Ian Paisley, Free Presbyterian Church Founder and Papal Opponent, Passes Into Eternity
Ian
Paisley, Northern Ireland’s firebrand Protestant leader, who vowed
never to compromise with Irish Catholic nationalists, then, in his
twilight, accepted a power-sharing agreement that envisioned a new era
of peace in Northern Ireland after decades of sectarian violence, died
on Friday in Belfast. He was 88.In failing health in recent years, Mr. Paisley had been fitted with a pacemaker in 2011 after falling ill in London and had retired from politics and the pulpit. His wife, Eileen, confirmed his death in a statement.
The day many thought would never come
arrived in Belfast on May 8, 2007. Mr. Paisley, founder of the
Democratic Unionist party, which sought continued association with
Britain, and Martin McGuinness, a Sinn Fein leader and former commander
of the Irish Republican Army, which had fought for a united Ireland,
took oaths as the leader and deputy leader, respectively, of Northern
Ireland’s power-sharing government.
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Ian Paisley Dies at 88; Longtime Voice of Hard-Line Ulster Who Then Made Peace
The
Rev. Ian Paisley, Northern Ireland’s firebrand Protestant leader, who
vowed never to compromise with Irish Catholic nationalists, then, in his
twilight, accepted a power-sharing agreement that envisioned a new era
of peace in Northern Ireland after decades of sectarian violence, died
on Friday in Belfast. He was 88.
In
failing health in recent years, Mr. Paisley had been fitted with a
pacemaker in 2011 after falling ill in London and had retired from
politics and the pulpit. His wife, Eileen, confirmed his death in a
statement.
The
day many thought would never come arrived in Belfast on May 8, 2007.
Mr. Paisley, founder of the Democratic Unionist party, which sought
continued association with Britain, and Martin McGuinness, a Sinn Fein
leader and former commander of the Irish Republican Army, which had
fought for a united Ireland, took oaths as the leader and deputy leader,
respectively, of Northern Ireland’s power-sharing government.
As
Prime Ministers Tony Blair of Britain and Bertie Ahern of Ireland
looked on, the proceedings ended direct British governance and
reinstated home rule in Belfast. The agreement bridged the chasm between
Mr. Paisley and Gerry Adams, the Sinn Fein leader who had negotiated
it. And it relegated to the past the civil strife, known as the
Troubles, that had raged from the 1960s into the ’90s and cost 3,700
lives.
The
next year, Mr. Paisley — white-haired, 82 and seemingly mellowed —
resigned as Northern Ireland’s first minister and as leader of the
Democratic Unionists, by then the dominant party of Ulster’s
Protestants, which he founded in 1971. He had already stepped down as
head of the Free Presbyterian Church, which he founded in 1951, and had
given up the seat he had held for 28 years in the European Parliament in
Strasbourg, France. In 2010 he gave up the seat in the British House of
Commons that he had held for 40 years.
It
was the winding down of a tumultuous career as a rabble-rousing
minister-politician whose single-minded objective had been to preserve
Protestant power and repress the Roman Catholic minority in Northern
Ireland, keeping Ulster aligned with Britain, across the Irish Sea, and
out of the reach — he would have said the clutches — of predominantly
Catholic Ireland to the south.
From
the 1950s, when he organized vigilante patrols to defend Protestant
neighborhoods against I.R.A. attacks, through decades of deadly turmoil —
bombings, assassinations, clashes with British troops and general
strikes and riots he had fomented — Mr. Paisley barnstormed the
province, condemning any peace deal that might open the way to
power-sharing with Catholics in Northern Ireland, which has nearly 1.8
million people.
In
the pulpit or at Stormont — the Northern Ireland Parliament, which had
been emblematic of Protestant hegemony since the partition of Ireland in
1921 — Mr. Paisley was a spellbinding orator, a thundering Jeremiah of
relentless political attacks laced with biblical references. The
Catholic Church, Sinn Fein, the I.R.A., Irish leaders, even interfering
American presidents were all targets of the Paisley wrath.
He
called Pope John Paul II the Antichrist. He said he wanted to kick Bill
Clinton in the pants for his peace efforts. He refused to attend
negotiations and accused some British leaders of plotting to sell
Belfast out to what he called the devils in Dublin. His demands for the
removal of an Irish flag from Sinn Fein’s Belfast office once led to two
days of rioting. And he said “no” to almost everything — to civil
rights for Catholics, to meetings with Irish leaders, and especially to
power-sharing proposals.
