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From the Sunday Independent

Forged in the crucible of his hatred

DESPITE the fact that RTE gave the DUP leader a ludicrously soft-centred
interview on Prime Time recently, the fact remains that if Tony Blair
really wants to find a weapon of political mass destruction, he need look no
further than the benches directly opposite him in the House of Commons, where sits
the subject of the interview: the very large destructive force known
as Ian Kyle Paisley.

Let us be clear that what is at stake here is not merely the Good Friday
Agreement, in its opposition to which the unionist community has
reverted to type, and given Paisley a mandate to destroy it, but the possibility
of ending the Irish Physical Force tradition once and for all. People sometimes
either fail to realise or do not want to advert to the fact that most significant
Irish political development originated in that tradition.

The Unionist Party founded the Ulster Volunteer Force in collusion
with British conservatives and threatened war in a successful attempt to frustrate the
verdict of the ballot box, and so prevented the introduction of Home
Rule to this country in the last century. In response, the Irish Volunteers were
founded, which led (apart from war, civil war and partition) to the
creation of Sinn Fein and from it subsequently Cumann na nGaedheal, Fianna Fail,
Clann na Poblachta, Sinn Fein the Workers Party and once again Sinn Fein.
With the Good Friday Agreement, we were offered the prospect of finally
closing off this deadly seedbed of violence and introducing a new era of
fruitful politics and of friendship between Dublin, London, Belfast
and the Irish diaspora.

This is now threatened and one of these days Tony Blair is going to
have to turn from dealing with Iraq, and the Dail from its preoccupation with
e-voting, to grapple with this reality. Perhaps because he appears to have a
sense of humour, the full malign impact of the Great Disturber is either not
explored in the Republic or else glossed over, as it was on Prime Time. Paisley may be
funny peculiar. He is not funny ha ha.

Younger readers of the Sunday Independent are probably not aware of
Paisley's "Third Force", created in 1981 after he had led a crowd of
masked men up an Antrim hillside earlier in the year where 500 firearm
certificates were brandished and a willingness to use them trumpeted.

Better-known will be his involvement with the Ulster Resistance
Movement in 1986 at which Paisley and Peter Robinson were photographed with leading
loyalist paramilitaries such as Alan Wright and Noel Lyttle. Part of the
armament supplied to Ulster Resistance came from the notorious British
undercover agent Brian Nelson. In 1986, also seeking to make an individual
name for himself on the wilder shores of unionism, Peter Robinson and a
loyalist gang invaded the Co Monaghan village of Clontibret and
attacked the Garda station.This behaviour was part of the essential and continuing
balancing act between the forces of extreme Protestant fundamentalism and
loyalist paramilitarism which has characterised Paisleyite politics
since he first entered public life. As far back as 1972, a British government report
into the origins of the North Ireland troubles said:

"Fears and apprehensions of Protestants of a threat to unionist domination
and control of government by an increase of Catholic population and
powers, inflamed in particular [author's italics] by the activities of the Ulster
Constitution Defence Committee and the Ulster Protestant Volunteers,
provoked strong hostile reaction to Civil Rights Claims as asserted by the
Civil Rights Association and later by the People's Democracy which were
readily translated into physical violence against Civil Rights
demonstrators."

Both the UPV and the UCDC were Paisley vehicles. Two years after the
foregoing was published, Paisley, the man who denounces links with
paramilitarism, including loyalist paramilitarism when it suits him, was
photographed marching with loyalist masked paramilitaries as they wrecked
the precursor of the Good Friday Agreement, the power-sharing Executive of
1974.

Today Paisley's targets are the same as they were in the earlier
stages of his career: Dublin, Catholicism, nationalism. Paisley and his DUP are
smoother, more media-honed than in the earlier stentorian days. Now the emphasis is
on sounding reasonable, on protestations of willingness to co-operate with
Dublin; the appearance of being a normal democratic party which cannot be
expected to co-operate with a party which has links to an illegal
army. It's a position to which, for many people in the Republic, the recent disturbing
kidnapping incident in Belfast has added an air of justification. But the
substance is something else, a visceral anti-Catholicism, summed up in
this verse of Hymn 757 of Paisley's Free Presbyterian Church:

The mystery of Wickedness

Right surely is thy name

The Harlot in the Bride's attire

As all thy ways proclaim

No peace with Rome shall be our cry . . . This view of Rome in which
the Pope is the Antichrist, who on occasion Paisley has publicly insulted,
would appear laughable, were it not for the fact that a majority of the unionist
electorate has just endorsed it. Our deletion of Articles Two and Three of the
Constitution, which Paisley once sought, and their replacement by a quite noble-minded
definition of what constitutes an Irishman has meant nothing.

