Paisley Trots Into A Sunset of His Own Making
As Ian Paisley announced last week that he will stand down as the head of Britain’s Stormont administration and as leader of the DUP in May this year, the majority of the political establishment in Ireland and in Britain lavished him with praise.
Bertie Ahern led the chorus,
“…when it came to making the Good Friday Agreement work and having an inclusive executive in Northern Ireland (sic), he made the big moves.”
British prime minister Gordon Brown said,
“Progress on bringing a lasting peace to Northern Ireland (sic) would not have been possible without his immense courage and leadership.”
Brown also commended Paisley’s longstanding opposition to “terrorism”, seemingly unaware of Mr Paisley’s longstanding associations with unionist death squads.
David Cameron, leader of the British Tory Party mimicked,
“Ian Paisley has been a formidable figure in Irish politics for many decades. His term as first minister has helped forge a peace many thought was impossible.”
Paisley’s Stormont deputy Martin McGuinness believed that,
“The decision he took to go into government with Sinn Féin changed the course of Irish history forever.”
This is just but a small sample of the praise that was thrown in the DUP leader’s direction. Ian Paisley, it seems, has successfully re-imaged himself in the 10 months since the establishment of the St Andrew’s assembly. He received credit and praise from all of the mainstream political parties in Ireland for being the man who delivered ‘peace’, and a workable political solution for people in the Six Counties.
The broad media discourse has reflected an image of a man who made a road to Damascus-type conversion, who triumphantly brought unionism into a power sharing arrangement with nationalism and bettered the lot of the population of the north east of Ireland. Ultimately, his political epitaph seems to be reading well and Ian Paisley looks set, on the face of it, to find a positive place in Ireland’s history books.
How could this possibly be the case? How could a right-wing religious fundamentalist with such fascist political outlooks who has been to the forefront of every unionist assault on Irish national democracy and human rights over the last half century be interpreted so benignly? And, perhaps more importantly, why?
Ian paisley was born in County Armagh in 1926.
After establishing his own small religious sect, the Free Presbyterian Church, he entered the political arena.
His firebrand mixture of right-wing politics and anti-catholic rhetoric gained him a reputation amongst extreme unionists as a man who would not bow to the forces of ‘Rome’. A position from which, to this day, he and his political party, the DUP, derives most of its strength.
His early initiatives gave birth to some of the most intense rioting Belfast had seen for decades. RUC officers attacked the Divis Street area of West Belfast in 1964 after Paisley threatened to lead a mob attack onto the Falls Road and, enforcing the nefarious Flags and Emblems act, remove the then illegal national flag from the election office of a nationalist councillor.
At the commencement of the campaign for civil rights in the late 1960s, Ian Paisley came to the fore as one of the most vociferously vicious opponents of equality for the catholic population in the Six Counties. The paranoia that he engendered and reflected in his supporters even led to the toppling of the head of the Stormont junta, Terence O’Neill, for being ‘too amenable’ to the civil rights demands.
Throughout the ‘70s and ‘80s Paisley just as vociferously opposed the nationalist struggle for equality and any British attempts to co-opt a sizable section of them into administering the British state in Ireland. A classically demagogic politician, the north Antrim MP was as equally committed to maintaining an apartheid state in the Six Counties as he was to maintaining British control over it.
Having armed and supported unionist paramilitaries, protested any Twenty-Six County government involvement in the Six Counties and viciously slandered, and ultimately toppled, any unionist figure that would countenance ‘power sharing’ with nationalists, Ian Paisley built for himself a monolith of unionism in his own image.
His own DUP has over 50 per cent of its membership attached to the Free Presbyterian Church, which he created, and which acts as the theocratic advisory group in terms of party policy.
The 1990s and the effective demobilisation of the nationalist insurgency saw Paisley’s fundamentalist form of unionism come into the ascendancy and, recently, he has all but unified the unionist electorate behind his party’s political outlook.
He involved himself in a personal campaign to smash Irish republicanism and threatened continued political logjam if republicans did not decommission their weaponry and recognise British rule in Ireland.
Since the establishment of the St Andrew’s assembly in May 2007, his party has further trampled on the rights of the nationalist community and the working class in the Six Counties. The DUP has thwarted legislation to protect the rights of Irish speakers, promoted brutal financial initiatives, engaged in anti-homosexual rhetoric, religious hysteria and a program for government that will entrench British new Labour free market economics and further alienate the nationalist population and working people in general.
Paisley’s legacy has been one of destruction and division and, as he leaves the political stage, no progressive person should lament, or get caught up in the ridiculous furore of praise for a man and an ideology that personifies all that is wrong with modern Ireland and all that we should seek to dismantle and replace.
This praise has merely served to obscure the more realistic assessments that have come from, among others, Paisley himself. The outgoing DUP leader and his colleagues have freely admitted that going into the Stormont administration with nationalists and catholics was a bitter pill to swallow.
However, what made this pill acceptable was the fact that unionists have a veto over any major measure that will be proposed in the Six County assembly and, at the end of the day, it is British law that they are administering.
It is truly a failure of Irish society – a failure that is worthy of honest and critical assessment - that a man of Paisley’s undoubtedly reactionary politics was allowed to ascend to where he always wanted to be – the unchallenged head of Britain’s Orange State.
As a new leader of fundamentalist unionism emerges we should be ever vigilant for the inevitable manifestations of inequality inherent within the DUP agenda and continue to oppose Paisley’s unionism and the cynical misrepresentation of fascism as progression.
“They breed like rabbits and multiply like vermin.” Stormont first minister Ian Paisley on catholics at a unionist rally in 1969.
“Catholic homes caught fire because they were loaded with petrol bombs; Catholic churches were attacked and burned because they were arsenals and priests handed out sub-machine guns to parishioners.” Stormont first minister Ian Paisley speaking in response to unionist pogroms in Belfast in August 1969.
“The role we play is saviour of the union.” Stormont first minister Ian Paisley speaking in 1998.