Pass the Paisley Sickbag

Ireland Calling with John Spain

Pass the Paisley Sickbag

March 12, 2008

by John Spain

NOW I know it’s almost St. Patrick’s Day when we all should be in good humor, and I don’t want to rain on anyone’s parade.

I understand that in our peaceful new Ireland everyone is supposed to “work together,” and you’re not supposed to say anything negative about anybody. But I have to tell you that the blurring of truth and the rewriting of recent history that this happy clappy attitude demands always makes me feel nauseous.

And for the past few days I have been suffering from severe nausea, so much so in fact that I will be lucky to get to the end of this column without throwing up all over you.

Why? What’s been making me so ill?

I have been reading all those warm tributes in the media here last week to Dr No himself, the Reverend Ian Paisley, who has at last set the date for his retirement.

Believe me, if Santa Claus decided to retire he would not get better coverage. In fact, reading some of the glowing tributes, the emotional paeans of praise, the affectionate reminiscences, it began to feel like I was reading about Santa Claus, instead of the malevolent, hate-filled old bigot who only saw the light at the very last moment when the bell was already tolling for him.

Pass the sick bag please, I feel another wave of nausea coming on just thinking about all the over-the-top tripe that has been written about Paisley in the past week.

Let’s start with Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Bertie Ahern, who described Paisley’s decision to step down from the post of first minister in a couple of months as “a watershed in the history of Ireland.”

He was “an honorable and courteous person” with a “sense of humor” and “charm” who in the end “demonstrated immense courage and leadership.” Ahern said Paisley was “a giant figure in the history of these islands.”

He did also recall the intransigence shown by Dr. No over the decades. “To be truthful, the image was not always a positive one,” Ahern said. Well, blow me down!

Even worse was British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who paid tribute to Paisley’s “courage” and said that his “commitment and dedication to public service deserve our gratitude.”

Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair recalled Paisley’s humor, and said that while Paisley was famous for saying “no” he would be remembered in Northern Irish history as the man who said “yes.”

Even Gerry Adams was at it, fondly extending his best wishes to Paisley and commending him for his crucial role in doing the deal with Sinn Fein last year which restored devolution. “I want to commend the positive contribution Mr. Paisley has made in recent times,” Adams said.

Talk about nausea! You would need a very strong stomach to keep this kind of guff down.

The Adams reaction was, of course, a classic example of birds of a feather flocking together. Adams is not that far away from retirement himself, and no doubt is hopeful that when he steps down the same fudging of the past will take place and people will line up to sing his praises as they have done last week for Big Ian.

But we might have expected a bit more balance from the rest of the politicians. So in the absence of that (and to help us all cope with the nausea), here’s a reality check.

Paisley may have cultivated the Santa Claus image in the past year, all handshakes and hugs and beaming smiles (himself and Martin McGuinness have become known as the Chuckle Brothers), but he was no father figure for the children of Northern Ireland over the previous three or four decades. Instead of bringing the kids of the North presents like Santa Claus, he brought them misery and destruction, year after year.

He did not carry a gun or a bomb himself, of course. But it was his intransigence and hate-filled rhetoric that kept extreme unionism on the boil for so long.

It was his bigotry that made compromise with the Nationalist community impossible. He bears a large part of the responsibility for the 30 years of murder and mayhem that went on, even if he did not commit any atrocities himself.

As far as I’m concerned, his late conversion over the past year or two to seeing reason and agreeing that power had to be shared between the two sides does not make up for the 30 years in which he opposed every effort to make a peaceful settlement in the North.

His visceral, bombastic hatred for all things Nationalist or Catholic goes back a very long way. I remember as a kid seeing those grainy black and white TV pictures of Paisley throwing snowballs at the then Taoiseach Sean Lemass, who was making a historic visit to Stormont to try to move relationships between north and south into the modern era.

That was 43 years ago. It looks funny now when you see the old footage, but there was nothing amusing about the bile being spouted by Paisley at the time.

And then a few years later in 1974, Paisley played a leading role in the Loyalist strike which paralyzed the North and brought down the power-sharing executive which had followed the Sunningdale Agreement and offered real hope for a peaceful future.

When you look back now at that deal, it’s hard to see what’s different from the present arrangements that Paisley is now part of — there was a power-sharing Executive, a Northern Assembly and cross-border councils on which ministers from north and south sat. It could have worked then — sparing us 30 years of bloodshed and 2,500 deaths — but it never got a chance, largely because of the way Paisley behaved.

He was still at it years later in 1985 when the Anglo-Irish Agreement was signed and he roared “Never! Never!” Never! into the microphone at a mass public meeting in Belfast. And he was at it again when the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1988 (Sunningdale Mark 2) was signed, the agreement which eventually led to peace in the North and the setting up of the power-sharing administration.

Over those decades Paisley opposed and frustrated every effort there was at solving the anachronistic and bloody situation in the North. He was the inspiration not just for hundreds of thousands of extreme Loyalists (“Not an inch!”) but for the savagery that went on, like the horror of the Shankill butchers. It was his hate-filled rhetoric that was the background music to so much of the vicious killing.

Of course there were two sides to this, and in a way they were a mirror image of each other. As the former Northern Ireland Ombudsman Maurice Hayes put it, Paisley and extreme republicanism fed off each other.

Paisley’s anti-Catholic outbursts drove Catholics to support Sinn Fein, and IRA violence reinforced the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) and confirmed Paisley as the prophet of doom. It could be said that they deserved each other.

At the few times over the years when it looked like moderate unionism might be prepared to start sharing power, Republicans could always be relied on to screw it up with another murder or another bomb or another refusal to renounce violence for good.

Paisley’s most sickening intransigence came not in the early years, but just a few years back when he cynically undermined the moderate Unionist leader David Trimble. Trimble had gone out on a limb to give Republicans a chance to share power without demanding that the IRA destroy the weapons first.

It was a gamble, although it seemed a pretty safe bet since the likelihood at that stage that the IRA would restart the war and risk the disapproval of people all over Ireland was small. The damage to Sinn Fein would have been considerable, particularly in the south.

In spite of this Paisley dug his heels in once again and ranted and raved. And having undermined Trimble and the Ulster Unionists, Paisley and his DUP party then became the majority Unionist party in the elections — and promptly did a deal with Sinn Fein, which had become the majority party on the Nationalist side.

The SDLP and the Ulster Unionists, who had borne the burden for so long, had both been squeezed out by the willingness of Blair to appease Sinn Fein and the decision of the Irish government to take the money off Trimble and put it on Paisley.

Why did it take the two extremes so long to stop the posturing and move to the center? The answer is the same for both sides.

They cynically kept stirring the pot until they had got into the majority position. Then, once power was within their grasp, they went for it together. With the prospect of getting their backsides in ministerial limos, it took them no time at all to decide that, hey, we can share power after all.

Paisley is as bad as Adams in that regard. Between them they were responsible for decades of violence and suffering, making the North ungovernable. And now Paisley is making like Santa Claus and lapping up the tributes to his great contribution to peace.

Quick! Pass the sickbag!

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