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85-year-old former first minister of Northern Ireland said to be making steady progress
Henry McDonald
Guardian
16 Feb 2012
Ian Paisley, Northern Ireland’s former first minister, has been moved out of an intensive care unit but is still being cared for at the Ulster Hospital.
Paisley had been in the unit after being treated for heart problems earlier this month. According to friends of the Paisley family, the 85-year-old was making “steady progress”.
Paisley, the founder of the Democratic Unionist party (DUP) and the Free Presbyterian Church, was admitted to hospital 12 days ago and his family requested privacy during what they described as a “difficult time”.
Paisley, now known as Lord Bannside, stood down as first minister in 2008 and ended 60 years of full-time ministry in January.
BBC
7 Feb 2012
Northern Ireland’s first and deputy first minister have called on the community to give “prayerful support” to Ian Paisley and his family.
The former DUP leader was admitted to hospital on Sunday with heart problems.
His family remain at his bedside in the Ulster Hospital at Dundonald.
Jim Flanagan, editor of the Ballymena Guardian, who has spoken to close family friends, said Mr Paisley had been able to communicate “to some degree” with family members.
Speaking to the Evening Extra programme on Tuesday, he said he understood Mr Paisley had “a reasonable night” in hospital on Monday.
While it is believed Mr Paisley is being treated for a heart condition, Mr Flanagan said he understood he had not suffered a heart attack.
In a statement on Tuesday afternoon, Northern Ireland’s first and deputy first ministers, Peter Robinson and Martin McGuinness, said they had been in contact with the Paisley family.
They offered their best wishes to Mr Paisley and his family and called on the community to “give prayerful support to Ian and his family at this time”.
“The first minister and the deputy first minister would appeal for the Paisley family to be given the space and privacy they deserve and that their wishes are respected,” they said.
“There will be no further commentary from the Office of the First Minister and Deputy First Minister at this time.”
Earlier, Ian Paisley Junior told the BBC he spent the night at the hospital but did not elaborate on his father’s condition.
DUP MLA Jonathan Craig told Good Morning Ulster that he was praying for the Paisley family.
“As a party leader and a friend he has touched not only myself, but four generations of my family have sat under his ministry,” he said.
“We are deeply worried and concerned and our thoughts and prayers are with the Paisley family at this time.”
Baroness Paisley released a statement on Monday confirming that her husband is being treated in the Ulster Hospital.
She requested that the family’s privacy is respected at a difficult time.
In February of last year, Mr Paisley was fitted with a pacemaker after falling ill at a House of Lords meeting.
At the end of last month, more than 3,000 people gathered to hear him preach his farewell service at Martyrs’ Memorial Church in east Belfast.
The service marked the official end of his six decades of full-time ministry.
Former Northern Ireland first minister, 85, is being treated in Ulster hospital, his wife confirms
Guardian
6 Feb 2012
Former Northern Ireland first minister Ian Paisley is in intensive care in hospital after suffering respiratory problems.
The family of the 85-year-old founder of the Democratic Unionist party, now officially known as Lord Bannside, confirmed that he was being treated in Ulster hospital on the outskirts of east Belfast.
In a statement issued on Monday afternoon his wife, Lady Paisley, requested that “the family’s privacy be respected at this time”.
The veteran unionist politician and fundamentalist Protestant preacher took ill at the family home in east Belfast on Sunday. DUP members of the Northern Ireland assembly were briefed on their ex-leader’s medical condition in the Stormont parliament.
Last year Paisley had a pacemaker fitted at St Thomas’s hospital in London after he fell ill at Westminster. Paramedics had to revive him after he collapsed in parliament.
Since he stepped down as first minister Paisley has slowly retreated from public life. In December he announced his retirement as a preacher in the Free Presbyterian church, the hardline Protestant sect he founded in the 1960s.
His final sermon took place last week in the Martyrs Memorial Church in Belfast. He told worshippers inside the church he helped build that he wanted to take time out to write his autobiography.
For nearly five decades Paisley was a colossal presence in Ulster politics. He established the DUP in 1971 and opposed every attempt by successive British and Irish governments to create a power-sharing government between nationalists and unionists in Northern Ireland.
When he moved aside as DUP leader he was succeeded by his long-time deputy and closest political confidant Peter Robinson.
