Beauty and Atrocity: People, Politics and Ireland’s Fight for Peace. Joshua Levine

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       4 THE REFORMER

      As western democracies underwent a social shift in the Sixties, away from the conservatism of the past, it appeared as though Northern Ireland was being dragged along with them. Terence O’Neill, the fourth Prime Minister of Northern Ireland, took office in 1963 and spoke of introducing ‘bold and imaginative measures’. He began visiting Catholic schools, having his photograph taken with nuns, attending civic receptions in Catholic towns, and attempting to introduce what he described as ‘long overdue reforms’.

      O’Neill’s attitudes were not those of a lone man crying in the wilderness. In the early Sixties some young Protestants were even willing to countenance a united Ireland. One man who attended Foyle College, a Protestant school in Derry, remembers: ‘Most of my school friends were very pro a united Ireland in those days. We’d have discussions, and we decided that we would still hold onto British culture, but we hoped for a united Ireland where both cultures were valued and accepted. I expect that after the Troubles started, many of these people retrenched back into more black-and-white attitudes.’ But even before the Troubles, most people in Northern Ireland were not so liberal in their outlook. O’Neill’s attempts to bring the province into the twentieth century were darkly observed by a man whose feet were planted somewhere in the seventeenth: the Reverend Ian Kyle Paisley.

      O’Neill and Paisley were very different men. Educated at Eton, a member of the Guards during the Second World War, speaking with an English accent, O’Neill was at the Anglo-Irish end of unionism. To read his autobiography gives a touching sense of the man; his genuine belief in reform shines through, and he writes in an endearingly Pooterish manner: ‘For some years we had been in the habit of taking the car to Britain for a holiday in August. Our second stop was with Jean’s cousin Jack…’ The overall impression is of a quiet, well-meaning man, who became involved with events and personalities far bigger than himself.

      One of those big personalities was Paisley, the son of an itinerant preacher father, and a Scottish Presbyterian mother. Like his father, Paisley became a fundamentalist preacher, and a hugely charismatic one. In this 1969 sermon Paisley – a fine performer in his own right – tells the morality tale of an ungodly actress:

      ‘Some years ago, outside a very famous hotel, in Durban in South Africa, a gospel evangelist was giving out gospel tracts. In that hotel there was staying a very famous actor, and down at the quayside was a great liner called the Durban Castle. And that famous actress had booked a passage and had a ticket on that liner, and she came out through the door, to get the cab to take her to board the vessel, and this Christian gentleman stepped up, and he handed her a gospel tract. And when she saw it, she threw it on the pavement and she stamped her heel through it and she said, “Damn your God!” She went aboard the Durban Castle. But when it docked at Southampton, she had disappeared. There was an inquiry, a steward was arrested, he was tried and he was found guilty of murder. And he murdered that actress, and it was found that he had pushed her dead body through the port-hole. And she had been buried in the briny deep. Her name was Gay Gibson, a famous actress. “What think ye of Christ?” “Damn your God!” My friends, you don’t need to use such a blasphemous expression, but tonight, by turning your back on Christ, you can go to the same hell that that Christ-rejecting actress went to! SHE DIDN’T KNOW THAT SHE WAS ON HER LAST JOURNEY! And her body perished in the depths of the sea, but her soul baptised in the waves of infinite wrath, for all eternity paid the penalty for her doom and for her Christ-rejection. Friends, how is it with your soul? Men and women, eternity! Eternity! WHERE WILL YOU BE, IN ETERNITY?’

      Yet as well as being a hell-fire preacher with the ability to inspire and terrify his congregants, Paisley has also been the most influential Protestant politician of the past fifty years. It has often been difficult to gauge where his politics ends and his religion begins. When he has thundered against Catholicism in sermons – ‘Romanism is the enemy of liberty! Romanism is the enemy of this province! Romanism is the enemy of God!’ – he has been speaking as both cleric and politician. He has articulated the political fears of his people with an evangelical fury: ‘The Protestants of Ulster are not going to be trifled with! We are in no mood to permit anything that is going to hinder our defence and preservation of Ulster as part of the United Kingdom!’ The Troubles might not have been religious in nature, but the wily, ambitious Paisley certainly was, and his presence was one of the major reasons why Northern Ireland careered into chaos at the end of a decade that had promised hope.

      At the beginning of his tenure, O’Neill made speeches promising that his government would no longer be acting solely in the interests of unionists. His words were received positively by many Catholics, but this only served to make him unpopular with the harder-line unionists. It was a matter of basic mathematics that if he were to bring more jobs, more houses, and more votes to Catholics, that meant fewer of each for Protestants, and this fact was never lost on loyalists.

      These were the fears that Paisley was able to articulate, while turning himself, in the eyes of some of his supporters, into a prophet of semi-biblical proportions. In 1964 he threatened to march his supporters to the republican headquarters in west Belfast to remove a small Irish flag that had been spotted in the window. The police had decided not to intervene, but under pressure from Paisley they smashed the window and removed the flag. Riots ensued and attitudes hardened on all sides. There are many, many incidents which have been said to have led to the Troubles. Of all of those commonly cited, this is probably the earliest.

      In 1965 O’Neill invited the Taoiseach (Prime СКАЧАТЬ