By Brendan Anderson

Former President Bill Clinton has been labelled “a political has-been” during an amazing tirade by Democratic Unionist leader Ian Paisley.

The North Antrim MP, buoyed up by his party’s recent landslide election victory over the Ulster Unionists, was responding to a speech in which Clinton dismissed Paisley’s claim that the Good Friday Agreement was dead.

Clinton, who is in Dublin this week to help launch a national suicide prevention scheme for young people, said there was “no viable alternative” to the Agreement. He did not agree with Paisley’s assertion that the concord was dead.

Referring to the likelihood of the IRA’s standing down and decommissioning its weapons, Clinton said such a move would “reinvigorate the political process.”

“If they were to give up their arms and criminality, I think it would put a lot of pressure on Mr. Paisley and others,” he added. “The Good Friday Agreement was fair to everyone in Northern Ireland. I hope it can still be revived.”

In a remarkable outburst Tuesday evening, Paisley exclaimed, “The discredited ex-President of the United States of America, Bill Clinton, simply revealed his unmitigated cheek in going to a country that wants to destroy Ulster’s place in the United Kingdom, and then lectures us that our democratic expression of our own future must be set aside to conform to the will of the country that claims supremacy over it.”

“The Belfast Agreement, which in itself is devoid of democracy, has made it clear that we must have a new beginning, and that beginning must close and bar the gates of its government to terrorists of whatever side they come from.”

“Clinton cannot have his way to force IRA/Sinn Fein terrorists into the government of this part of the United Kingdom, as I told him to his face when he was in Belfast.”

“When Clinton was in the White House,” Paisley said, “he would not have allowed the Oklahoma bombers to take posts in his government. Rather, he threatened them with the almighty punishment of his government, yet he dares to dictate to the free people of Northern Ireland that they must have such terrorists in their government.”

“Don’t do what I do, but do what I say — that is the hypocritical way of Bill Clinton, a has-been.”