POLITICS: Paisley: From Demagogue to Democrat? By Ed Moloney, Poolbeg, 562pp. €22.99'It is not Irish to trample on a fallen foe," declared the Catholic Canon Cohalan when condemning the sectarian murders of several Protestants near Dunmanway in 1922, writes Paul Bew.
THE GOOD Canon's dictum does not seem to be holding in 2008. The crisis of the Paisley dynasty has generated Schadenfreude Ulster-style on a grand scale.
Nine months ago the Big Man appeared to have evaded his enemy Enoch Powell's celebrated dictum that all political careers end in failure. Since then, Paisley has been rocked by the Seymour Sweeney affair, the local ramifications of the Conway case at Westminster, and the drastic drop in his party's vote in the Dromore by-election - attributed, above all, to his "Chuckle Brothers" routine with Martin McGuinness. His legitimate aspirations for his son's political career (after all, Ian jnr had played a decisive and positive role in the birth of the new Executive) are now severely threatened following Ian Paisley jnr's resignation from his ministerial position.
Worst of all, the Doc has been eased out of his position as Moderator of the Free Presbyterian Church and eased out also of his position as First Minister and DUP leader by his own party. Alas, there was no Brian Cowen to stand on the burning deck and loyally defend the leader. It is not difficult to spare a thought for the Paisley family as they contemplate the ingratitude of so many whose careers have effectively been dependent on the Big Man's oratory and leadership.
Ed Moloney's book on Paisley could not be better timed. As always with Moloney, he respects the requirement for the serious writer to be original. One of his revelations is already causing a particular stir. Traditional Unionist MEP Jim Allister has seized on Moloney's suggestion that at St Andrews two DUP MPs secretly met with Martin McGuinness and that there had been earlier meetings with Sinn Féin both in London and Belfast, in defiance of the then publicly stated policy of the DUP.
The author also throws new light on the relationship between the DUP and the Irish government, correctly laying particular emphasis on a meeting at the Reform Club in the last days of 2003, just after the DUP's defeat of David Trimble in the November election. What remarkable symbolism - did the DUP delegation, Peter Robinson and Nigel Dodds, notice the great portrait of Daniel O'Connell that adorns the Reform Club walls? With Dan smiling down on them, the work to create the new power-sharing executive began there and then.
Like another recent writer, Mary Alice Clancy, Ed Moloney lays considerable emphasis on the role of Mitchell Reiss, President Bush's envoy, in pushing the process along. Reiss, like Michael McDowell, tended to be rather more unambiguous on matters of criminality than the British government. Moloney argues that the Blair-Jonathan Powell indulgence of Sinn Féin helped to destroy both the Ulster Unionists and the SDLP and raise up Paisley and Adams. It is only fair to add at this juncture that Powell, Blair's chief of staff in Downing Street, will be publishing his version in his own important book out next month.
The central thesis of Moloney's book is that Paisley has always had a symbiotic relationship with the IRA- that he himself conjured up the demons that he spent a lifetime fighting.
There will be those who will argue that you cannot write a biography of Paisley without having a profound interest in religion as such. There is certainly a case for another book to be written by someone more deeply immersed in fundamentalist Protestant theology than Ed Moloney would ever claim to be. But Moloney has a very strong reply to such criticisms: how important are religious texts when Paisley simply redeploys them according to his opportunistic purpose at a given moment? In his earlier Paisley biography (with Andy Pollak, 1986), Moloney noted how, in a message of solidarity with the hardline unionist Willie John McCracken, Paisley chose to quote in justification a passage from St Paul's epistle to the Ephesians (6: 19-20): "And for me, that utterance may be given unto me, that I may open my mouth boldly, to make known the mystery of the Gospel, for which I am ambassador in bonds, that therein I may speak boldly as I ought to speak." Eagle-eyed, Moloney notes that 37 years later the same quotation was appended by Paisley to an autographed photograph of his handshake with Bertie Ahern.
From the age of six, as the book makes clear, Paisley has regarded himself as saved and the anointed one - that being so, he has the right to decide the meaning of the scripture in any given context.
There are a number of little slips. The term "prelate", is applied - apparently unironically - to Paisley on page 445, whereas like other spiritual descendants of the 17th-century Scots Covenanters he has denounced "prelacy" almost as unmercifully as "popery". The novelist Joseph Hocking, whose tales of Jesuit conspiracies were serialised in Paisley's Protestant Telegraph, was an Edwardian Englishman - and supporter of Irish Home Rule - rather than an American.
After a period of dreamlike torpor, Ulster politics are entering choppier waters. Banal though the trope of the DUP modernisers was - allow Trimble to take the inevitable early pain of the process and then steal his policy - it has been effective and may well continue to be so.
Nevertheless, Ian snr and Ian jnr, working together as they were a few months ago, was arguably the best combination to bring about devolution of policing and justice as rapidly as possible.
The irony is that the Irish Government watches on a little nervously and asks the question - have the DUP modernisers dispensed with the Doc a little too quickly?
Paul Bew is professor of Irish politics at Queen's University Belfast. His last book Ireland: The Politics of Enmity, 1789-2006 was published by Oxford University Press earlier this year