Ian Richard Kyle Paisley farewell… DUP realos, fundis and the future March 4, 2008
Posted by WorldbyStorm in Democratic Unionist Party.trackback
It strikes me watching Channel 4 News and reading that Ian Paisley is stepping down in May that this must be the source of considerable anguish and unease in many quarters this evening. Cast your mind back to a time before those balmy Spring days last year, before we gazed upon former adversaries sitting down together and breaking bread, or cracking jokes, travelling the world and enjoying first class lounges at various airports, or whatever it was that they were doing. Think back even before the famous right-angled table which brought together the unlikely combination of Ian Paisley and Gerry Adams.
Think back to a time when the media was engaged in the task of DUPology, something akin to Kremlinology, but arguably more difficult. When – as happens in such cases – various attributes were projected, often with little or no basis in fact, upon individuals within the DUP. We were told that there were, as it were, fundis (incidentally, I’ve always detested that term when applied inappositely to the Irish Green Party, but the DUP isn’t the Green Party). For them there was no countenancing a deal short of a return to something close to 1965, or perhaps earlier, perhaps 1956. Or earlier… perhaps 1695. We saw Gregory Campbell on this evening – a fine example of same. Ian Paisley himself was meant to be one such. Then, it was whispered, that there were realos. Peter Robinson was promoted as leader of that faction. These were they guys who when push came to shove were aching to be in power, keen for the merc’s or Jaguars, and perks. Willing even to deal with the… well… with Sinn Féin…
And then, with one bound our hero broke free and proved himself to be not merely not a fundi, and hardly even a realo, but a super-realo. Ian Paisley (for it was he) eschewed such categories in favour of a protean transformation from Dr. No to … something else entirely. It has been as if he spun a web which allowed everything to transcend the actuality and move somewhere else. This shouldn’t have been a surprise, this was a man for whom rhetoric was all, from the first utterance of a negative to the softer words in the more recent past. And that rhetoric was surprisingly skillfully employed to entangle both allies and opponents.
The discourse shifted. Because now people began, as the haze lifted, to wonder just how solid was the DUP behind him. And still – perhaps – that remains unclear. Is Robinson (still odds on favourite to take the helm after 27, count them, 27 years as Deputy leader) truly a realo. Or more of one than had been hoped. How will that realo stance assist him as the thorny issue of devolution of policing becomes even more of a live issue as we move towards the Summer.
What also of the fear that the fundis are implacably opposed to the current situation and without the authority of the iconic signifier of rejectionist Unionism somehow supporting the structures of the GFA that the DUP will bend and break upon the workings of that agreement. Because it’s not as if Unionism doesn’t have form on these situations, taking steps forward only to retreat in disarray. These are dark thoughts, and perhaps unlikely to come to pass. Yet there are forces on this island which thrive on uncertainty and instability. That are waiting in the long grass to do away with stability and push the situation somewhere, anywhere. And there must be many many wondering what happens next, for better or for worse. Gary Gibbons on Channel 4 News recounted an anecdote of an SF MLA who said to him some months ago that if he saw Paisley keel over he’d be first in line to give mouth to mouth resuscitation. That very story speaks volumes about his centrality to the process and the fragility of that process. I never thought I’d be sorry to see him go.
It seems there was an element of being pushed bu those within his party. If so, this was not because they want to break the deal. It is because they believed Paisley had become a threat to its successful continuance due to the chuckle brothers routine. I think though this is a massive overreaction to the Dromore by-election coupled with what is of more importance – Ian Óg.
His potential rivals in any future leadership battle wanted him out of the way, especially with the Sweeney thing. It was not unlikely that Big Ian would try to get him put in as leader at some point – rumour has it he tried to get Kyle made moderator of his church.
Is this really though a political career that has ended in failure? I don’t believe so. And I doubt he thinks it either.
Although this is slightly off the point, why has everyone
forgotten Paisley’s repulsive anti-semitism?
His rag the Protestant Telegraph publishes several
anti-semitic articles, including the June 72 issue:
“ Watch the Jews. . . watch the papist Rome rising to a grand crescendo with the communists. … They are heading for an alliance against the return of the Lord Jesus Christ.”
There was also that TV documentary a few years ago
where he kept referring
to the presenter as “that Jew”.
Was it not the Israelite he called him?
Was thinking about how the right has moved from being anti-semetic, to rabidly pro-Israel over the last 50 years after the debate on slugger on the graffiti on the Whiterock Road. Amazing. I guess they reckon that Muslims are even more sub-human.
In the part of Spain where I live, the right-wing regularly spray muslim shops and areas with the Israeli flag and Star of David.
I used to have a copy of the Protestant Telegraph, but I don’t have a clue where it is now. A scary scary publication.
As regards the right, I’d think there are still embedded anti-semitic strains on it although it has taken on a patina of pro-Israeli thinking. I guess the distinction is that on the conservative right the pro-Israeli thing is quite strong but as one moves further towards the fascist right they’re still utterly wedded to an anti-semitic discourse.
According to Thomas Hennessey’s ‘The Origins of the Troubles’ (which I looked up after Garibaldy mentioned it elsewhere) in the Duncairn by-election of 1966 the Protestant Unionist leaflets attacked the Unionist Party candidate because he ‘is not a Protestant. The Unionist Party are boasting that he is a Jew. As a Jew he rejects our Lord Jesus Christ, the New Testament, Protestant principles, the glorious Reformation…etc’ (p.16).