Mistakenly, a wide swathe of Irish political opinion, including
opinion in Sinn Fein, has chosen to believe that Paisley is an old man who can be bypassed
in favour of pragmatists in his party who will do a deal. Granted
Paisley is 77, but he's a strong 77. How old is the Pope? Has his age and physical
condition made him appear willing to consider retirement?

The evangelical or religious component of Paisley's politico-religious
creed is what sets him apart from the so-called pragmatists, presumably Nigel Dodds
and Peter Robinson. Without the religious factor, Paisley's party
would just be another slice of unionism, Tweedle Dee Jeffrey Donaldson and Tweedle Dum
David Trimble.

I would not argue, as some optimists do, that in the absence of Paisley,
moderation would easily be achieved. The split in unionism may heal.

But certain things will continue: dislike of Dublin, a distaste for
power-sharing with Catholics, an inability on the part of unionist politicians to
promote a vision of politics which, for example, would encourage their
constituents to get

themselves an education to replace the vanished apprenticeship
culture, and perhaps even to co-operate with Dublin so that inward investment and a
share in the benefits of the Celtic Tiger might be brought to
unemployment-ravaged East Belfast.

Unionist politicians will continue to seek those benefits for
themselves, of course, pace John Taylor's recent multimillion-euro newspaper deal in the
Republic or the fact that Paisley's church draws revenues from this
abhorred fiefdom of Rome.

Nevertheless it is true that at every step of the road over the last
40 years, any movement towards breaking out of unionist moulds always came up against
the towering figure of Paisley.

I remember sitting in Captain Terence O'Neill's office in Stormont in
October 1965 while public opinion in the Republic was still reverberating with
approval for Sean Lemass's overtures of friendship towards O'Neill.

O'Neill and his secretary, Group Captain Jim Malley, who had done much to
arrange the historicalLemass/O'Neill meetings, with TK Whitaker, both
warned me of the dangers, unappreciated in the south, which Paisley's strident
campaign against the dismantling of Belfast/Dublin barriers posed for the
future. "The trouble is," said O'Neill, "that he does all this with
the Book in his hand. The Book is very important up here."

It was and is. Petrol bombs might have been - and were - thrown for
the first time in Belfast during 1964 after riots which Paisley incited with a
threatening speech in the Ulster Hall fulminating against the display of an Irish
tricolour in an innocuous back-street premises off the Falls Road, the headquarters
of the Sinn Fein candidate in the Westminster elections. But the Bible was the
missile which Paisley deliberately chose to throw at the head of a
clerical opponent, the ecumenical Methodist preacher Donald Soper.

At an intellectual level, if I may be pardoned the term, Paisley (in a
pamphlet) has attacked the Jesuits for, in effect, furthering devil worship. The
mark of the cloven hoof is upon Jesuits because, Paisley argues, their sign, IHS,
stands for a pagan Egyptian trinity, Isis Horub Seb. I do not know at what
level one should place Paisley's resignation from the Orange Order, because it
refused to expel Sir Robert Kinahan for attending a Catholic funeral service,
nor his demonstration at City Hall against the lowering of the Union Jack on
the death of Pope John XXIII who he described as "the Roman anti-Christ".

But at street level he is on record during the Fifties of giving the
names and addresses of Catholics to supporters on the Shankill Road, and telling his
hearers how long Protestants had lived in those houses before they passed
into the hands of the Papists. He then went home, leaving inflamed
crowds to attack the Catholic homes and businesses.

This had nothing to do with him, of course. No more than the fact that
members of the UPV and UCDC were responsible for the series of deaths
and explosions which blew Captain Terence O'Neill out of office a few
years later. (In one, Thomas McDowell, a member of Paisley's Free Presbyterian
Church, died attempting to blow up an ESB station in Donegal.)

Nor could anyone connect him with certain activities of a UPV organiser, a
printer on his hate-sheet the Protestant Telegraph, Noel Doherty.
Doherty did time for his involvement with paramilitaries with whom he discussed arms
procurement at a meeting in Loughgall. Paisley, who was going to Armagh,
drove him to the meeting and drove him from it, but claimed that he had no
idea what was discussed.

