their lack of awareness, he told me once, that enabled Ian Paisley “to fight to the last drop of our blood”.
Throughout his career, Ian Paisley was never afraid to inflame opinion, often to the point of inciting hatred. He was the only politician on this island in my lifetime whose followers and whose philosophy were named after him — it may have been the only thing he had in common with Margaret Thatcher. But if Thatcherism was a mildly complex philosophy, capable of underpinning a range of policies, Paisleyism could be summed up in one word. That word was ‘no’. Originally, ‘no to civil rights’. Then ‘no to reconciliation’. ‘No to peace.’ No man stood in the way of progress with more determination and more venom that Ian Paisley did. Along the way, he crushed every unionist leader who tried to effect change for the better within Northern Ireland.
People of my generation remember him leading an incredibly vitriolic opposition to Terence O’Neill; then James Chichester Clark; then Brian Faulkner. They were all unionist leaders who tried to take small steps, nothing truly radical or dangerous.
They were traitors in Paisley’s eyes — traitors to Protestant Ulster. He was, in effect, the most sectarian politician of his generation. And he stayed that way for almost 40 years.
I remember vividly the first time I saw Ian Paisley. I accompanied the Irish delegation, led by Garret FitzGerald, Dick Spring and Peter Barry, that signed the Anglo-Irish Agreement with Margaret Thatcher in Hillsborough Castle.
We landed in helicopters at the back of the Castle, and walked across a courtyard. As we walked, it became clear that Ian Paisley had marched a crowd right up to an enormous locked iron gate. He was bellowing at us, and as we walked past, not looking right or left, a huge arc of spit soared through the air and missed the Taoiseach by inches. I looked over, and saw a self-satisfied look on Ian Paisley’s face. I don’t know if it was he who had launched the spit, but he clearly approved of it.
Would power-sharing have survived in the 1970s if it wasn’t for Ian Paisley? Probably yes. Would the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985 have generated momentum much earlier if it wasn’t for Ian Paisley. Of course it would. Could Ian Paisley have contributed to peace much earlier than he did? Certainly he could have.
Probably he needed to win in order to change. If that is the case, then I’m glad he won and I’m glad he changed. In the end, as finally the undisputed leader of unionism, he did make a major contribution, a seminal contribution, to peace. In the process, and long before he died — in the ultimate irony of a long political life — he disappointed and maybe betrayed the most embittered Paisleyites, and he killed Paisleyism. He died a peacemaker. May he rest in peace.
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