Eileen Paisley was a Protestant Unionist candidate elsewhere in that election.
But hey, why not bigotry from the Big Man? Look at some of the things he said about Catholics! And rember who his pals in the US are, the Bob Jones University was one of the last to have desegregation forced on it.
Funny listening to Ahern, Kenny and co on Paisley’s retirement, not a hint of the man’s past. Eamon Gilmore on the other hand talked about Paisley’s ‘responsibility’ for the problem (though is this because Gilmore can’t stomach the fact that Paisley made a deal with SF?!)
Paisley’s politics were classic right wing populism, he was a reactionary to the core, led thousands of young Protestants astray as many former UVF-UDA men attest and washed his hands of his role in causing the Troubles.
A bastard.
In a way, the last few years of Paisley’s career attest to the value of, and necessity for politics. At a time where politicians – here and in Britain – seek to be managers of an enterprise and treat the electoral process as a job interview in front of a panel of millions, and when the middle-classes seem prefer ethics to supplement their material comfort with a patina of self- approval (the Greens in Europe, the Obama constituency in the US), the weird political process in the north – and I have deep reservations about the GFA – is some kind of model for how the adversarial struggle may produce a genuinely new thing – a (possibly) functioning society in NI.
Politics is a creative pursuit – at its best, it about making the new from the material at hand; which is why the ethical impulse in politics should be resisted as a illicit import, a transmuted theology; the high- minded ethicist might blanch at a twin commisariat of a terrorist and a fundamentalist preacher, and prefer adminstrators, and maybe, and perhaps preferably, in the end the North will be administered, but perhaps too, to do something like what has happened in the North you need the deeply weird outsider(s) to lead it.
Paisley is/ was a completely political animal, despite the cloth – whereas an administrator would have sought to import a passionless managerial solution that played to material interest and tried to sideline the really political – the notions by which people define themselves as ‘us’, and the other as ‘them’ – and an ethicist would have remained happy with the rightness of his position and shied away from gambling it all, Paisley knew that the real work of politics always – even for conservatives – involves making new things (Tories just pretend that these new things are really old things). And his skill was exemplary; whereas Hume and Trimble traded the trust of their respective constituents for the plaudits of Clinton, Blair and the Nobel committee, Paisley always knew he was nothing without the support of the little old ladies in Ballymena; and in the end he – and not Blair, not Ahern – pushed the Shinners further than they ever wanted to go, because, after a point, going back became impossible; if, to start with, the impetus for the PP came from the nationalist side (Hume, Adams and Reynolds), in the end, it was the DUP that tied SF irrevocably to a future as a government party in Stormont.
And yes Ed, he was a Bastard……. but insisting poiticians be nice people is a privilege only those who don’t really need politics can afford.
“Paisley’s politics were classic right wing populism, he was a reactionary to the core, led thousands of young Protestants astray as many former UVF-UDA men attest and washed his hands of his role in causing the Troubles.
A bastard.”
Yes, Paisley was the classic ultra-conservative demagogue,
in the same mould as George Wallace, Pierre Poujade and
Paisley’s buddy Enoch Powell.
There’s also the issue that many hardliners in the
DUP are unhappy with the St. Andrews Agreement and
Paisley’s resignation could give them their chance
to undermine it.
Its not about him being ‘nice’; any account of him shows him to be a fairly humourous and entertaining character; its about the hypocriscy and lies; fulminating against Hume in Belfast and going to dinner with him in Brussels; giving the nod the UPV boys in the 60s and washing his hand of them; knowing full well that working class Protestants were deprived of votes under the rates system yet denying full stop that there was any such injustice; marching the Prods up to the top of hill and marching them back down again, while leaving a few hundred to do life in jail after they took his rhetoric seriously, covering up Kincora, etc etc…so maybe this is all for the good, but I don’t have to pretend I fucking like it.
Yes to all of that, but I could probably come up with a similar or worse charge sheet against Adams or mcGuinness; the point is, like it or not, these awful people were probably the only ones who, in a particular time and place could get from A to B, and the fact that they did when it might have been easier in certain respects not to, deserves some – heavily qualified – respect. As I said above, I would hope, in the end, that, once their midwifery is complete, SF and the DUP would either become irrelevant or change into more recognisably democratic parties – like old fashioned Communist parties were meant to do………
It’s difficult isn’t it? I find saying a kind word about Paisley something almost beyond me, but jump he did when he had to… At least he did. Which is more than the more ‘respectable’ Molyneux’s et al ever did…
“Was it not the Israelite he called him?”
What difference does that make?
” Was thinking about how the right has moved from being anti-semetic, to rabidly pro-Israel over the last 50 years after the debate on slugger on the graffiti on the Whiterock Road. Amazing. I guess they reckon that Muslims are even more sub-human.”
depends on which right, where.
Also, you could say it was amazing how many supposedly left folk have worked themselves into a froth of enthusiasm for wingnut theocrats in recent years
“realo’s, fundi’s”.
they are plurals so no apostrophes, right?
Yes… you’re right eamonn… but I didn’t have the time to change them…
The difference is the Israelite was a Biblical-referencing joke, as was clear from seeing the programme. I remember a review (possibly in the Times) talking about it at the time as well.
I couldn’t agree more on the ridiculousness of supposedly left people getting into bed with theocrats. Not least after the evidence of Algeria and Iran as to how religious nationalism and left politics cannot mix. Oh yeah, and NI.
ah, I see. Didn’t see the prog.
e
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