The list is as long and as unlovely as Ian Kyle Paisley's own
political career, but though Prime Time shied away from confronting it, the time is fast
approaching when we and the governments of Dublin and London will have
to do so.

Tim Pat Coogan

[rabroy]

Typical stuff from this man. Gerry Fitt urged the Catholics to get out onto
the streets and take the pressure of the Bogside,this led to the rioting on
the Shankill and the Falls in 1969,but not a word about that from Tim Pat
Coogan. Also Bernie Devlin was'nt inciting the Catholics or throwing stones
Why paint Paisley this way,they were all as guilty or innocent as he was

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BBC
Profile: Ian Paisley


By Martina Purdy
BBC Northern Ireland political correspondent


A few years ago, Ian Paisley told the BBC journalist Peter Taylor that he would not be changing.

"I'll go to the grave with the convictions I have," said the DUP leader, who has been a dominant, and often controversial, personality in Northern Ireland politics for more than three decades.

At 77, Mr Paisley - who holds an honorary doctorate from Bob Jones University in North Carolina - is remaining true to his word.

Looking at his long career, one might have detected a few changes, but his fundamentals haven't altered much.


Ian Paisley addressing supporters in 1974
With Dublin lifting its constitutional claim on Northern Ireland, Mr Paisley appears to be in favour of informal cooperation with Dublin.

But the man who threw snowballs at the Taoiseach Sean Lemass in 1965 remains opposed to the formal cross-border structures set up in the Good Friday Agreement, and in 2003, he insulted the Irish foreign minister in the most personal way by mocking the size of his lips.

Since the 1970s, when he campaigned against power-sharing with the SDLP, he has blocked every political initiative to bring it about.

But Mr Paisley no longer rails against coalition with "constitutional nationalists," instead focussing his ire on "terrorists in government" - ie Sinn Fein.

Despite the subtle shift, he remains resolutely a traditional, not-an-inch unionist. Having risen to power through the turmoil of the 1960s civil rights movement, he still leads both the Democratic Unionist Party and his own Free Presbyterian Church, set up in 1951.

Although some of the day-to-day operation of the DUP is increasingly in the hands of his deputy, Peter Robinson, Ian Paisley - with his over-powering personality - continues to have a firm grip on his party.

In 2003, he is as committed as ever to his own fervent brand of fundamentalist Protestantism, still condemning the Pope and the Roman Catholic Church.

The Rev Ian Paisley
1926: Born Armagh, NI
1946: Ordained
1951: Founded Free Presbyterian Church
1974: Entered Parliament
1979: European Parliament
1998 NI Assembly

Mr Paisley has insisted that while he is opposed to the Catholic Church, he has nothing against individual Catholics. This distinction is often lost on his critics, who dismiss him as a bigot.

He is scathing about the current leader of the Ulster Unionist Party, David Trimble. Traitor is a word thrown at Mr Trimble with the same ease that it was hurled at his predecessors, among them Terence O'Neill, and Brian Faulkner.

Through much of his career, he has been at odds with UUP leaders, although he had a working relationship with Jim Molyneaux (now Lord Molyneaux) and the parties worked together in opposing the Anglo-Irish Agreement.

But despite this, even Molyneaux suffered from the "Judas" label. It has long been Ian Paisley's ambition to be the undisputed voice of unionism. He is looking to the next Assembly election - if there is one - to prove it.

At the very least, he may be able to block power-sharing with Sinn Fein should another attempt be made to restore devolution.

It was his passionate opposition to Irish republicanism that launched him on the political scene, and he has not altered his views.

In 1964, he demanded an Irish tricolour be removed from Divis Street in west Belfast. When the RUC removed it, it led to rioting.

The Sinn Fein leader, Gerry Adams, then a young man, remembers the incident as shaping his political development.


Mr Paisley is preparing to stand again in the European poll next June

A woman who was in the Sinn Fein office at the time, years later, wondered if Mr Paisley had done republicans a favour.

It's a question at the heart of the debate when considering the influence of the Democratic Unionist leader over the fortunes of Northern Ireland: has he helped strengthen the union by his uncompromising ways, or has he played into the hands of republicans all along?

That may be one for the historians. But voting trends would suggest that unionists are increasingly convinced that Mr Paisley and his party is their best bet.

While the DUP leader has condemned violence, both loyalist and republican, he has been criticised for his own past involvement with shadowy groups.

