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Ian Paisley dead 22:20 - Sep 12 with 2697 views

Can't understand the media adulation being heaped on this guy. He was an evil man. His speeches incited violence. So he he died with blood on his hands.

(I'm not Irish, by the way - this is an impartial view)

Ian Paisley dead on 22:23 - Sep 12 with 2243 views

SterlingArcher

Saw him outside Parliament back in the 70's with a Bike on his head.
Said he was holding a Raleigh..

Ian Paisley dead on 23:40 - Sep 12 with 2151 views

ingeminate

Happy to be corrected by anybody more knowledgable but so far as I understand he was able to bring his side to the table and help bring peace to the region. No doubt because he was so stridently loyalist for so many years.

	If not actually disgruntled, he was far from being gruntled. PG Wodehouse
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Ian Paisley dead on 23:54 - Sep 12 with 2130 views

PlumsteadQPR

Unlike you GloryHunter I am Irish born and bred - I moved to England (Wembley NW London) from Sligo in the mid 80s as a 10 year old. I grew up hating this man both before and after I moved to London. For a long time Ian Paisley epitomised everything that I was not, in terms of my opinion on - and relationship with - North of Ireland politics.

Both sides of my family were strongly republican by inclination. However, I'm in my late 30s now and hard as it is for me to believe, I actually have a lot of time and respect for the man. He may well have spent the first 60 odd years of his life despising people like me and doing his very best to make the lives of people from my background difficult but he also spent the last 10-15 years of his life making sacrifices and compromises that would have been absolutely unthinkable a few years before for the sake of the day to day lives of most people who live in the North of Ireland.

I genuinely believe that the brave decisions taken by both Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness to work together to share power in the North of Ireland in the face of both personal enmity between the two as individuals and the two as representatives of their respective communities have saved many, many lives... Many elements of both communities find the other deeply unpalatable because of their past but in my opinion both individuals deserve recognition for the bravery they have shown in making this step forward.

Ian Paisley's actions in the last few years as part of a power sharing government of the North of Ireland with Sinn Fein are to me almost literally unbelievable.

For most of my life, I looked forward to the prospect of his death only marginally less keenly than that of Maggie Thatcher's, however, now that it's here I actually find myself reflecting far more on his actions in the twilight of his existence rather than the decades of unapologetic sectarian bigotry which preceded it. There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that his words and actions in the late 1960s, early 1970s led to deaths in the North of Ireland. However, I also believe that his words and actions in the late 1990s, early 2000s prevented deaths in the North of Ireland.

Either way, I've definitely raised a glass of the Devil's buttermilk to the memory of Big Ian tonight...

Ian Paisley dead on 23:56 - Sep 12 with 2126 views

CroydonCaptJack

It did enable a witty friend of mine to post
RIP RIP

Ian Paisley dead on 00:03 - Sep 13 with 2109 views

BrianMcCarthy

Ian Paisley dead on 23:54 - Sep 12 by PlumsteadQPR

Perfectly weighted. Great post.

	"The opposite of love, after all, is not hate, but indifference."
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Ian Paisley dead on 01:13 - Sep 13 with 2053 views

NathanNI

That's one of the best posts I've read on here G.

Ian Paisley dead on 01:47 - Sep 13 with 2034 views

SonofNorfolt

What's good is that people are being killed in Ulster these days, and every credit to all sides for achieving this at least, because this must have been more than just difficult to achieve.
So whatever our particular bias, he at least goes out on a high note, which you would never ever would have believed up until about twenty years ago.
In my mind, he also will have an unintentionally comedic value.
It's why an accent from NI can never be the language of love.
(Apologies here to my many Ulster (ex) friends.)
'Ian, shall I take my knickers off?'
'NOOOOOOOOOOOOO, HADES WILL FREEZE BEFORE THIS ABOMINATION,
Bra always first, I LOVE YOU.'
Hope you get the gist.........

Ian Paisley dead on 06:49 - Sep 13 with 1960 views

MagicHat

Thank you Plumstead, you have articulated my thoughts perfectly.

Magic Hat- O'Driscoll clan, Cork

Ian Paisley dead on 07:28 - Sep 13 with 1931 views

YorkRanger

Ian Paisley dead on 01:47 - Sep 13 by SonofNorfolt

Think there is a word missing in your first line SoN

Ian Paisley dead on 07:39 - Sep 13 with 1922 views

YorkRanger

Ian Paisley dead on 23:54 - Sep 12 by PlumsteadQPR

Good post Plumstead.

I respect most those people on both sides who have embraced the Good Friday agreement despite having lost loved ones in the Conflict.