John
Hume, a Catholic civil rights leader, once said to Mr. Paisley, “Ian,
if the word ‘no’ were to be removed from the English language, you’d be
speechless, wouldn’t you?”
“No, I wouldn’t,” Mr. Paisley shot back.
While
supporters called him a passionate defender of Protestant unionism,
some said his negative stances alienated allies, prolonged violence and
held back progress even as prosperity spread in the Irish Republic.
Critics called him a bigoted demagogue who offered simple nostrums to
complicated religious, cultural and social problems. But Mr. Paisley
conceded nothing and denied culpability for any violence.
In
1998, a peace agreement was signed by David Trimble, the mainstream
Ulster Protestant leader, and Mr. Hume, and they shared the Nobel Peace
Prize that year for their efforts. The so-called Good Friday Agreement,
ratified by voters in Ireland and Northern Ireland, was hardly radical.
It provided that Ireland could be united only with the consent of
Northern Ireland and made it likely that Northern Ireland would remain
Protestant in perpetuity or at least well into the 21st century. But it
envisioned power-sharing, and Mr. Paisley fulminated against it.
By
2007, however, a series of hurdles had been passed: The I.R.A. had
destroyed its arsenal of weapons and dismantled its clandestine cells,
and Sinn Fein had endorsed a reconstituted Northern Ireland police
force, which it had long considered an arm of British and Protestant
repression, leading Mr. Paisley to accept a power-sharing compromise
reached at St. Andrews, Scotland.
On
the day of his swearing-in as first minister in Belfast, a thriving
city that had once been an armed fortress, Mr. Paisley was solemn.
“While this is a sad day for all the innocent victims of the Troubles,
yet it is a special day because we are making a new beginning,” he said.
“I believe we are starting on a road to bring us back to peace and
prosperity.”
Ian
Richard Kyle Paisley was born on April 6, 1926, in Armagh, Northern
Ireland. His father, James, was a Baptist minister; his mother, Isobel, a
Scottish evangelist.
Raised
in Ballymena, County Antrim, Ian attended local schools and worked on a
farm. He decided to be a minister, studied at a South Wales evangelism
school, graduated from Theological Hall of the Reformed Presbyterian
Church in Belfast and was ordained in 1946.
But
he soon came to believe that his church had deviated from biblical
strictures, and he founded the Free Presbyterians, a relatively small
fundamentalist sect. The Presbyterian Church, Northern Ireland’s largest
Protestant denomination, disassociated itself from his anti-Catholic
rhetoric.
In
1956, he married Eileen Cassells. The couple had three daughters,
Sharon, Rhonda and Cherith, and twin sons, Kyle and Ian Jr. They all
survive him, as do several grandchildren.
Mr.
Paisley was 6-foot-4 and 240 pounds, with broad shoulders to go with a
booming voice and a solemn demeanor. He was a teetotaler and nonsmoker
who avoided movies and other entertainments he considered frivolous. But
he was affable in a smoky bar with politicians drinking whiskey, which
he called “the devil’s buttermilk,” and he sometimes told bawdy jokes.
Mr.
Paisley wrote many volumes of religious and political commentaries,
including “An Exposition of the Epistle to the Romans” (1968), “United
Ireland — Never!” (1972), “America’s Debt to Ulster” (1976), “No Pope
Here” (1982) and “The Protestant Reformation” (1999).
He
was the subject of a documentary, “The Unquiet Man,” broadcast by the
BBC in 2001, and a biography, “Paisley” (1986), by Ed Moloney and Andy
Pollak. (A new edition, “Paisley: From Demagogue to Democrat?,” by Mr.
Moloney, was published in 2008.)
After
giving up the seat in the House of Commons that he had won in 1970, he
was succeeded by his son Ian and was made a life peer in the House of
Lords, as Baron Bannside of County Antrim. In January 2012, he retired
after 65 years as the pastor of Martyrs’ Memorial Church in Belfast.
County
Antrim, his ancestral home, was his political base. His Democratic
Unionists, an outgrowth of the Protestant Unionists he founded,
attracted wide followings but were not Ulster’s dominant Protestant
party until 2005. His campaigns often featured fiery denunciations of
homosexuality and what he called the blasphemies of popular culture.
But
his politics were predominantly a crusade against Irish Catholics. And
when it was over, when he had softened the diatribes and accepted
leadership in a power-sharing government, the legacies of fighting and
religious hatreds remained. Housing was still overwhelmingly segregated,
discrimination in jobs was still common, and 3-year-olds, researchers
said, continued to display sectarian instincts.