In 1981, he appeared on a hillside in the dead of night with 500 men brandishing firearms licences and later had a brief dalliance with Ulster Resistance.

In recent years, the DUP has been steadily gaining support at the expense of the Ulster Unionist Party


With the peace process came attempts by loyalist paramilitaries to organise politically - and challenge the DUP. But neither the Progressive Unionist Party nor Ulster Democratic Party has made much impact electorally.

There were marked scenes, however, at the 1998 referendum count when their supporters turned on Mr Paisley, calling him a dinosaur. He got his own back by taking 20 seats in the Assembly a few weeks later.

In recent years, the DUP has been steadily gaining support at the expense of the Ulster Unionist Party, winning five seats at the 2001 General Election to the UUP's six.

And there is much speculation that Tony Blair, disappointed with the IRA's stance on acts of completion, called off the Assembly elections in May out of fear that the DUP would over-take the Ulster Unionists in that poll.

But despite this recent success, Ian Paisley has not succeeded in his aim of crushing republicans. His campaign to "Smash Sinn Fein" has clearly failed.

Elections

Sinn Fein is stronger than ever, having over-taken the more moderate SDLP at the last General Election, with four MPs to its three. He no doubt would blame government policy for this.

But as if to demonstrate that he's not for changing his convictions, Mr Paisley told a news conference in July 2003 that if there was to be renewed renegotiations, then not just the IRA, but Sinn Fein too would have to disband in favour of a new republican party.

"Sinn Fein is a terrorists' party," he said. "They should have no part nor be in any negotiations."

The significance of the remark shouldn't be underplayed. For those in government circles wondering if there could be an accommodation between Ian Paisley's DUP and Sinn Fein, they seemed to have the answer - not while Ian Paisley remains leader.

A leading Ulster Unionist called the remarks by the DUP leader "cloud cuckoo land" politics.

Ian Paisley's response to such put-downs is often to point to his popularity, citing his poll-topping record in the European elections.

Indeed, it is a crown he wears with considerable pride. He fought hard to maintain it at the last European poll in 1999 when the SDLP leader, John Hume, came close but failed to over-take him.

More recently, he has denied suggestions his health is suffering, and is preparing to stand again in the European poll in June 2004.


http://news.bbc.co.u...and/3109773.stm

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Irish Independent
30 April 2003

Blast of bigotry sounds start of another Paisley campaign

SPEAKING at the glitzy launch of the DUP's Assembly election
campaign, where the party's slogan will be "It's time for a fair
deal", Ian Paisley rounded on David Trimble yesterday before dumping
his own special brew of ridicule and abuse on Brian Cowen.

It was a new low even for Ian Paisley, an equal-opportunity, all-
purpose bigot whose racially loaded language can still undercut the
most base of the North's political limbo dancers.

The grossly offensive insult was a 19th century racist concoction
made from a fusion of a crude Punch cartoon and a blacked-up
minstrel stage show.

And while Paisley was canny enough to avoid transgressing anti-
racist laws, his language yesterday will set the tone for the
election campaign expected over the coming month.

This is an edited transcript of Paisley's speech:

"I was enraged when I saw that strange character from Dublin coming
again to see us. Somebody told me the other day the reason his lips
were so thick was that when his mother was bringing him up he was a
very disobedient young boy so she used to put glue on his lips and
put him to the floor and keep him there and that has been recorded
in his physical make up . . . yes away with him indeed and if he
wants to use his lips to better effect he should do it somewhere
else and go to people of like physical looks."

Most of the Northern media ignored it and later yesterday evening's
Six O'Clock News on RTE TV edited out Ian Paisley's grossly
offensive personal attack on the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Brian
Cowen.

However, journalistic sensitivities were ignored by the party
enthusiasts who gave the leader's crude slur a standing ovation at
the launch of the DUP election campaign.

Even at the zenith of his political power in Alabama, the late
Governor George Wallace never stooped to such potentially incendiary
and deeply offensive insults as Paisley heaped on Brian Cowen
yesterday.

Ian Paisley has accepted the racists of the US southern states as
soul brothers and sisters since he was conferred as a doctor of
divinity in 1966 at the notorious Bob Jones University in South
Carolina.

It is easy to see how Paisley has never quite understood the notion
of separating church and state: His great-uncle organised ambushes
against the IRA in 1916 and his first political monitor was the
notorious RUC inspector, John Nixon, who led assassination squads
against Belfast Catholics in the early 1920s.