However, Paisley stunned the political world in 2006 when, after the St Andrews agreement, he indicated that the DUP would share power with their former enemies in Sinn Féin. As a result, he and ex-IRA member Martin McGuinness became first and deputy first ministers of Northern Ireland. The pair struck up an unlikely rapport and gained the nickname “the Chuckle Brothers” because at public events they were often seen smiling together.
During his long reign as head of the Free Presbyterian church Paisley embarked on several moral crusades, including an unsuccessful battle to oppose the legalisation of homosexuality in Northern Ireland.
In opposition to Paisley’s “Save Ulster from Sodomy” campaign, the Northern Ireland Gay Rights Movement depicted him as an “ayatollah” who was watching everyone in the province.
FIONOLA MEREDITH
Irish Times
28 Jan 2012
The Rev Ian Paisley among the 3,000-strong congregation at the farewell service in his honour last night. (Photograph: Pacemaker)
THE ROADS around Martyrs Memorial Church in south Belfast were jammed with traffic in all directions as the Free Presbyterian faithful came from all over the country to bid farewell to the Rev Ian Paisley.
The special retirement service last night marked the official end of 65 years of Dr Paisley’s ministry on the Ravenhill Road. There was a cheerful, celebratory atmosphere as the massive congregation surged into the church, squeezing into the old wooden pews.
Among the female members of the congregation there were many elaborate hats of all colours, trimmed with bows and feathers.
When Dr Paisley, now known as Lord Bannside, finally entered the church, alongside his wife Eileen, Baroness Paisley – who was wearing the most elaborate hat of all, an exotic confection in black and gold – there was a standing ovation and cheers as Dr Paisley raised an arm to acknowledge his followers. There ensued a series of tributes from fellow travellers: preachers and missionaries who have walked alongside Dr Paisley throughout the years.
Dr John Douglas, a Free Presbyterian minister from Lisburn, claimed his place as “the first convert the Lord gave you in your ministry”.
Dr Paisley’s son Kyle, now a preacher in England, said that despite all the demands on his father’s time, his first concern was always the spiritual welfare of his family.
When Dr Paisley got to his feet to acknowledge the praise, he appeared stooped and a little frail. Yet once he was back in the pulpit that formidable presence returned, and his increasingly powerful voice filled the church. Clearly this was not a man ready to say goodnight to the world just yet.
News Letter
23 January 2012
THE Secretary of State who succeeded in persuading the DUP and Sinn Fein to share power has revealed the mix of flattery and strong-arm tactics he used to bring Ian Paisley and Gerry Adams together.
In his memoirs, which are published today, Peter Hain says that he used threats of withdrawing DUP Assembly members’ hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of salaries and allowances to build pressure for a deal with Sinn Fein.
In the book, Outside In, Mr Hain says that he believed the republican leadership of Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness were weary and felt that if they did not get a deal at the point when they did then their entire project — decades of violence and then political success — would have been in vain.
Mr Hain also reveals how he secretly met Ian Paisley Jnr, who he describes as a “gatekeeper” to Dr Paisley, now Lord Bannside, in an attempt to win over his father — despite Peter Robinson warning him against such a route.
“Tony (Blair) had indicated that none of my predecessors had got close enough to Ian Paisley, the fiery, veteran leader of the Democratic Unionist Party. So I resolved to do so,” he says.
“As I read and listened my way into the job it became evident to me that at least two things had to change.
“First, the government had to start treating Paisley and the DUP with proper respect: they were outsiders and had always said ‘no’. I needed to get them to become ‘insiders’, able to say ‘yes’, by assuming the responsibilities that always come with leadership. So I resolved at the outset to treat Ian Paisley as the first minister-in-waiting.
“‘You will have to deal with the problem when you are in charge, Ian’, I would say if he lobbied me on a local issue. He would deny a willingness to accept the post, while chortling knowingly.”
Mr Hain says that Dr Paisley told him privately after the Northern Bank robbery that it was “just as well” that a near-agreement with Sinn Fein weeks earlier at Leeds had not come off: “‘Just as well we did not get an agreement or I would have been skinned alive.’ I understood his point exactly.”
He says that Dr Paisley was “a real gentleman with old-fashioned manners of the kind with which I had been brought up; perhaps why we got on so well”.
Mr Hain also lays bare what he believed were some of the tensions within the DUP at the time, where he says Dr Paisley’s son Ian, now the MP for North Antrim, was not popular with his colleagues.
