Image courtesy of the BBC
Reverend Ian Paisley, the hardline Protestant Unionist in Northern Ireland, died in Belfast on September 12 at the age of 88. Regardless of whether you agree with his politics—I certainly do not—Rev. Paisley was a remarkable man who deserves remembrance.
Rev. Paisley, who was a minister in the Free Presbyterian Church of Ulster, which he himself founded, made a career out of anti-Catholicism and anti-republicanism. In the 1950s, a decade before the outbreak of the Troubles, he organized a Unionist defensive militia. In the 1960s he would oppose the Catholic civil rights movement; in the 1970s he would oppose power sharing with republicans and organized massive, violent strikes to this effect. He campaigned against both the Anglo-Irish Agreement in the 1980s and the Good Friday Agreement, which would end the Troubles, in the 1990s. His rallying cry was “No surrender!” and his actions mirrored his words. He sat in Westminster for forty years and European Parliament for thirty-five. He founded and led the Democratic Unionist Party for forty years until his retirement. This list of credentials alone is remarkable.
Rev. Paisley was famous for his speeches and sermons, and rightly so, for he was a master of the craft. For fifty years his grand, fiercely partisan rhetoric thundered down from pulpit and podium alike with vicious incisiveness, violently dismissing the very prospect of any and all cooperation with Catholics—no negotiation, no collaboration, and certainly no power-sharing. These speeches inflamed emotions, sometimes causing riots in their wake.
Yet despite all this opposition—refusal to compromise, refusal to share power, refusal to concede even a single inch—Rev. Paisley’s position shifted vastly by the end of his life. In 2007, he shook hands with Martin McGuinness, the leader of Sinn Fein and a former IRA member, and together they formed Northern Ireland’s inaugural unity government, in which republicans and unionists shared power, ending forty years of direct rule from Westminster. Had Rev. Paisley died in 2006 his legacy would have been one of savage partisan vitriol; he would have been remembered as a man who opposed peace at all costs. But he did not die until last week, and instead we will remember him as a man who, late in his life, understood that cooperation was the best way forward and governed with people whom he had previously professed to hate. This is not hypocrisy; but rather brilliance. Rev. Paisley’s turnaround late in his life should serve as a lesson to remind us that ideologies are never absolute, and that compromise is always an admirable virtue.