I've spent a lot of time in Northern Ireland and met people in Stormont who have "interesting" backgrounds. The desire to do make the province strong and find peace and sustainable economic conditions for people to grow and prosper comes through strongly in everyone you meet.

Ian Paisley dead on 09:17 - Sep 13 with 1848 views

isawqpratwcity

yes, i'm impressed, too, by people who can turn their back on their own lifetime of sectarianism and embrace reconciliation.

Poll:

Deaths of Thatcher and Mandela this year: Sad or Glad?

Ian Paisley dead on 09:33 - Sep 13 with 1830 views

terryb

Great post Plumstead & is a real eye opener for people like me that only remembered the vile extremism of both sides in the past.

Thank you for your accessment.

Ian Paisley dead on 11:02 - Sep 13 with 1773 views

A40Bosh

Ian Paisley dead on 00:03 - Sep 13 by BrianMcCarthy
Perfectly weighted. Great post.

Poll:

With no leg room, knees killing me, do I just go now or stay for the 2nd half o?

Ian Paisley dead on 13:49 - Sep 13 with 1667 views

Pommyhoop

Great post Plumstead. I too remember learning from older relatives then seeing and reading for myself what an evil ,bigoted man Rev Ian was.But fair play to him ,he changed for the better and put his heart and soul into making the Peace Agreement work.
Here's a nice tribute to Paisley's from his one time adversary and I'm sure 'An evil ,bigoted man ' to many people in N.I.
http://www.newsletter.co.uk/news/regional/ian-paisley-martin-mcguinness-pays-tri

A little lesson to Israel and Palestine. When you actually get fed up enough with all the killing ,talking does indeed work.

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Ian Paisley dead on 18:10 - Sep 13 with 1569 views

MrSheen

I don't see it that way myself. People like Trimble and Hume were the ones who took risks, while Paisley and Robinson, Adams and McGuinness screamed traitor and sellout at them. Once the institutions were in place and they saw there were jobs for life and chauffeured cars all round they stepped in and scooped the pot from the people whose reputations they had rubbished but who had set them up for life. Seriously, what risks did any of them take when the others had down all the spade work?

Ian Paisley dead on 18:53 - Sep 13 with 1534 views

wood_hoop

Ian Paisley dead on 18:10 - Sep 13 by MrSheen

Have to agree with you MrSheen, the past events of Paisley and McGuiness seemed to be airbrushed out with some degree of nonchalance,both were responsible for many many deaths over a long period of time, why could they not reach a peaceful agreement many years ago,good reason was that neither could accept the fact of the two communities living along side one another without one being the dominant force, not connected in anyway to NI, have friends from there and have heard things from back in the 70's/80's that make you wonder if the pious followers of any religous faith exsisted amongst the 'leaders', just a front for wreaking havoc,Paisley being near the top of the list, maybe also meeting his maker getting closer was a good a reason as any for Paisley to change tact.

Ian Paisley dead on 18:55 - Sep 13 with 1532 views

Pommyhoop

Ian Paisley dead on 18:10 - Sep 13 by MrSheen

They both got the Nobel didnt they? Hardly forgotten or left on the shelf.
The man has just died FFs. I'm sure both Trimble and Hume will recieve their fitting accolades when they depart.

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Poll:	How much should we sell Eze for. What will we get.

Ian Paisley dead on 19:44 - Sep 13 with 1496 views

Pommyhoop

Ian Paisley dead on 18:53 - Sep 13 by wood_hoop

This is one of the reasons it will be so very hard for the Palestinian problem to be calmed down ,let alone solved. Too many people ready to look back and not forward..

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Poll:	How much should we sell Eze for. What will we get.

Ian Paisley dead on 19:51 - Sep 13 with 1489 views

Monahoop

Ian Paisley dead on 23:54 - Sep 12 by PlumsteadQPR

Good post and correct in more ways than one.
NI's politics is complex and best not for the likes of me to give an opinion on what is wrong or right about it.
I sat in front of the big man a few years back on a plane from London to Belfast. He cut a very large presence. He spoke in whispered tones to the person next to him, but I still felt I needed ear plugs as even his whispers were noisy!

There aint half been some clever bastards.

Ian Paisley dead on 21:58 - Sep 13 with 1414 views

kysersosaqpr

Ian Paisley dead on 23:54 - Sep 12 by PlumsteadQPR

Like others here, really great post. Spot one except...
Just can't bring myself to raise that glass of buttermilk to him. Every one of my mom & dads' brothers and sisters were burnt out of their homes in 1979, and had to go into Ardoyne. All led by mobs geed up by this man.
So all you said Plumstead is right and correct. Just can't forget the pain that man did to so many innocent people who just wanted equal rights back in the 70's.

The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist.

