In a week when Ian Paisley's hold on power weakened significantly, Ed Moloneyexamines the DUP leader's contradictory career in two extracts from his forthcoming biography
It is the question everyone asks. Why did Ian Paisley do it? After all, he had spent a lifetime denouncing compromise and assailing every unionist leader who came near to making peace with Irish nationalism, even its mildest and least demanding elements; so why did he end up in government with those who had once been at nationalism's most inflexible and violent edge, those he said he detested the most for their bloodstained ways? If that question is put to those who were his colleagues in politics and religion over the years, who saw him up close the longest, the answers are varied but also remarkably similar for what they don't say about his motivation. There are those who credit, or blame, Eileen his wife - "Mammy" - for pushing him down this road, who believe that otherwise he would never have done it; but still others who insistently add that he needed very little pushing. Yet more suggest that his illness and the glimpse it gave of his own mortality played a part, at least in the timing of events. Some say it was his revenge, his way of getting back at the unionist and Protestant establishment which had reviled and denigrated him for so long. And then there are those who claim it was his sense of history that drove him to this end or that it was done to satisfy an inner, hidden craving for respectability.
What is striking are the number of his past and present disciples who have come to believe there always was a concealed ambition in Ian Paisley, a part of his ego that yearned for power and was just waiting for the right time and conditions, and the presence alongside him of enablers with the required strategic skills to allow it to be realised and satisfied. What absolutely none of them say is that he did this because he had finally recognised the errors of his past and wished to make amends before the end; that this was Ian Paisley's redemption.
Whatever the truth, in the end the answer to that question may be the simplest one of all: that he went into government with Sinn Féin because he could, and because the Provos made it possible. And since it was Ian Paisley more than any other single individual who had brought the Provos into being, it may be that ending up in power with Sinn Féin qualifies as one of the greatest self-fulfilling prophecies in modern politics.
Paisley's renown as a prophet, for being the political Moses of Northern Ireland unionism, was earned at the very dawn of the Troubles when he helped bring about the fall of Captain Terence O'Neill, the modest reformer of unionism, whose agenda involved nothing more threatening to Northern Ireland's place in the United Kingdom than friendly conversations with Dublin, some less than earth-shaking cross-Border co-operation and a commitment to be nicer, if not necessarily fairer, to Northern Catholics.
Paisley greeted O'Neillism with a blood-curdling prediction that the prime minister's compromising policies were the thin end of an apocalyptic wedge that could end in the destruction of the unionist citadel and its absorption into the confessional Catholic state south of the Border. And so he set out to incite and agitate for O'Neill's overthrow and by so doing helped set in motion the very forces that made his prophecies seem so accurate and prescient to many rank-and-file unionists.
PAISLEY WAS THE self-fulfilling prophet from the start. Left alone, O'Neill's milk-and-water reformism would probably have satisfied the bulk of nationalists and Northern Ireland would have been spared four decades and more of bloodshed and suffering. It was not Paisley alone who destabilised O'Neill and Northern Ireland, to be sure, but neither would have happened so completely or quickly without him. His gospel succeeded not just because there were so many receptive ears in the unionist community but because he had special qualities - the oratory, the showman's skills and the ability to imitate and evoke unionist icons - which in combination made his message so powerfully effective.
There were two consequences of Paisley's campaign against O'Neill and then his fall. As O'Neill retreated from Paisley's assaults, impatient Catholics rallied around the civil rights banner and, in the heightened sectarian climate, created in no small way by Paisley's protests against marches for political and economic equality, Northern Ireland was pitched into a summer of mostly anti-Catholic violence in 1969. With the IRA unable or unwilling to defend Catholic communities, the year ended with a split in Republican ranks and the creation of a new Provisional IRA dedicated to the destruction through physical force of the state seen responsible for its community's misfortunes.
Even though he had been its midwife, the birth of the Provos was seen by his followers as testament to Paisley's God-given powers of prophecy and, from that day on, the IRA's fortunes and those of Ian Paisley would go hand-in-hand. Since the IRA was, in important ways, Paisley's creation, it was fitting that when the IRA prospered or later its political wing Sinn Féin, then invariably so did Paisley. Each time the republicans made advances, Paisley's renown as a clear-sighted prophet was confirmed and consolidated in the eyes of many rank-and-file unionists, and more votes went his way. The truth about Paisley and the Provos is that they were yoked together from the very beginning.