He was ordained at the age of 20 in 1945 and in 1958 he attacked a
Roman Catholic priest saying: "We know your Church to be the mother
of harlots and the abominations of the earth. Go back to your
priestly intolerance, back to your beads, holy water, holy smoke and
stink and remember we are the Sons of the martyrs whom your Church
butchered."

Yet he is more than a cartoon racist and religious bigot: In his
memoirs writer and columnist Senator Maurice Hayes, the
distinguished former Ombudsman in Northern Ireland and a Catholic-
born and Irish speaking retired civil servant, drew a picture of a
more complex character.

"I have often thought there are about six Paisleys," wrote Maurice
Hayes.

"Two of them are very nice people, two quite awful and the other two
could go either way. What I have to report is that he never told me
a lie, never breached a confidence, and . . . he worked unceasingly
for all his constituents regardless of religion."

And for every story illustrating the dark underbelly of his bigotry
and rabble-rousing, there is another telling of how Catholics in
North Antrim vote for him in Westminster and European elections
because of the service Paisley provides for his constituents.

Of course, outsiders fail to understand the Free Presbyterian Church
which he founded and now has branches in Canada and England as well
as the Republic of Ireland.

And when his daughter, Rhonda, asked permission to marry former the
Lord Mayor of Belfast, Sammy Wilson, a divorcee, in the church her
father founded, she was denied despite Ian Paisley asking for the
elders' approval.

Out-voted by the democracy he had inserted into the rules of the
church he founded, Paisley was said to have been distraught for his
daughter but Rhonda, who still lived in the family home, left the
Free Presbyterians.

But he is raging against failing health and his 78 years, saying he
has no thoughts of retiring when even respectable opinion accepts
that it will take his passing for Northern politics to take its
first tentative steps out of the sectarian swamp.

He has been lying low recently and despite persistent rumours of his
failing health Ian Paisley doesn't trust his most obvious successor,
Peter Robinson, to keep the politics of the DUP and the faith of the
Free Presbyterian Church locked in an indivisible union.

Back to basics is getting down and doing dirty for Ian Paisley and
he did yesterday what he has been doing for more than 60 years now
and what he intends for the coming election campaign.

Brian Cowen? He was just a useful foil for Ian Paisley's basic
instincts.

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http://www.unison.ie...sh_independent/ ... e_id=11250

Paisley's new sermon CD proves big hit with priests

THOUSANDS of CDs containing a sermon by Ian Paisley have been sent to Catholic priests nationwide in the latest missionary drive by the firebrand preacher.

Three thousand copies were posted out by his Free Presbyterian Church in recent weeks to priests on both sides of the border. The CDs contain religious songs, the testimony of a former Catholic who converted to Protestantism and the sermon by Dr Paisley himself.

The Reverend David McIlveen, who is attached to Dr Paisley's Martyrs Memorial Tabernacle church in Belfast, said the response to the CDs had been very encouraging and that a new batch was on the cards in order to meet demand.

"It is obviously something we are encouraged about. What has happened since is that some Roman Catholic priests who did not get a copy have actually requested a copy," said Mr McIlveen. "We don't set out deliberately to offend people, but we feel it's our responsibility to promote the ministry of evangelism, as opposed to ecumenism. What we want to do is present the message of Christ. We believe it's possible for a Protestant minister or even a Roman Catholic priest to be ignorant of that."

Dr Paisley recently urged members of his congregation in Belfast to undertake missionary activity south of the border, calling on older ones to take advantage of the free bus and rail travel offered by the Irish Government to senior citizens. He added that a taped copy of his Easter sermon had been sent to every Catholic priest in Ireland, and promised the results would be explosive.

Evangelical missionaries from the North have conducted missionary activity south of the border for some time, including handing out leaflets to Catholic pilgrims at Croagh Patrick.

Mr McIlveen added: "One thing I would like to stress is that the people in the south of Ireland have shown great respect to the people who have gone down. They don't always agree with what we are about, but at least they respect the fact that we are there."

A Catholic Church spokesman said the mass mail shot was a common selling technique used for commercial initiatives. "In effect, this is unsolicited mail, and will be treated as such."