Ian Paisley dead on 01:55 - Sep 15 with 1294 views

SonofNorfolt

Ian Paisley dead on 07:28 - Sep 13 by YorkRanger
Think there is a word missing in your first line SoN

You mean they aren't?

Ian Paisley dead on 20:40 - Sep 15 with 1155 views

TacticalR

Ed Moloney's 'Voices from the Grave: Two Men's War in Ireland' has already been discussed on this forum. The book looks at the conflicting forces within the Republicanism and Loyalism. The second half is based on interviews with David Ervine of the UVF.

What follows is one of the sections about Paisley. It's a long section, and I quote the whole thing because otherwise I think it's impossible to capture the complexities of the situation and the methods Paisley used to hoist himself into power:

In May 1977 the Paisley-insired, UVF/UDA-supported Loyalist strike started with the public goal of forcing a crackdown on the IRA and a more secret agenda, which some believed amounted to an attempted coup d’état. But there was a key difference between the 1977 action and the 1974 UWC strike and that was that Unionism was divided about the wisdom of such an extreme step. Significant sections of mainstream Unionism, the Official Unionist Party and the Orange Order in particular, refused to have anything to do with Paisley’s strike and it collapsed after ten days, fatally weakened by Unionist divisions.

While David Ervine might be right, that there was no intimidation of factory and office workers in 1974, the same could not be said about the 1977 strike. Showing a distinct lack of enthusiasm for the action, most workers paid no heed to Paisley’s call and so the paramilitaries deployed fear and intimidation to force them to stay home. At one stage a joint statement said that neither the UVF nor the UDA could be held responsible for the safety of workers on the streets. The power workers came under huge pressure, but they forced Paisley into a corner. They would support the strike, they said, but would close the power plant down in one fell swoop, rather than the gradual slow-down the strike organisers wanted. Knowing that doing this could permanently cripple the plant and cause lasting damage to the economy, Paisley retreated and the strike was over. The UVF and the UDA had a disastrous strike. Not only had they alienated their own people by threatening and intimidating in Loyalist neighbourhoods, but they had both killed Protestants during the strike as they sought to enforce it. One was a bus driver shot dead by the UDA and the other a part-time soldier in the UDR, the son of one of the strike leaders as it turned out, killed by a UVF bomb set in a petrol station that stayed open during the strike. Afterwards both groups were in bad odour with their own communities and all the more vulnerable to police action.

Although the UVF and the UDA came out of the strike weakened, not so Ian Paisley — and that it ended this way was as perfect a metaphor for the relationship between paramilitary and political Unionism as could be found. While both Loyalist groups hunkered down for the security assault, Paisley found his political fortunes immensely transformed for the better, even though he had been humiliated during the strike. In council-wide elections held ten days afterwards, Paisley’s DUP doubled the number of its councillors and won control of its first council, Ballymena. Paisley hailed it as evidence that Protestants had backed him but the truth was that the DUP, sensing the strike’s defeat, had switched its resources to the election campaign in the last week, abandoning its political and paramilitary allies. The election ended with all the smaller Loyalist political parties swallowed up by the DUP, leaving only Paisley’s party and the Official Unionists vying for the top-dog position in Unionism. For many in the UVF and UDA, this outcome encapsulated their unequal relationship with the mainstream. In a crisis they would be asked, and would happily carry out, the dirty work while respectable Unionists condemned them and afterwards they would be abandoned and denied a share of the political rewards while the politicians prospered.

The paramilitaries had urged Paisley to call the power workers’ bluff over their threat to close their plant down but that Paisley wouldn’t take up the challenge provided another lesson: the DUP leader made a great noise during crises but invariably fell short on delivery. It was after this that both the UVF and the UDA took to calling Paisley ‘The Grand Old Duke of York’, willing to march up the hill but never able to summon the courage or commitment to go over it. The 1977 strike was the last occasion that the UVF or the UDA would dance to Paisley’s tune, although they would continue to work alongside some of his better regarded and more trustworthy colleagues. Four years later, in November 1981, when Paisley tried to revive street politics in the wake of the IRA’s murder of South Belfast Unionist MP Robert Bradford, both the UVF and the UDA shunned him. A few weeks later, a Shankill Road UDA prisoner jailed in Dublin for a firebomb attack on the city, Freddie Parkinson, echoed a general Loyalist view in a statement issued to the press: ‘I remember vividly the Parliamentarian megalomaniacs of the late 1960s and early 1970s who beckoned us to follow them but later left us abandoned to be scorned as common criminals. To my countrymen … I offer this sincere appeal: Do not allow yourselves to be used by the politicians who have created the conflict in which we live.’ On Paisley in particular, he added, ‘He uses words to create violent situations, but never follows the violence through himself.’ Many years later, the UVF’s former South-East Antrim Commander, Billy Mitchell, identified another defect in modern political Unionism: ‘Unlike the Ulster Unionist leaders of 1912 and 1920, and even 1965, who were prepared to go outside the law and give leadership to the UVF, the leaders of Unionism during the past thirty years have only been prepared to incite men and women to organise; they have never put themselves forward as either Officers or Volunteers.’

