Paisley: Mellowed by Age – and “Mammy”?

Oldie of the Year 2008 – Rev. Ian Paisley, Leader of the Democratic Unionist Party of Northern Ireland, and, at 82, oldest sitting member of the House of Commons. He was first Minister of the Northern Ireland Assembly until March of this year.

The Rev. Dr Ian Kyle Paisley MP has a reputation for fierceness: he who has denounced the Pope as the Antichrist and launched the famous “Save Ulster From Sodomy” campaign: he who has said “No” to so many changes and modernisations that he has been dubbed “Dr No”: he who has used Biblical language of fire and brimstone against his adversaries since first appearing on the public scene in the 1950s, demonstrating against all moves towards change and reconciliation.

And yet Paisley, in person, seems a cordial old party, throwing his head back as he laughs. The preacher who was once said to affirm the Pauline view that women should keep silent in church, is inseparable from his wife, Eileen, always addressed as “Mammy”, and obediently goes where “Mammy” leads in the corridors of Westminster. (Eileen is also at Westminster in her own right -  elevated to the Lords as Baroness Paisley in 2007.)

At 82, how does “Big Ian” now look back on his life? Oh, very happily. “Life is a teaching experience. And sometimes we’re amiss in taking the lessons. But the lessons go on.”

He feels very well. “You could reverse my age and make it 28!” He chortles away. He has “marvellous health,” he says, and “when the young fellows are exhausted at 6 o’clock, this old turtle is going on.” Indeed, he’d prefer to be old than young because of the “teaching experience” of life’s reflections.

Ian Kyle Paisley was born in Armagh in 1926, the son of an independent Baptist preacher. His mother, a fiery Scot named Isabella, also took to the pulpit and exercised great influence over the family church. The Scottish roots remain strong with Ian Paisley to this day: he’s friendly with Alex Salmon and feels an affinity with Gordon Brown, the “son of the manse”.

The culture in which Paisley grew up was austere: no dancing, no liquor, and no bobbed hair or lipstick among women, for St Paul disapproved of the shorn head and the painted face. Protestant Ulster was to be defended from both Dublin and Rome: the Vatican was “the mother of harlots and the abomination of the earth”. Ian Paisley, who preached from the age of 16, always used this dramatic language of perfidy with a powerful flourish.

The common view now is that he has mellowed. Does he ever regret using such pejorative language? He chortles again and brushes these points away as mere formulae. These words are “scriptural terms”, he says vaguely. “But my attitude to individual Roman Catholics has always been respectful,” he adds. And it is true that he championed Catholic constituents as energetically as Protestant ones: he once stopped the Department of Transport from running a motorway through the grounds of a convent school.

He also has the politician’s reflex of scoring through humour. Latterly, he has been well-received in Dublin, where he is regarded as a bit of a “turn”, especially on TV. Last year, he announced in the Irish capital that he wished he had come to Dublin more often in the course of his life. Pause. “To evangelise you all!”

And yet, Paisley was formerly against every link between Belfast and Dublin. He came to prominence in 1965 when Captain O’Neill, Prime Minister of Northern Ireland, had a much-heralded meeting with Sean Lemass, then Taoiseach. Paisley’s protesting banner read: “No Mass – and no Lemass.” He opposed all liberalisation of the Stormont regime, from the Civil Rights movement to the Sunningdale Agreement of 1973 to the Belfast Agreement of 1998. He was opposed to so much he was dubbed “Dr No”.

Would he have done anything differently, looking back?
“I would do a few things differently, yes.  But everybody has their own way of doing things. And I lived my life as I believed it.”

Was he too hard on Terence O’Neill? There is no sunny chortle at the mention of the liberalising Unionist. “Terence O’Neill was very hard on me. He tried to have me committed to an asylum. He tried to claim that I was mad.” O’Neill was “not a good man.”

One of Ian Paisley’s biographers, Ed Moloney, writes that there are two Paisleys: one is the hell-and-brimstone preacher: but the other is a pragmatic politician who knows when to move in a direction that will prove effective.

And all his “No’s” finally came to a “Yes”, when, to the world’s astonishment, he went into Government with Sinn Fein, becoming the First Minister in the power-sharing Northern Ireland Assembly, with Martin McGuinness as his Deputy. A photograph of the pair seen laughing together was widely dubbed “The Chuckle Twins”.

Why did Dr Paisley – after all his years of opposing dialogue and ecumenism, both political and religious – suddenly perform this volte-face? There is a theory that, after a bout of  serious illness, he felt he must move towards peace and reconciliation before meeting his Maker.

No, he says, not so. It was simply that Sinn Fein agreed to the three conditions he had always insisted upon: “if they accept the constitutional position: if they respect the law and that all are equal under the law: if they respect the police” – then he would enter into government with these ex-IRA men. (Irish Nationalists would say that many of the problems arose in Northern Ireland because previously they were not “equal under the law”.)

“And they have fulfilled their promises. Some not very well. There are some hiccups. But I would not be a Christian if I did not take them at their word.”

Paisley maintains that the picture of himself and McGuinness is slightly doctored: the two were not sitting side by side at the time the photo was taken. The group –McGuinness, Tony Blair and Bertie Ahern –  had been laughing when he had said “I don’t know why people would hate a nice man like me!”

Yet he does not object to the image. “The picture didn’t do me any harm. Better to see that than to come out of these meetings with a long face.” He got along with McGuinness personally. “Oh yes. We disagree. We’re Ulstermen! There were things we didn’t agree on and we left them on the one side and got on with what we could agree on.” Where the former attempts at power-sharing were “houses build on sand”, this one is building on substance.

There are commentators who ascribe Dr Paisley’s more conciliatory development to another factor: “Mammy”. Eileen Paisley is a quiet but strong-minded wife whose long-term influence is emollient. “Oh Mammy is the ruler!” he chortles.

And “Mammy” says that Ian has indeed “changed for the better” over the years.

 

Not all readers agreed with the Oldie of the Year Award to Dr Paisley. He certainly is a man of paradox, and his opinions have often come across as harsh and unbending. His “Save Ulster From Sodomy” campaign in the 1970s would today be called homophobic: though he says now that “we pray for homosexual persons – we do not mock them”. There is some justice in the oft-made allegation that he is a man of the 17th century more than the 21st. And yet, he has travelled a road and accomplished something: he certainly will be counted a historic figure.

And he has this benign and optimistic personal side. He gives credit where credit is due – he is pleased and grateful that the Irish Government now honours all Irishmen who fell in the Great War, and he has laid a floral tribute on the grave of John Redmond, the Irish Home Ruler, who died in 1917. Paisley also delights in modern-day Belfast, with all its cheerful improvements, where “Roman Catholics come up and clap me on the back and say, ‘we don’t approve of everything you say, but we approve of what you have done’.”

The Paisleys have four children and ten grandchildren, all of them Biblical Christians, and all of them teetotallers for whom liquor remains “the Devil’s Buttermilk”. None of their children rebelled against the family values. He was both “very strict and very liberal” as a parent – his offspring were given boundaries, but told they had to make their own choices -  and as a grandfather “very indulgent.”

He is tickled that Liam Neeson is to play him in a biopic of his life. But who will play “Mammy”? For she is perhaps the ultimate shaper of the man.