The other consequence of O'Neill's downfall was that the Protestant middle class, embarrassed or intimidated by Paisley and dismayed by the downward spiral to chaos, deserted politics and left it to others, inevitably unionists of a more rigid mindset, who were most susceptible to Paisley's charges of treachery and weakness. In such a way Paisley was given a veto over the programmes of other unionist leaders who learned that to incur Paisley's wrath was to court disaster. The only unionist politician unhampered by a veto was Paisley himself.
It was no accident, surely, that when the dust settled after the collapse of the Sunningdale power-sharing executive and the humiliation of Brian Faulkner, the mainstream Ulster Unionist Party that he had led chose, as his successor for the next 16 years, James Molyneaux, a figure who became a byword for caution and inactivity and whose political preference was for an alliance with Paisley rather than conflict or competition.
WHEN THE PEACE process brought another opportunity and David Trimble decided to try where Faulkner had failed, to craft a settlement with Irish nationalism, Paisley was there to shout "Lundy" from the sidelines, as he had done in O'Neill's and Faulkner's day, and to pick up the votes of disillusioned and deserting Trimble supporters. And once again the iron law of Northern Ireland's political extremes ensured that in the era of the peace process, as before, Sinn Féin's rising fortunes went hand-in-hand with Ian Paisley's.
The means by which Sinn Féin overwhelmed the SDLP was also the route through which Paisley saw off David Trimble to emerge the leader and voice of unionism. By delaying and then drip-feeding IRA decommissioning, Sinn Féin deepened a conflict with David Trimble that only the Provos and Paisley could win - Sinn Féin by rendering the SDLP irrelevant and Paisley by playing the role of trusted Protestant defender, steadfastly opposing a compromising unionist leader and a growing republican threat.
And so the peace process ended with Paisley and the Provos, having fed off each other for nearly four decades, now the unchallenged masters of unionism and nationalism respectively. All that remained was to go into government with each other.
Again it was the Provos who had facilitated that option. In the decade or so since the IRA first declared a ceasefire in 1994, Ian Paisley was perhaps the most prominent unionist sceptic, arguing that the IRA and Sinn Féin were engaged in trickery and deceit. He was of course wrong. The Provos' decision to make IRA violence a thing of the past was genuine, done not because they had turned against violence but because they realised the IRA could never win its war. Instead, like Collins and de Valera before them, Provo leaders decided to join the system they had tried to destroy and instead to try to dominate it using the ballot box instead of the Armalite. This meant that defining elements of traditional republicanism would have to be discarded and Northern Ireland's constitutional status quo accepted, a process they began to undertake during the talks that led to the Good Friday Agreement. Once Sinn Féin completed this journey and finally did for Paisley what they refused to do for Trimble and shed the last of their republican garments, the final objection to joining with the Provos around the cabinet table dissolved. In the end, Ian Paisley went into government with Sinn Féin because he could and because the Provos made it possible.
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From all the available evidence, especially the photographs of a smiling and laughing Ian Paisley at Stormont, there seems little doubt that the DUP leader and former Free Presbyterian Moderator is thoroughly enjoying life as Northern Ireland's First Minister. He and McGuinness appear to have struck up a genuine rapport and so far the Sinn Féin leader has not noticeably complained about Paisley's habit of regarding himself as the prime minister of Northern Ireland and McGuinness as his junior assistant. There is, though, judging by the record so far, one part of his duties that Ian Paisley must not relish, and that is First Minister's question time in the Northern Ireland Assembly.
During such occasions Ian Paisley snr is usually seated beside his son, Ian jnr, who can be relied upon to prompt his father and pass appropriate documents his way. Paisley's first Assembly question time as First Minister on June 11th, 2007, did not go well. The SDLP's Thomas Burns asked him about the appointment of junior ministers in the office of First and Deputy First Minister, one of them Ian Paisley jnr. Was it not the case, he asked, that this was done to prevent proper scrutiny of the First Minister's office? To which Ian Paisley replied: "The Deputy First Minister and I have made it clear that the Office of the First Minister and the Deputy First Minister is totally committed to promoting equality and human rights. The First Minister and the Deputy First Minister are completely opposed to any form of discrimination and harassment against any citizen."
