Ian Paisley's no middle ground

22 September 2014

I think of that brave man Paisley, eyelessIn Gaza, with a daisy chain of millstonesRound his neck; groping, like blind Samson,For the soapy pillars and greased poles of lightningTo pull them down in rains and borborygmic roarsOf rhetoric. (There but for the grace of God,Goes God.)

W R Rodgers Home Thoughts from Abroad

Those lines come from the mid-60s, years before the world heard of the demagogue preacher with a speciality in rooting out Babylonian whores hiding under Roman cassocks. In 1988, he was forcibly ejected from the European Parliament for shouting at Pope John Paul II 'I denounce you as the Antichrist.' Fiercely loyal, in his idiosyncratic way, to the empire and the monarch – he was after all a member of her Privy Council – he made a career out of biblical scorn for the unrighteous, deep loathing of sodomy and a good head for business.

And then, in his eighties, ten years past the biblical appointed age, the old firebrand began to mellow. In 2006 he went to meet the Archbishop of Armagh, the Pope’s main man in Ireland, and they sat down to tea together. The following year, he almost took Irish Taoiseach Bertie Ahern’s arm from its socket with a ferocious handshake. That was the year he began a career as First Minister of Northern Ireland, running the statelet with Martin McGuinness as his deputy, a man he cordially hated.

But somehow, Paisley and McGuinness worked well together. The Chuckle Brothers they were called, an attempt to present them as two buffoons out of their depth, but for ordinary people, it was an endearing image, a tribute to a pair who had brought their respective sides with them in an unlikely peace. There were elements in Unionism who viewed Paisley as a traitor, just as there were nationalists who were appalled that Sinn Fein appeared to have shelved their aspiration for Irish unity and gave support to the strongly Protestant police force. Those elements still exist.

It would be easy to be scornful of Paisley’s late-life conversion to democracy, a way of thinking he showed little respect for in the past. But then, Sinn Fein, the political party with whom he found himself running his little polity, had no great track record in that regard either.

However, at least in Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness, Sinn Fein had two men of extraordinary perseverance and courage. They managed to turn what

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Ian Paisley's no middle ground

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