Ian Paisley does not have the right to point fingers at anyone
I welcome its dedication to peace by breaking with a paramilitary history spanning back to the 1860s. However, this is not enough for dear Ian.
While there is no justification for violence and murder of innocent people, it is time we took a look at Paisley’s portfolio. The press have always welcomed any rantings from Paisley which attack Sinn Féin because of its apparent links to paramilitarism. I wonder whether he has the right to point fingers. He refuses to trust the word of the two witnesses in this case, attacking their credibility, so let’s look at Paisley’s credibility.
In the 1960s he opposed efforts to deliver civil rights to the nationalists. In 1966 he set up the Ulster Protestant Volunteers, which commenced a bombing campaign to destabilise O’Neill’s government. This group later amalgamated with the Ulster Volunteer Force. In March 1969, Paisley was jailed, for organising an illegal counter-demonstration against a civil rights march in Armagh. He was released during a general amnesty for people convicted of political offences.
In December 1981 the US revoked his visa, concerned at the effects of his inflammatory speeches, which often fomented violence.
In the 1980s Paisley opposed the Anglo-Irish Agreement and he set up an unofficial paramilitary unit called the Third Force, which began to import arms from South Africa to violently resist what was claimed to be “Dublin rule”.
The Third Force was soon discredited and faded away. The whereabouts of the arms are unknown, although it is likely they fell into the hands of loyalist paramilitaries.
In 1998, Paisley’s DUP party withdrew in protest from the Good Friday Agreement when Sinn Féin was allowed to participate after the ceasefire.
Former members of loyalist terrorist groups said that, as impressionable teenagers, they had been attracted to extreme loyalism by Paisley’s violent and provocative speeches, blaming him for much of the violence that resulted. Paisley has never accepted any culpability for any violence.
Paisley has spent his political career saying no; no to O’Neill’s reform, no to contacts with the Republic, no to Sunningdale, no to the convention, no to the Anglo-Irish Agreement, and no to the Belfast Agreement.
Some of his many quotes include: “I will kill all who get in my way”, shouted at certain reporters after a loyalist rally in 1968, “This Romish man of sin is now in Hell!”; after the death of John XXIII in June 1963 and “The Provisional IRA is the military wing of the Roman Catholic Church.”
I think I know who should “wear sack cloth and ashes”!
Sorcha Ní Dhubhda
Ballygurrane
Athenry
Co Galway
