Flashback, April 1966: Ulster Unionist Bigot Ian Paisley Starts Political Ascent

Within a week of his 40^th birthday, Rev. Ian Paisley moved decisively from fire-and-brimstone pulpit pounding in Northern Ireland to incendiary political partisanship in April 1966.

The ostensible cause of his agitation was Ulster Prime Minister Terence O’Neill’s commemoration of the 50^th anniversary of the Easter Rising, a well-meaning but toothless gesture that Paisley interpreted as a dangerous concession to the province’s Roman Catholic minority.

Protests planned by Paisley led O’Neill to restrict the Easter rising commemoration parades on April 17^th. Those security measures, without equal countervailing measures against Protestant marchers, reduced Catholic support for a Prime Minister perceived as timorous and condescending while emboldening Paisley and his associates.

Through size and the passion of a true believer, Paisley dominated the groups he founded or transformed in adulthood. In 1951, at age 25—only five years after ordination—he set up his own fundamentalist Free Presbyterian Church of Ulster.

By 1966 he organized opposition more aggressively against O’Neill, by:

*founding the Ulster Constitutional Defence Committee;

*establishing the Ulster Protestant Volunteers, who would use the motto “For God and Ulster,” formerly associated with the notorious Ulster Defence Force;

*co-founding The Protestant Telegraph, an answer to the more mainstream unionist newspaper, the Belfast Telegraph (sample headline from late October 1966: “Were the Reformers Right in Separating From the Church of Rome at Reformation?”; and

*street protests and rallies, often proceeding through Catholic neighborhoods as provocative gestures.

What came to be known as “The Troubles”—the three-decade sectarian conflict that cost 3,000 lives in Ulster—did not arise in a vacuum, nor even solely through social, economic, or political differences. Their destructive heat derived from rhetorical tropes that gave currency to ancient grievances and prejudices.

Paisley was not the sole purveyor of this bombast, but as an increasingly visible minister—and, ultimately, the politician with the most formidable base—he bore the heaviest responsibility for its use.

In journalist Tim Pat Coogan’s memorable summary from The I.R.A., Paisley possessed “a doctorate from Bob Jones’s Bible Belt University, lungs like the Bull of Bashan and a theology from the Apocalypse…In terms of bigotry he would stand, were he a Muslim, 359 degrees to the right of the Ayatollah Khomeini.”

Kenneth Branagh’s Oscar-winning screenplay for Belfast includes a brief scene with a screaming Protestant minister who is more than a little reminiscent of Paisley. Many YouTube viewers reacted with amusement at the over-the-top deliver y of this bilious rhetoric, but there was nothing remotely humorous about it at the time.

Denunciations of Vatican II’s ecumenical statements, including on an October 1962 visit to Rome where he intended to distribute pamphlets, led to him being detained for questioning when he and other clerics arrived at the Eternal City. 

He viewed O’Neill’s outreach to the Catholic minority as a political counterpart to this, even having gone so far as to lead a 1965 march by 1,000 loyalists to Ulster’s government seat, Stormont, to protest the historic first official visit to Northern Ireland by an Irish taoiseach (prime minister), Sean Lemass.

(Two years later, when Lemass’s successor Jack Lynch arrived in Ulster, Paisley pelted his car with snowballs.)

With pressure groups that could quickly be turned into mobs at his disposal, Paisley ramped up his anti-O’Neill, anti-Catholic campaign. In June 1966, he led members of his Free Presbyterian Church to picket and harass delegates to the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church of Ireland for its openness to ecumenism.

Instead of curtailing his fanaticism, his arrest and subsequent three-month imprisonment only conferred martyrdom status on him within the loyalist movement. 

His vehement opposition to the Catholic civil-rights marches of 1968 and early 1969 lifted his visibility, and when he finally plunged into the political arena in the latter year, his better-than-expected polling results in O’Neill’s own Bannside constituency helped trigger the Prime Minister’s resignation.

At this point, he began the modus operandi to which he would adhere for most of the rest of his life: whip followers up into a murderous frenzy, while vanishing before violence inevitably occurred.

In 1971, Paisley formed the Democratic Unionist Party, with considerable overlap from adherents to his own Free Presbyterian church. He now held a seat in Westminster as a Member of Parliament and by decade’s end would also start a quarter-century stint in the European Parliament. 

Many of his colleagues may have grown chary of his antics (e.g., denouncing Pope John Paul II as the Antichrist when the pontiff visited the European Parliament in 1988). But there was seemingly little they could, or would, do about them.

Paisley continued to obstruct the peace process, including by opposing the 1998 Good Friday Agreement that effectively ended 30 years of The Troubles. When he assumed power in 2007, it was as part of a power-sharing agreement with Sinn Fein –the same kind of pace he had denounced and torpedoed in the 1973 Sunningdale Agreement.

Longtime Ulster observers couldn’t get over the jovial relationship he now enjoyed with the Deputy First Minister in the government, Sinn Fein’s Martin McGuinness. But the realities of power can only be denied for so long.

In the same sense that only Cold Warrior Richard Nixon could have gone to Red China, only an incendiary bigot like Paisley could have agreed to peace negotiations with the IRA.

Upon his death, many Paisley admirers hailed what he had done for peace. They overlooked the irony that he had, in effect, engaged in the same reconciliation process with Catholics that provoked his outrage against Captain O’Neill—and that he had to detoxify the very environment he had inflamed with his rhetoric three decades earlier.

Paisley’s damage to the province was not only heinous but also injurious to the Unionist cause he espoused.

When he took umbrage at Captain O’Neill’s tentative attempt to ameliorate tensions between Ulster’s two faith communities, the Irish Republican Army stood at its lowest point since the six Protestant-dominated counties of Ulster were partitioned from the 26 counties of the republic to the south. Its 1956-62 offensive was so disastrous that the paramilitary organization’s acronym was spelled out to spawn a derisive nickname: “I Ran Away.”

Though gerrymandering and discrimination raged on, growing educational opportunities and the generous social welfare programs of Great Britain led many Catholics to accept control by the crown.

This month’s centenary of Paisley’s birth should lead to reflection, but hardly celebration, about his legacy. His career holds implications beyond the British Isles, to an entire political world with similar personalities.

Like demagogues across the globe and ages, he stirred atavistic prejudices into current socioeconomic grievances to advance his political interests. With such people, decades of peace and civil rights advances are provisional, always vulnerable to bigotry and backlash.