30 Ian Paisley

Once, back in the 1970s, Paisley boasted of how John Hume had once turned to him in frustration and said, ‘Paisley, you’re just an Ulster Protestant.’

‘I replied to Mr Hume: “I am glad that at last you have got the message. I am indeed an Ulster Protestant!”’

Although there has since been the bones of an accommodation between Southern nationalism and Paisley’s tribe, the truth of the matter is that the condition of Ulster Protestantism is still as mystifying to most of those who live south of the border as it ever was. We just don’t get it: their reciprocal ignorance of Southern nationalism, their rage against the Republic, their belligerence, their dogged insistence on being ‘British’ in defiance of geography and self-interest. Neither do we get the way they don’t get us: their persistent prating about ‘Rome rule’, long after the fact. Their continuing condescension about the ‘banana republic’ and their ironic references to the ‘Free State’, even though their own little ‘statelet’ went to wrack and ruin while the Republic was going to Paradise and back. ‘They try to explain Ian Paisley, but they don’t understand,’ the Big Fella elaborated to a meeting of his followers in Omagh in 1981. ‘Ian Paisley is the incarnation of every Protestant Ulsterman here at this meeting tonight. I am only saying what you want me to say, what you want to hear.’

In a speech denouncing the latest joint initiative of the British and Irish governments, Big Ian criticized both Charles Haughey, Taoiseach of the Republic, and Humphrey Atkins, the Northern Ireland Secretary of State. The readings that night were from the Old Testament, the music was ‘Rock of Ages’. A bystander’s report described a scene of passionate intensity. When speaking, the Reverend Paisley delivered an improvised oration that transported his audience to new heights and new places in themselves. His arms flailed and the sweat poured off him. His voice rose in pitch and power, like a tenor coming to the climax of his final aria.

‘We shall defend what is ours. We be determined men, come to do a task, and with God’s almighty grace we will do it. I say to Charles Haughey, that son of an IRA gunman from Swatragh, that guardian of the IRA whose murderers have darkened sixty Fermanagh homes with death. Charlie Haughey, the Godfather of our intended destruction, the green aggressor, I say to you, Charlie Haughey, that you will never get your thieving, murderous hands on Ulster, because we are determined to fertilize the ground of Ulster with Protestant blood before we enter your priest-ridden banana republic.’

There have been many books, many articles and a multitude of broadcast documentaries produced about the ‘troubles’ on the island of Ireland over the past forty years. But not even the best among these efforts has come close to capturing the complex interflow of currents and forces, the undertows and whirlpools of this most incomprehensible of conflicts. This story is all but untellable, in part because the roots of the conflict extended to so many levels of Irish society, north and south. And yet, somehow, the mysterious nature of both the conflict and its eventual resolution is summarized in the personality of Ian Paisley, and the complex nature of his relationship with those inhabitants of the island who were not happy to call themselves British.

Not long ago, Ian Paisley was greatly feared by the people of the Republic – and not in an abstract sense. He was feared in the manner of a demonic force of nature whose tempers seemed to threaten on a scale that was godlike. He was the stuff of our nightmares, and not just the metaphorical, political kind. He was someone who had us crunching bolt upright in bed in the deadest hours, quaking under the thunderous bellow of his voice, recoiling from the fiery torches of his eyes and wiping his spittle from our fearful faces.

Fast forward to the Noughties, and Paisley had metamorphosed as though into our favourite uncle, a cheery broth of a boy who made us laugh inwardly at the ridiculousness of the idea that we had ever seen him differently. Even those of us who never met him in the flesh – who might even yet recoil from such a meeting for fear that he would revert to type in our presence – have come to, yes, love Paisley. The word is not too strong.

This change of heart did not occur for wholly political reasons, nor can its drifts and shifts be conveyed by psychological analysis. But if the story of recent Irish history can be comprehended at all, it is to be comprehended in the personality of Ian Paisley, and in his shifting relationships with the various political and human entities on the island.

Paisley belongs to a rare elite of political figures who have brought to politics the fullness of a strong personality and confronted history as though it were a little boy asking for more. The nearest equivalent produced in the Republic was Charles Haughey, but compared to Paisley, Haughey was, as Paisley always intuited, that little boy.

Only by understanding how we came to love Paisley can we begin to understand what has happened to ourselves. This is not comprehensible in terms of memoranda, discussion documents, declarations, still less of bombs, bullets and kneecappings. These were but the surface events of a drama that went to the core of the identities of the peoples on the island of Ireland in the second half of the 20th century.

The image of the ‘Chuckle Brothers’ conveys something of what has happened. We watched Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness in the paroxysms of mirth brought on by their blossoming friendship, and something of the benign mystery of reconciliation came across. These men who used to hate and slander each other, now belly-laughed at each other’s jokes. But this was more than an image of two men. It was an image from a culture that changed because of the complex interworkings of human personality as much as by the plodding and drudgery of politics. The Chuckle Brothers were the children of reinvented public desires, two men who stood for many more. The spectacle of their bodies trembling with laughter would not have been possible unless something enormous had shifted deep in the soul of Ireland. For many years these two men had engaged in ritualistic disavowals of one another because that was what their respective tribes wanted to hear. The process by which we travelled from there to where we ended up did not happen by chance, nor was it some maudlin reconciliation conducted for the sake of peace. It was a profound human interaction which collapsed the ideological, historical and political barriers between two men who happened to be politicians, because such a collapsing had first been achieved at a more general level. This one-on-one human reconciliation drew its energy from a profound change in the surrounding culture, and in turn nurtured the changes that had given it life.

The peace process was not something that happened on television, but, long before that, in the hearts and minds of the people. There had to be a process of thawing, initiated by the leaderships, but incapable of being dictated or contrived. Around the talks table, a formal method was called for: an engagement of moderates, followed by engagement of extremists. This too was a layer of the drama, vital to the unfolding of the deeper one.

But this was still just the formal political process, depending for its viability on a deeper process in the imagination of society, and, beneath this collective imagination, in the individual heart of every member of that society, contriving to change him- or herself in ways that cannot be measured or discounted. Ultimately, it was not the politicians who changed Ireland, but the people, one by one, in our private hearts, allowing our deepest antagonisms and prejudices to melt away in the hope of a brighter dawn.

And yet the story can only be told, comprehended, as a drama in which the King of the Culture, flawed and flamboyant, was Ian Paisley. And here was the deeper truth about Paisley: that, despite his protestations, he was at least as Irish as anyone else and more so than most of those who claimed the condition. For who, beholding the extravagant dimensions of his remarkable personality, could conclude other than that he emerged from the mists of some Celtic identity crisis? In truth, he was as ‘British’ as the Pope of Rome.

And this is perhaps the tragedy of Ireland in summary: that neither part of itself could recognize itself even in this, its most vibrant and passionate manifestation. For if, four decades earlier, we could have got to know each other as well as we got to know each other in the end, the whole sorry bother could have been substituted with a brief but hearty slanging match.