He had answered a question about an entirely different topic, his son's controversial comments on gays, and hadn't noticed his mistake.
Three months later, something very similar happened. DUP Assembly member Ian McCrea, son of the Rev Willie, asked Paisley what progress there had been in efforts to recognise driving disqualifications on each side of the Border. Paisley replied: "I would like to see a good relationship between both parts of this island without any political claims of jurisdiction by either one. We are not claiming that the South of Ireland should be part of the United Kingdom, and they should not claim that we should be part of the Irish Republic. That should be borne in mind. This is not a place for arguing constitutional positions: it is a place for arguing for the best arrangements for the ordinary people who can benefit from them."
Once again it was the answer to a very different question.
Now, it may well have been that Ian Paisley jnr handed his father the wrong papers and a genuine, understandable mistake had been made. But Ian Paisley nevertheless continued to read the answers even though it was plain that they were the wrong ones. And he did so twice. There have been other mistakes. The DUP is opposed as a party to a new Single Equality Act, a nationalist initiative to bring together all the separate existing pieces of equality legislation, on the grounds that Sinn Féin and the SDLP would probably want to add to them. The matter is a contentious one inside the power-sharing Executive but one thing the DUP wished to avoid was making any public commitment to a new Single Act. At First Minister's question time in early September 2007, Paisley was asked if he would now commit himself to a timescale to introduce a new, unified Act. To the dismay of his colleagues, he replied: "I wish that I could. I would like to do it tomorrow, but that is not possible. We must take time."
DUP COLLEAGUES HAVE other complaints, such as his tendency to behave as if he were the prime minister of Northern Ireland, rather than a co-equal First Minister with Martin McGuinness, and difficulties he has had both with his officials and in coping with the sheer complexity and scale of the office. The complaint is delicately phrased: "He's come to office just a little late in life," is the way one DUP source put it.
At one point, in the autumn of 2007, when speculation that the new British prime minister, Gordon Brown, might call a snap general election was particularly intense, things got to the stage where a substantial body of opinion in the DUP, according to interviews conducted with elected members, believed that Ian Paisley should quit as First Minister and as party leader. One source at the time said that eight of the nine DUP MPs thought he should go, as did 33 of the 36 Assembly members. Another DUP figure put that number a little lower and estimated that around three-quarters of the Assembly party wanted a new leader.
He described the DUP's mood at the time in this way: "We have this difficulty where a large body of opinion wants him removed and people like myself are saying you owe this man respect and loyalty, let him get his own way out. Some want him to stay because of fears about their future otherwise. Some want him to stay because letting him go would harm the process. Others want him to go because him staying would harm them politically and others want him to go because that would harm the process. So it's when the group wanting to avoid political harm to the process decide that he must go, that he will go.
Another said simply: "The feeling that he should go is quite widespread but at this stage it is being said quietly." The conspiracy against Paisley was fuelled by the prospect of an early Westminster election and appeared to have been rooted in fears that internal DUP divisions would impact negatively on the party's likely performance. It would have been an extraordinary twist in the story of the peace process, but the plotting faded as the chances of an early election dissipated. The drama, however, has by no means come to a conclusion.
In November 2007, Ian Paisley repeated the pledge he gave before taking up office as First Minister, that he would serve the full four-year term, meaning that he will be 85 years old when he finally retires. There is a strong view in the party that one reason he wants to stay on is to ensure that Ian jnr succeeds him and that the Paisley dynasty will be secure. But Ian jnr is far from being a popular figure in the DUP and he would make an unlikely contender. The controversy over his association with a Co Antrim property developer, Seymour Sweeney, and allegations that he may have acted improperly when lobbying for a visitors' centre at the Giant's Causeway planned by Sweeney would also make him a contentious candidate.
Until recently the succession was thought to have been Peter Robinson's for the asking. As the figure who strategised the DUP into power, he also has the support of Nigel Dodds who, at 10 years younger, would be well placed to succeed him when he retires in turn. The prospect of Ian Paisley staying as First Minister until 2011, with the accompanying possibility that Ian Paisley jnr might succeed him, is not something either man would welcome.
The story of Ian Paisley's journey from street-corner preacher and political demagogue to power and respectability is one of the most extraordinary in Irish history. And it may yet have a Shakespearean ending.
Paisley: From Demagogue to Democrat is published by Poolbeg Press on March 3, 22.99