Ben Quinn

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Ian Paisley: the portrait of a preacher
http://www.sluggerot...ives/004427.asp

This is a bit overdue, since it was published (subs needed) in the Financial Times at the beginning of the month. It's a short portrait of a man who has been one of the dominant features of Northern Irish politics over the last fifty years. Love him or loathe him (and there's not been many who've found themselves languishing in the grey area in between), the man has been a phenomenon that could not be ignored!
It’s a sunny Sunday evening in a prosperous middle class area of East Belfast. The Martyr’s Memorial church overlooks spacious parkland and on to the sweeping green hills in the North and West of the city. This is my second attempt of the day to catch what many think of as the quintessential voice of Ulster and one of the most legendary preachers of his times.

The organist plays an Old Testament style hymn in quick time. A slightly stooped old man comes quietly out of the door to the left of the pulpit. Climbing the steps some papers slip out of his frail hands. He bends and patiently gathers them up. The organist skips quickly to the end and the doors close behind us.

The old man is Ian Paisley. He’s dressed in a white collarless shirt and a sharp grey jacket. He draws himself up to his still impressive seventy eight year old frame, and invites us all to sing the first hymn. But five verses in, he stops and instructs the congregation to put smiles on their faces. He gently chides them, "We’re not singing about the mortuary. We’re not singing about the old undertaker and the corpse. We’re singing about heaven, halleluiah!"

His humour is both direct and characteristic. Over the years the same pulpit has witnessed a multitude quips, sometimes at the expense of opponents, more often with 'old red socks', as he is wont to call the Pope, as the butt of his ebullient humour. But today his own mortality is nearer the surface, and the congregation find it hard to smile. This is more of a valediction than celebration.

The Martyrs Memorial is a Calvinist cathedral. Built around a plain but impressively wide pulpit and placed at the perfect height to give the preacher eye contact with every individual on three sides and two levels. There is no sign of microphones visible to the congregation. The acoustic carries the preacher’s voice naturally through the cavernous interior.

To one side, the sign reads "Salvation to the Utmost". A phrase he uses several times within the service. His declamatory sermonising style is not unlike that of Martin Luther King’s. The voice rises on a shuddering crescendo as he takes his audience to view in turn the gates of heaven and hell. In a moment it drops to a gentle whisper to intimate hope, treachery or fear.

In a younger man, such style might be vulnerable to parody. But Paisley speaks a language from a time before irony, or postmodern angst, a time of moral certainty over the reviled relativism of contemporary Ulster. And it’s built upon the genuine conviction that’s driven his whole life. Both message and messenger go down well with the often wrapt, but mostly aging congregation.

And yet there is evidence of change within the church. It was once said that the Free Presbyterian Church was simply the DUP at prayer. But his overwhelming success of his political party in thoroughly eclipsing David Trimble’s Ulster Unionist Party stands in marked contrast with the many empty pews tonight. But for a well-groomed party of children and teenagers bussed in from a sister church in Ballymena, the Martyr’s Memorial holds less than a fifth of its capacity.

The leader of Irish Free Presbyterianism tells his flock ‘though the harvest is plenty, the labourers are few’. He recommends a history of evangelisation in Ireland – he’s known to regret that earlier generations of Presbyterian missionaries did not make greater use of the Irish language of the native Catholic population to spread the Protestant word. Then he calls for missionaries to head south to proselytise the largely Catholic south.

To break the ice he urges the senior citizens amongst them to make use of the free bus and rail travel the southern Irish government offers all citizens of Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, something that might have been unthinkable for many of them even five years ago. He assures them that the campaign has already begun by sending every Catholic priest in Ireland a taped copy of his Easter sermon. The results, he promises his congregation, will be explosive.

But he is tired. It has taken every ounce of spirit and the professionalism he’s cultivated over the years to pace himself to the end of the service. The door to the side of the pulpit swings open. On the wall inside is a more familiar picture of his younger self, probably from the early seventies when he was undoubtedly in his prime. It’s a sharp and poignant reminder that this preacher’s time has almost run.

The strange paradox of Ian Paisley is that despite his notoriety amongst Northern Ireland’s Catholic population for his frequent attacks upon the integrity of their church, many still retain affection for the ‘big man’. That’s partly because of his reputation, maintained even through the worst years of the Troubles, for fighting on behalf of all his constituents regardless of their political conviction or religious background.

But perhaps it’s also because there is something disarmingly genuine and at times even gentle about the man. As the service ends, he invites any of us who are not yet committed Christians to come and see him so he can tell them how they might be saved. And the faithful crowd round him, as they might a fond old grandfather.

A version of this article was first published in the Financial Times Magazine, on the weekend of 31st July/1st August.