Did the Big Man bring his faithful to the promised land?

Wednesday, March 05, 2008

By Maurice Hayes

It also marks the end of one the most remarkable odysseys in modern Irish politics - from street preacher to statesman, from turbulent priest to the father of his people, from agitator to administrator, from eternal outsider to the centre of the Establishment, from the gospel hut and the mission tent to marbled halls and the Oval Office.

In a long career his demise has been predicted often enough (and never less emphatically than when the representatives of loyalist paramilitarism jeered at him outside the building in which they had signed up to the Good Friday Agreement) but he saw off all rivals, foreign and domestic and now he is being seen off himself.

For have no doubt, seeing off it is - his retirement, while timely in many respects, is almost certainly not voluntary.

In his time he saw off no fewer than four Prime Ministers of Northern Ireland - Terence O'Neill, James Chichester Clark, Brian Faulkner, and latterly David Trimble as First Minister.

Internal rivals both in church and party fared no better.

Indeed, the most dangerous position over the years has been that of chief lieutenant as Major Bunting, the Rev William Beattie and others could testify - except for one, Peter Robinson, his almost certain successor and even he has had his periods of difficulty.

Now Paisley is removed if not brought down, by the forces he himself created, both in church and party.

The difficulty is that he is being contested from two sides by those who blame him for supping with the devil (and even more for appearing to enjoy it) and those secularist reformers in the party who wish to settle the succession and get on with the business in hand.

What happens now will depend on the outcome over the next couple of months on the struggle between these two tendencies in the DUP.

Reading between the lines of Gerry Adams' Ard Fheis speech at the weekend this is clearly what is exercising minds in Sinn Fein, when he paid tribute to Ian Paisley and called on the reformists in the DUP to stand up to the 'naysayers'.

It has been a new experience for Ian Paisley to be at the centre of things - and yet there are those who argue that that was where he yearned to be all along.

For most of his life he was the eternal outsider throwing rhetoric at whatever organisation of institution he was not in.

He was an outsider in all the great pillars of the unionist hegemony - the Unionist Party, the Presbyterian Church and the Orange Order.

His greatest insurance when he became top dog in the North was that, unlike his predecessors he did not have a Paisley on the outside trying to undermine him. How ironic it is that in the end the real sappers were insiders in church and party.

As with any political cleric there will always be a debate as to which came first.

Did he use his position in the church as a springboard to politics as some of his enemies allege, or did he espouse politics to defend the religious positions and values he embraced? I tend to the latter view, but his was the religion of Calvin and Knox, neither divorced from politics and the joint pillars of his position were the Bible and Williamite settlement.

I remember a March evening nearly 50 years ago when as town clerk of Downpatrick I was invited with the chairman to tea with the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Ramsay, in Dundrum.

Unusually for the time we were surrounded in the gathering dusk by police and B Specials until someone said that we could be let past.

I asked who we should not have been and, in an unconscious echo of Mahaffey on Pearse, a B Special replied, "Sir, there's a man called Paisley."

This was the Paisley of the time, the agitator, the enfant terrible, the scourge of Ecumenists, the proselytiser, the bogeyman used to put Catholic children to bed. The sixties saw him emerge into street agitation and violence (never personal but fuelled by his rhetoric) and then into politics as he took on one unionist sacred cow after another.

He did not get there by accident - a forceful man with at times demonic energy, great intellectual horse power, rhetorical ability and a gift for the cutting phrase that comes straight from 17th century polemics.

He was indeed an opportunist with a great capacity for tactical withdrawal and an instinct for self preservation. He flirted at times with paramilitaries but kept himself within at least the letter of the law.

He was a rabble-rouser, at times feeding off the passions of his audience, but he was a man too of charm and wit, a good companion with an ability to communicate with ordinary people that eluded both O'Neill and Trimble.

He was an amazingly assiduous and effective constituency MP who never spared himself in the interest of his constituents, whether they had voted for him or not, whether Catholic or Protestant.

Indeed his large personal vote showed his capacity to draw votes from beyond the DUP and from Catholics and nationalists. In Europe he worked effectively in partnership with John Hume.

Cynics will say that had it not been for the activities of both Paisley and the IRA over the decades agreement may not have been necessary or so long delayed. As it was they fed off each other.

The question will be asked why? Another more pressing question is - what now? The anxiety in Sinn Fein was evident at the Ard Fheis, a hope that if Paisley did not survive that his legacy might live on in the form of a working Executive.

The short answer is that it will because the politicos in both DUP and Sinn Fein want it to work - indeed need it to do so, they having nowhere else to go.

There may be fewer smiles, a more Spartan way of doing business with Peter Robinson, difficulties over policing and the Irish Language Act but survive it will.

It is much too early to write Paisley's political epitaph or even to judge how he will be remembered - for his youthful excesses - the turbulence of his middle years, or his final apotheosis.

A lot will depend on the durability of the agreement he made with Sinn Fein and the institutions he created.

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