Ashdown spreads message by four winds

A giant crab confronted Paddy Ashdown in the front hall of Belfast's Lagan College yesterday morning.

It was an innocent art exhibit by the students, but it might have been a comment on Northern Irish politics, in which the protagonists traditionally move sideways, if at all.

Here to appeal for a giant leap forward in Friday's referendum, the Liberal Democrat leader could not have missed the symbolism.

No doubt he also noticed that the college was in a part of south Belfast called The Four Winds.

This was as good a place as any for spreading a message, and Paddy Ashdown had a message to spread yesterday.

The message was this: that Northern Ireland's "many friends" around the world would be watching and listening on Friday next. "And if all they hear is the voice of Ian Paisley saying No yet again, then there's a grave danger that they'll turn away. Not in anger, necessarily, but in despair."

So urgent was the message that Mr Ashdown delivered it three times during the visit, first to a TV camera, then to a group of sixth-formers, then to another TV camera.

A crowd of Paisleyite crows heckled him as he addressed students in the shade of some old sycamores in the school grounds, but he wasn't put off.

An ex-soldier who still has more military bearing in his person than a small army, Paddy Ashdown is not easily put off.

He was scheduled to meet the students in the school library, but when the Mediterranean weather turned the event into a hedge school on the college lawn he squatted gamely, assuming the lotus position in half the time it would take most men of his age to say "rheumatism".

Under the spreading sycamore trees, the Lib Dem leader sat and repeated his thought for the day: "I know this sounds like a piece of blackmail, but . . ."

And again he summoned up the spectre of Ian Paisley saying No, and the sad-eyed world turning away.

Pressed by some of the students, Mr Ashdown conceded scenes at recent Sinn Fein and UDP conferences had been "deeply, deeply unhelpful".

But he asked people to look 10 years forward, when such things would be long forgotten. Then he was joined under the sycamores by Lord Alderdice, who was preaching the same theme.

"If we wake up to a No vote on Sunday, what then?" he asked. "Where's Ian Paisley going to lead us then?"

The heckling crows were getting to Paddy Ashdown by now, you could tell.

"What's that legend about the crow and the snow, and the blood," he wondered aloud. "Is it Cuchulainn?" he mused. Maybe it was the thought that the mythical defender of Ulster was more like Ian Paisley's kind of legend, but he didn't wonder any further.