He's come a long way from tinted glasses, and when Ian Paisley's longtime deputy becomes DUP leader and First Minister in May, Dublin, London and even Sinn Féin, all seem convinced that he will make powersharing work, writes Gerry Moriarty.
Peter Robinson, in his 60th year, is finally creeping out from under the shadow of Ian Paisley. Soon he will be his own man. He is breaking the chains of the past, mindful that he can't escape completely; that, for the moment at least, he has two DUP constituencies to manage: those who are comfortable with the new historic reality in Northern Ireland, and the fundamentalist minority who yearn to be back in Neverland.
Some years ago Peter Robinson was profiled on BBC Northern Ireland's Hearts and Mindspolitical programme. The cameras visited his house in east Belfast. They focused on his love of gadgets and computers. The programme captured Peter opening up drawer after drawer of neckties, more than a thousand of them. It showed him petting the koi carp that he keeps in a pond at his house, his favourite a big one called Elsie.
The picture intrigued viewers. It was all rather strange. One rang in to say that the sight of Robinson stroking the carp conjured a picture "of a James Bond baddie, rather like Blofeld, sitting in his chair, caressing his furry white cat, as he pondered how to take over the world". It's an apposite image, because for many years Robinson was an arch-villain in the eyes of nationalists and the British and Irish governments, while moderate unionists weren't particularly enamoured of him either. Those tinted glasses, that hard look, the clipped voice, all conveyed an impression of a ruthless politician with menacing ambitions.
To paraphrase that Leonard Cohen song: first we take Clontibret, then we take Belfast. But Robinson has travelled a long distance from accompanying the mob to the tiny Co Monaghan village 22 years ago. Now he's talking about "Planter and Gael" living in harmony. Not quite as cloying as Ebony and Irony, but certainly remarkable.
Most people on the island have a broad fix on his political history but there is less detail of his personal life. He's from east Belfast, and in the 1960s attended the Annadale Grammar School by the Lagan. It's also the alma mater of poet Tom Paulin, whose father Douglas was headmaster, and Mr Justice Reginald (Reggie) Weir. One contemporary, using a Belfastism, described him as a bit of a "nyerp", rather a "teacher's boy" who had no interest in sport or banging around in loyalist flute bands.
But, as indicated by old pictures of him with long hair, a slightly brooding look and his arm around his future wife Iris, he wasn't oblivious to the Beatles or the culture of the 1960s. He fell for Iris, MP, MLA and formidable woman in her own right, when he was 17, she 16. The couple have three children, who work for their parents in differing political roles. In the Assembly chamber any criticism of Peter will trigger dagger looks and verbals from Iris. The Robinsons are as protective of each other as the Paisleys are of the Paisleys, but soon the Robinsons will rule the roost.
He has his little vanities. In recent years, he underwent laser treatment so he could shed his glasses, also spiking his hair in modern fashion, probably with the encouragement of Iris. He likes his luxuries, doesn't drink, but enjoys a fine meal in a good restaurant. He cites golf as a hobby. He is happy to overnight in Dublin, staying in hotels such as the Shelbourne and the Hilton. And the South is not a strange place to him. During the Clontibret unpleasantness he saw the inside of Garda stations and prison cells, but with Iris in their young hostelling days he travelled in the Republic, as far south as Kinsale, and wasn't corrupted by the experience.
He briefly worked as an estate agent and his decision to shift permanentlyt to politics was motivated by the IRA murder of a close friend, Harry Beggs, in August 1971. Beggs, aged 23, was an electricity board worker who was engaged to be married.
ROBINSON, WHO WILL be 60 in December, has stood shoulder to shoulder with Paisley from the formation of the DUP in September that same year. There was always a certain distance, however: he is a born-again Pentecostalist who in the end steered away from Paisley's even more fundamentalist Free Presbyterian Church. Robinson was there with Paisley in 1974 when, with the loyalist paramilitaries, they engineered the collapse of the powersharing Sunningdale Executive - which was not much different to the current arrangement.
He was his trusted lieutenant for the various sinister Paisley stunts during the 1980s: the formation of the vigilante Third Force in 1981, the booming protests against the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement, and a year later the creation of the paramilitary Ulster Resistance, with the trademark red beret worn by its members. When Ulster Resistance was later found to have imported guns for itself and the UVF and the UDA, Paisley and Robinson quickly set about distancing the DUP and themselves from the organisation.
In August 1986, Robinson joined a mob of loyalists, armed with cudgels and sticks - and some say guns - who "invaded" the village of Clontibret, assaulting a Garda in the process. Robinson, learning the dissociation technique of his master, contended he was there to observe the lack of Border security rather than to lead. The subsequent court case led to a riot and a republican mob confronting his loyalist supporters in Dundalk. Had he been jailed, as Ed Moloney points out in his recently published biography of Paisley, Robinson would have lost his Westminster seat which he had won in 1979. But a deal was struck and Robinson pleaded guilty to more minor offences, which earned him a fine of £17,500 but kept him out of jail. The payment of the fine earned him the title of Peter the Punt from some loyalists, who felt he should have been a martyr for the cause.