Mr Hain said: “Paisley’s son, Ian Junior, was, I increasingly realised, very important to the settlement I wanted to achieve, though publicity-addicted and a target of huge jealousy among his colleagues.
“But I could not help liking him and acknowledging that it was very difficult making his own way as a politician living in his father’s very considerable shadow.
“Moreover I realised that Ian Junior — like me a motorsport fan — was an influential gatekeeper to the ‘Big Man’ as Paisley was colloquially known, someone who was on top of the detail his dad floated over and intensely loyal.
“About a year into the job, and initially against the advice of my officials and that of the DUP deputy leader, Peter Robinson, and his close associate Jeffrey Donaldson, I began seeing Ian Junior privately, often at Hillsborough, which was near his own family home.”
He goes on: “Robinson and Donaldson were both supporters of my football team, Chelsea, and I was able to get them invited to a few matches.
“Although with a somewhat abrasive public image and reputation as a hardliner in previous years, Robinson was the brains behind the DUP, and extremely astute tactician with a tight grip on the party machine.
“He was often frustrated both at the endemic reluctance of his party to progress negotiations and Paisley’s penchant for the big picture and indifference to textual nuance for which Robinson had a specialism.
“We would have regular and very frank meetings, often in my Westminster parliamentary office, which he could come to without anybody else noticing. These were invaluable conduits for both of us to test out ideas and strategies.”
Mr Hain says that he had tried to get close to the now DUP deputy leader Nigel Dodds but without much success: “He was always cautious and, I sensed, someone happier to lead from behind than the front.”
The current shadow Welsh secretary of state said that the key politicians for him were “the two Paisleys, Robinson, Adams and McGuinness”.
Mr Hain put private pressure on the DUP MLAs, he says, as they came to face re-election in 2007, having already been elected to an Assembly which had been suspended “and I couldn’t see the public acceptance of the charade of voting a second time for something which did not exist … I would cancel the 2007 election if there was no settlement by then”.
He adds: “The DUP hated the gauntlet being thrown down in this way. Soon they were to hate it even more when I determined upon another stratagem popular with the voters, in fact almost wildly popular.
“I would not be prepared to keep paying for long the salaries and generous allowances Assembly members received if there was no progress towards a settlement.
“‘You are bullying us, Peter,’ Ian Paisley thundered at me. ‘The Ulster people will never stand for that.’ The problem, he knew full well, was that in this instance the people would stand for it, especially when I started saying in speeches and interviews that Assembly members were the only citizens who did not have to turn up at work to get paid … the members hated this and hated me for doing it to them, grimacing as they conceded I was right.
“Peter Robinson quietly told me approvingly it was causing real consternation in the large DUP Assembly group, and also to party officials and leaders, since another element of the public funding involved was paid directly to the parties to enable them to organise their Stormont activities with support staff, in the DUP’s case amounting to hundreds of thousands of pounds a year.
“Robinson could not say so publicly of course, but he felt it helped ‘reformist’ elements like him who wanted a settlement against the large body of refuseniks in his party.
“Inside information also indicated that my threat had caused deep concern among the families of DUP Assembly members, understandably worried about how they would pay their mortgages.
“Effectively they were being pressured from a tangent never before tried and which might well not have worked years earlier, before Assembly members had become a semi-permanent political class with all the trappings and lifestyles of modern democratic politics — save for a functioning legislature.”
He says that headline-grabbing and unpopular policies such as plans to bring in water charges, reform of the rates system and the end of academic selection, all helped to force the DUP and Sinn Fein into power.
“I practically incited them to make me redundant, and my radical domestic policies became important levers in the political process — in the end to some extent decisive.”
News Letter
6 January 2012
Ulsters Day of Action at City Hall. Huge Crowds of Loyalists took the advice of Paisley and other Unionists to take the afternoon off work to show their feelings to the Government . 23/11/8 (Photo: PACEMAKER PRESS INTL. BELFAST)
PERMEATING almost every 1981 Government file concerned with political or security developments is the presence of Ian Paisley.
From the decriminalisation of homosexuality to the hunger strike and the Ulster Unionist Party’s internal wranglings, how to avoid handing the DUP leader an easy victory appears to be uppermost in officials’ minds.
Previously classified files just released under the 30-year rule show that officials and ministers appeared genuinely frightened of what Dr Paisley was saying and doing.