As David Ervine noted, sympathy for Paisley’s approach to politics was thin on the ground in the UVF compounds of Long Kesh/The Maze:

'I remember [the Reverend Ian] Paisley coming into Long Kesh and his view seemed to be that he knew that all of us Loyalists would stay in here for ever to keep the IRA in, and that went down like a lead balloon. He also talked about hanging the murderers, and we wanted to know did that mean us as well, and of course logically from his point of view it had to, even though he may not have meant it. There was always a sense of hurt and anger and hatred for Paisley’s politics inside the Long Kesh camps, and not just that; I think within the ranks of the UVF, there’s been consistently a hatred for Paisley’s politics, which is quite interesting in that the fundamentalist found himself not very well appreciated within the ranks of those who were seen as the absolute extreme. Strange stuff, strange psychology.'

In retrospect, the abortive 1977 strike was something of a watershed in the relationship between the Loyalist paramilitaries and, if not with all Unionist politicians, then at least with the most boisterous and provocative of their number. The Loyalists were more inclined thereafter to plough their own furrows, more careful about associating with mainstream political leaders and more willing to embrace previously heretical ideas, such as power-sharing, which the mainstream Unionists were still too timid to touch. In 1979, for instance, the UDA’s embryonic political wing advocated sharing power with Nationalists in the context of an Independent Ulster — the idea being to remove the vexed constitutional issue from any settlement — and later embraced it without that precondition. Signs that some in the UVF were ready to stray down a similar path came much earlier, within a few weeks of the strike ending, when Gusty Spence issued the first of several words were not liked by many in the UVF, or elsewhere in the Loyalist world, but his public utterances were, in hindsight, the beginning of a process that ensured that when the peace process arrived, the hardest of the hard men — or at least their leaders — were ready to deal. Without that, the process might well have failed.

Spence, in his eleventh year of imprisonment and now forty-four years old, chose the holiest day in the Orange calendar, 12 July, for his first statement, made to UVF prisoners in Long Kesh in what was described as ‘a personal capacity’. Launching a verbal assault on Paisley, without actually naming him, Spence called for talks between the Provisional IRA and the Loyalist paramilitaries. Attacking the politicians, he said, ‘We can do without the politically immature, emotionally unstable and bigoted element within Loyalist circles. As a political leadership they are a sick joke; a mixture of inane hacks and power-hungry clerics who could not recognise the truth if it kicked them in the face. These are the men who have cunningly and purposefully fused religion with politics and fostered fear among the Loyalist community for their own designs and to retain power. They have adroitly manipulated the Orange Institution and other working-class organisations to serve such ends, hinting that when the time came for action they would not be found wanting.’ Spence’s speech conflicted radically with official UVF policy, outlined in a 1974 mission statement, which set out an uncompromising stance towards the Provos: ‘The UVF recognises the Provisional IRA and Provisional Sinn Fein as the No. 1 short-term enemy of Ulster. The Provisionals can only be defeated by military means and any form of “détente” with them is out of the question.’ Four months later Spence made another appeal for peace, saying that further violence would be useless and counter-productive because the aim of Loyalists — self-determination — had been achieved with the 1974 strike: ‘There is a need for reconciliation with our neighbours whose aspirations differ from ours,’ he said. ‘Negotiation and dialogue can fill the vacuum of violence.’

Air hostess clique

Ian Paisley dead on 21:13 - Sep 15 with 1134 views

kysersosaqpr

Never read that before. Gusty Spence was a real trailblaiser in sorting stuff out. Your right to differentiate a real man like him from a bigot like P. I'm from the other camp, but everyone I know (limited) all had great respect for Spence.

The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist.

Ian Paisley dead on 22:05 - Sep 15 with 1111 views

TacticalR

The first two paragraphs are mine, the rest is from Moloney's book.

The thing that emerges from the book is that the 'men of peace' need the 'men of violence', especially if they can present themselves as being an alternative to the 'men of violence'. This was particularly common in colonial situations where if there were no 'men of violence' there was little incentive for the colonial power to deal with the 'men of peace'.

[Post edited 15 Sep 2014 22:06]

Air hostess clique

Ian Paisley dead on 22:15 - Sep 15 with 1101 views

BklynRanger

Very interesting, Tactical. Gives a new level of detail to the obvious fact that many of the politicians in NI at the time were only in the job for the benefit of their egos.

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