Paisley's Politics Pays Off
Reprinted from the Boston Globe Op-Ed
By Padraig O'Malley
March 27, 2007
ONE HAS to hand it to the Rev. Ian Paisley. After 40 - plus years of haranguing "No Surrender" to every effort to facilitate some accommodation in Northern Ireland, he stands atop the political heap, having concluded a power-sharing deal with Sinn Fein, the party he has demonized as the murder machine of the Irish Republica n Army.
On May 8, Paisley, at age 80, will become First Minister of Northern Ireland, and his deputy will be Sinn Fein's Martin McGuinness, a former chief of staff of the IRA. An improbable end to this chapter of the Northern Ireland conflict? Indeed. But a fitting one.
Despite a decade of peace in Ireland, Northern Ireland is now more divided than ever. Protestants and Catholics choose voluntarily to live increasingly apart -- two communities for two peoples, more peace walls cement division than are torn down to aid reconciliation.
I have followed Paisley's career since he first made news in Ireland in 1963, when he went to Rome to mount a one-person demonstration against the Vatican Council, denouncing the pope as the anti-Christ and a charlatan. We laughed. He made cartoonists' careers. This guy was a riot.
In the following decades, he was the cause of many riots as he inveighed against the Catholics' civil rights movement and thundered Protestant fundamentalism from the pulpit of the Free Presbyterian Church, a church of his founding. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, his church on Ravenhill Road in Belfast was the place not to be missed on a Sunday evening, when Paisley preached to his congregation. His mesmerizing voice, overpowering physical presence, and hypnotic charisma ensured that one could hear a pin drop when he paused for a breath. He exuded God's truths, the literalism of the Bible, and was the protector of the faithful from infidels at the door, whether they were moderate Unionist leaders, British prime ministers, the pope, or his favorite, the incarnation of evil itself, the IRA.
We watched his antics and took some pleasure in "Big Ian."
He destroyed every Unionist leader who tried to make an accommodation with the Catholic minority. He played to Protestant fears: of a united Ireland, a Catholic Ireland, of a sellout by the British government.
He castigated six British prime ministers and he denounced every agreement between the Irish and British governments, the Sunningdale Agreement, the Anglo-Irish Agreement, the Downing Street Declaration, and, finally the breakthrough Good Friday Agreement. He refused to become a signatory to the Good Friday Agreement, demanding that unless the IRA put its weapons permanently and verifiably beyond use, there could be no lasting peace and no power-sharing government. The more he dug in his heels, the more the Protestant community swung toward him until the Democratic Unionist Party eviscerated the mainstream Ulster Unionist Party and can claim to be the one true voice of Protestant Ulster.
Meanwhile, Sinn Fein has emerged as the authentic voice of Catholic nationalist aspirations. In the furtherance of its interests and in order to restart power sharing in Northern Ireland, even one that would put Paisley at the helm, Sinn Fein decommissioned its arms, accepted the authority, and will fully support the Northern Ireland Police -- all demands that for Paisley were non-negotiatiable.
Although many Catholics would say that his actions over the years were incitement to violence by Protestant paramilitaries, Paisley fulfilled his historical role. His unequivocal, non-negotiatiable demand that he would not do business with Sinn Fein until the IRA had for all practical purposes put itself out of business is an articulation of what most nationalist politicians in the North and most people in the South felt but were constrained from expressing because of their history. For all his braggadocio, he spoke relentlessly to one essential truth: In a democracy you cannot have a political party that is attached to a paramilitary organization.
The last time we talked was in October 2006. He was as rambunctious as ever, but adamant that he would not be bullied into a power-sharing agreement on an arbitrary date set by the British government, which he detested. He won that one, too. But only because Gerry Adams reached out and helped him.
The meeting yesterday was the first time the two had met face to face in almost 40 years.
A new beginning? Perhaps. At the least, things can never be the same again. In the months to come, a measure of whether the two parties can rule together will be whether Paisley remembers Adam's gesture of reconciliation.
Padraig O'Malley is a professor at the McCormack Graduate School of Policy Studies at UMass-Boston.