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Paisley "Not the Politician We Thought"    [

    A Wind of Peace Rises Over Northern Ireland
    By Stéphane Bussard
    Le Temps

    Tuesday 27 March 2007

    For the Northern-Irish and for us Europeans, this past Monday is, without exaggeration, truly historic. Urged up until midnight on Monday by London to reach an agreement, these two enemies who had been irreconcilable up until now - the Protestant Ian Paisley and the Catholic Gerry Adams - broke with tradition yesterday in Belfast when they agreed to share power starting this coming May 8.

    Even though the path to a cohabitation government is still strewn with ambushes, the two leaders, of the Democratic Unionist Party and of Sinn Fein, are putting an end to close to a century of troubles and three decades of inter-sectarian violence that has taken 3,600 victims. For eighty-year-old Reverend Ian Paisley - dubbed "Dr. No" up until now for his immoderate love of refusal - it's a radical change in direction. On his side, Sinn Fein President Gerry Adams had the tough job of convincing the Irish Republican Army (IRA), author of numerous terrorist attacks, to put down its arms in 2005.

    The Monday agreement could well constitute Tony Blair's finest political success, as he had made resolution of the Northern Ireland question one of his priorities, notably by favoring the conclusion of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. If it materializes, this political breakthrough will put a bit of shine on the career of the British prime minister that was tarnished by the Iraq fiasco.

    The Stormont accord should also reassure us. It shows that, in spite of the wounds, reconciliation and peace are not a pure utopia, and that religious, even ethnic divisions, like those filmmaker Ken Loach depicted so well in "The Wind that Shakes the Barley," are not inevitable. Nonetheless, the obstacles to overcome were considerable. Everything separated the Catholics and the Protestants - the former attached to the values of Celtic heroism, the latter to notions of racial superiority.

    The message is consequently all the stronger for contradicting the logic that had prevailed during the 1995 Dayton Accords, where "ethnic cleansing" in the former Yugoslavia was finally ratified. It also contradicts what UN Mediator Martti Ahtisaari calls his desires for Kosovo: an independence rendered unavoidable by hatred fed on the horrors of war.

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     Paisley "Not the Politician We Thought"
    By Kevin Connolly
    BBC News

    Tuesday 27 March 2007

    A few years ago in driving rain at the end of long taxi-queue at Belfast City Airport, I bumped into a senior member of the DUP a few days after the party won the Stormont Assembly elections in 2003.

    "Paisley-ism Was All About Saying No"

    I congratulated him on his own success and said flippantly that I imagined that it had set back the chances of power-sharing by decades.

    He smiled and said: "I wouldn't underestimate Ian Paisley's desire to be first minister of Northern Ireland."

    It seemed fantastically improbable. Paisley-ism was all about saying no, after all, and Ian Paisley had built his party and career on his ability to conjure the genie of Protestant resistance to any hint of accommodation with the Catholic minority.

    But the signs were there all along that he was never quite the politician you thought - especially if your view was based on the roaring demagogue caricatured by Spitting Image.

    He talks of his profound faith with humility and simplicity for example, he is a sophisticated operator at Westminster and he has always been capable of surprising geniality.

    "Defined by Hostility"

    Why has he changed?

    Well, in part, he has mellowed with age.

    And of course, by definition he is the first unionist leader in 40 years who has not been frightened away from the prospect of change by the thought of being denounced in the most lurid of terms by Ian Paisley.

    But more than anything perhaps, he has shown the political veteran's sure grasp of the times in which he lives.

    Unionism for years has been a reactionary political movement - defined by hostility to Irish unity and to IRA violence.

    With IRA violence gone from the picture and the Irish Republic suddenly benign and Protestant-friendly, unionism has had to operate in a changed political landscape.

    "Ian Paisley Has Identified the Moment and Risen to It"

    The old reasons for refusing to cut a deal which Ian Paisley once articulated with such passion and power are largely gone and even in his 80s, Ian Paisley has identified the moment and risen to it.

    How different - how statesmanlike - his legacy will be now than it would have been if he had left the stage five years ago.

    I should have paid more attention to the friendly small talk in that taxi queue all those years ago.