IT'S PART OF the complex nature of Northern politics that, even at this period, Robinson, unlike his leader, was realising that if politics were to struggle forward there had to be an accommodation with nationalism, although Sinn Féin was not then part of that equation.
With Frank Millar, then general secretary of the Official Unionist Party, and an OUP MP, the late Harold McCusker, he was appointed to the joint unionist Task Force. In 1987, it proposed a devolutionist model of government for Northern Ireland, which didn't rule out powersharing. Paisley and the then OUP leader, the integrationist Jim Molyneaux, respectively did not like its conciliatory and devolutionist tone, and its implied criticism of their leadership. Around this time, too, as evident from Irish Timesreports of the period, there was talk of Robinson challenging Paisley for the leadership. But Paisley prevailed. Millar, now this newspaper's London Editor, left politics for journalism, while Robinson resigned as DUP deputy leader.
But only for 2½ months. Paisley needed him. He was back as deputy by January 1988, facing into the period that led to the IRA ceasefire of 1994, and the talks starting in 1991 that ultimately resulted in the Belfast Agreement of 1998, and the subsequent powersharing executive led by David Trimble and Seamus Mallon.
Politics suited Robinson more than protest. While Paisley was humbled in 1998, Robinson saw the political opportunity. Had he so wished, as chief party strategist he could have destroyed the agreement simply by refusing to allow the DUP to participate in the fledgling Assembly or the Executive, which couldn't have survived without the DUP. Paisley might have bought that approach. Instead, Robinson sold the idea of himself and Nigel Dodds serving as ministers but not sitting with Sinn Féin on the Executive, while at the same time acting to undermine Trimble. It was underhand, and it worked.
Robinson, and even his opponents will concede this, was brilliant at playing real politics. He was technocratic, sharp at the dispatch box, sure of his brief, and unafraid to bring in bright young unionists, many of them defectors from the Ulster Unionist Party, to beef up his kitchen cabinet. He was probably the most capable minister in either Executive. And he's now due for his greatest political honour, in May or shortly thereafter, assuming the posts of First Minister and the second leader of the DUP in what the party hierarchy insists will be a "bloodless" succession - albeit with some suspicion that he colluded in Paisley's accelerated departure, a charge he denies.
Dublin, London, Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness seem convinced that Robinson, the supreme pragmatist, wants powersharing to work. They make private allowances for the fact that, while looking to the future, Robinson must also protect his back from the likes of Jim Allister and his Traditional Unionist Voice party, and also from the minority of revanchists in the DUP. He knows he will never have Paisley's grip on the DUP: he must show some collegiality in leading. "He is not in the business of bringing this down, but he is not in the business of losing a whole load of seats to Jim Allister either," says a senior Dublin insider.
"The Taoiseach would have good time for him, and Brian Cowen has a very good businesslike relationship, and we find him fine, but in a very grey sort of way," he adds. "Robinson's mind is on running Northern Ireland. His objective will be to make life better for everyone, mainly his own guys, but everyone. He sees it all as: how can I be a very successful First Minister for the next five or six years. He sees it very much as Bertie Ahern or Brian Cowen sees it in the South. Nobody's worrying."
One Shinner even defended Robinson while in conversation with the same Dublin source. He said that Robinson had a "different sense of humour to Ian Paisley's". "That was very manful of him," the insider observed, "putting 'sense of humour' and 'Peter Robinson' in the same sentence." Unlike Paisley, Robinson does rather lack personal colour and charm, but occasionally he can be engaging and is often witty. Not knockabout like Sammy Wilson or capable of bringing an audience through an emotional roller coaster of fervour, fun and anger like Ian Paisley, but funny in a methodical, brutal, crafted way. Ulster Unionists could dismiss as bombast some of the attacks on them from Paisley but they feared the verbal stiletto that Robinson employed.
And, believe it or not, he can be Olympian. Two years ago in New York he told the Council of Foreign Relations of his vision in language that John Hume might have used. He concluded his speech thus: "I hope there will emerge a clear message from Northern Ireland that all those who have stood fast and suffered long have been rewarded by the dawn of a better and brighter day; that the eternal values of liberty and democracy have prevailed and that the sons and daughters of the Planter and the Gael have found a way to share the land of their birth and live together in peace."
Gael and Planter living together in peace, a placatory phrase he first used in 2004. Who could have predicted it? No more tinted glasses. Most reasonable people can live with such a refashioned Peter Robinson.