'Big man' is back center stage
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Ian Paisley's voice has boomed out in Northern Ireland for 30 years.
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BELFAST, Northern Ireland (Reuters) -- Revered by followers as a stern defender of a way of life, loathed by opponents as a rabble-rousing bigot, Northern Ireland's preacher-politician Ian Paisley has always provoked strong emotions.
Now, more than three decades after barging onto the political landscape, Paisley, 77, is back at centre stage as his hardline Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) threatens to eclipse the more moderate Ulster Unionists of arch-rival David Trimble.
Paisley refused to sit in talks involving the Irish Republican Army's political ally Sinn Fein which led to the 1998 Good Friday peace agreement, and has consistently opposed a deal he sees as a sell-out of Protestants' British heritage.
Lambasting Trimble for backing the plan, Paisley called the Good Friday accord: "The greatest betrayal ever foisted by a unionist leader on the unionist people."
He says he will never negotiate with Sinn Fein, whom he brands "terrorists," and has vowed to re-negotiate the deal if his party is ahead of the UUP when vote counting in elections to the province's power-sharing assembly finishes late on Friday.
Espousing a heady mix of Protestant fundamentalism and fierce loyalty to the British crown, Paisley's fiery oratory and unbending hostility to Irish republicanism and Roman Catholicism has made him one of the province's most recognizable figures.
Television footage of the burly, bull-necked minister bellowing defiance at mass demonstrations of pro-British "unionist" followers are an enduring image of Northern Ireland's decades of division.
Viewed with bemusement overseas and often dismissed by outsiders as a throwback from another age, the "Big Man of Ballymena" nonetheless commands significant support in the heartlands of Northern Irish Protestantism.
Age and growing frailty have dimmed the fire-and-brimstone rhetoric, and the day-to-day running of his party is now increasingly delegated to deputy Peter Robinson, but his political instincts remain sharp.
Paisley has always denied that his opposition to Catholicism -- which has included branding the Pope "the Antichrist" -- amounts to sectarianism, but he is widely regarded by Northern Ireland's minority Catholic population as a religious bigot.
The son of a dissident Baptist minister, he delivered his first sermon at 16 and founded his own Free Presbyterian Church in 1951.
He entered politics in the 1960s, when one of his first acts was to organize a protest against the lowering to half mast of the British Union Flag flying over Belfast City Hall following the death of Pope John XXIII.
He was jailed twice in the 1960s, once for three months for protesting at the "Romish tendencies" of established Presbyterians, and later for six weeks for blocking a Catholic civil rights march.
Paisley formed the DUP in 1971, two years after the outbreak of the "Troubles" in Northern Ireland, as a radical, less secular alternative to the mainstream UUP.
In 1974 he was a key figure in scuppering the Sunningdale agreement, a forerunner of the 1998 Good Friday accord.
More than a decade later, in 1985, Paisley brought large crowds on to the streets outside Belfast City hall to protest against an Anglo-Irish agreement, famously telling then-British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher: "Ulster Says No!"
That agreement, which gave Dublin a limited say in Northern Irish affairs, was anathema to Paisley, who refuses to accept any links with the "rebel state" south of the border.
Paisley and wife Eileen have three daughters and two sons. Ian Paisley Junior, a leading DUP member, is the only one of his children actively involved in politics.
Copyright 2003
Reuters. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