At the height of the MP, MEP and Free Presbyterian moderator’s political powers, this was the year when the DUP narrowly (and fleetingly) overtook the UUP in a local council election, polling 0.2 per cent more than the UUP in the May poll.
The man who would go on to cheerfully share power with a former IRA commander and be elevated to the House of Lords as Lord Bannside was in 1981 spoken of by officials in similar terms to terrorist leaders.
The files show that officials and ministers appeared frightened of what Dr Paisley was saying and doing, particularly his creation of the ‘Third Force’, although officials appeared to be more concerned about the perception that the paramilitary force was acting with implicit government support than any fear of its members’ military ability.
In fact one document shows that officials believed ‘gun certificates’ which the Third Force showed to journalists one night to demonstrate the group’s power were actually pieces of House of Commons notepaper.
The group marched several times that year in Protestant towns, most notably in November when, following the murder of Ulster Unionist MP Robert Bradford, several thousand men paraded through Newtownards wearing masks.
On December 7, 1981, senior NIO civil servant David Blatherwick — who would go on to become a UK ambassador to the United Nations, Dublin and Cairo — sent a confidential note to the secretary of state and other senior officials about the Third Force.
He said: “An increasing number of Protestants, as well as Catholics, are complaining that the Government is not standing up to the Third Force.
“Everyone knows that laws are being broken.
“Parallels are being drawn with alleged Government failure to confront the ULWC strike in 1974 [which brought down the Sunningdale Agreement], and the secretary of state’s declarations that private armies will not be tolerated are being made to look empty.
“Allegations of sympathy if not complicity between the Third Force and the RUC and UDR are causing especial indignation – again not only among Catholics.”
He said there were “several dangers in this”, among them that “the Provisionals’ propagandists are being given a useful new theme. Some Catholics are no doubt again beginning to take out insurance with PIRA”.
However, another file shows that SDLP leader John Hume told officials that he was not afraid of the Third Force, though he knew that many Catholics were afraid of the group.
Eventually the Third Force faded as the DUP’s focus shifted back to fighting elections.
Owen Bowcott
Guardian
Thursday 29 December 2011
Suggestions that the pope be given the honour of addressing both houses of parliament on his first visit to Britain were discouraged by senior advisers and vetoed by Margaret Thatcher.
Fears that the Northern Ireland MP Ian Paisley, leader of the Democratic Unionist party, would disrupt the event and the fact that Pope John Paul II was not head of the “established church” proved decisive.
Preparations for the visit, which finally went ahead in 1982, started nearly two years earlier. Confirmation of the invitation caused a flurry of opposition from fringe evangelical groups.
The prime ministerial file on the event, released to the National Archives, contains a letter from the Protestant Reformation Society objecting to the arrangements as well as the organisation’s pamphlet, entitled Ten Reasons Why the Pope Should Not Be Invited to Make a State Visit to Britain. Paisley was also recorded as having telephoned Downing Street seeking details.
Two peers, Lord Bessborough and Lord Ingleby, had suggested the pope be asked to address both houses. The opportunity is rarely granted, although both the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, and Barack Obama have delivered speeches at Westminster in the past few years.
Lord Hailsham, the lord chancellor, wrote to No 10 saying there was likely to be a “good measure of support” for the proposal although he had spoken to the duke of Norfolk, the most senior Catholic peer, who advised the “greatest caution” about any parliamentary address.
Drafting advice for Thatcher in March 1981, the cabinet secretary, Sir Robert Armstrong, pointed out that the pope had not spoken in either the French or Irish parliaments during recent visits.
“It would look very odd if the pope were to address members of the two houses of parliament in a country which has an established church of which he is not head,” he wrote.
“I also have it in my mind that, if there were to be such an occasion, it would be impossible to exclude Mr Paisley as a member of parliament and he would be almost bound to come and make a nuisance of himself.
“My private information is that both the cardinal archbishop of Westminster and the duke of Norfolk do not favour the idea.”
On the letter, Thatcher noted that she agreed that “such a course of action would have the gravest consequences and would damage the pope, the established church and parliament.”
The prime minister, the daughter of a methodist lay preacher, added: “Perhaps we could discuss this in cabinet, but I have no doubt that the view will be strongly against.”
Paisley went on to be ejected from the European parliament in 1986 for heckling Thatcher and in 1988 for denouncing the pope as the “antichrist”.
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