Necessity of violence
Kelly, Mary Pat
Interview with Ian Paisley NECESSITY OF VIOLENCE WHEN LONDON NODS TO DUBLIN B ritish airways was running a special promotion on its London to Belfast route. The price was good even if the name...
...If Parliament ratified the agreement all the Unionist MPs would quit...
...In style, theologically and politically, he's been compared to Jerry Falwell...
...The price was good even if the name was unfortunate: it's called the "firecracker fare.'' At London's Heathrow airport, there is a special section for passengers to Belfast...
...All bags must pass through an x-ray and a hand check...
...Last June when Sinn Fein candidates ran in the local elections in the South, they received a miniscule share of the vote...
...Paisley and the Unionists did try to stop it...
...Hetoldme, "Look it up in the dictionary...
...It makes it less awkward if when passing a traffic policeman dressed in a flak jacket and rifle on the ready you merely pretend he is not there...
...Paisley spoke in a prepared statement style — the same for everyone...
...You would assassinate the police...
...Them," he said, indicating the nearby line of Royal Ulster Constabulary...
...What did these men feel when they heard such talk from their fellow Protestant Unionist?' 'How did they take it...
...He sat behind a wall of his own making in that lounge...
...The deal with the devil was to be sealed at a place sacred to the unionist tradition, Hillsborough Castle, the queen's residence in the North...
...Neither the Irish police nor army had any real commitment to stopping terrorists...
...Did Paisley really believe that Northern Catholic SDLP politicians, like John Hume or Seamus Mallon, constantly villified by the IRA for their stand against violence, were actually secret allies of the Provos...
...There is a serious body search, no mere pass with a metal detector...
...I had always wondered why Paisley focused so much on the IRA Provos and why he identified them so closely with the people and the government of the Irish Republic...
...He needs the IRA...
...A demonstrator holding an "Out, Out, Out," placard was more specific...
...Then one answered, "We take it with contempt...
...I asked...
...They want to "be nice to the IRA...
...The Northerner told him that an American reporter wished to speak with him...
...Oh, aye, he agreed, he would like to see that crowd dead, but his real ire was directed elsewhere...
...We've left them alone up to now, but if they remain in a police force where Dublin has any say at all...
...Surely Paisley knew that when John Hume ran against Martin McGuiness for the House of Commons seat in the heavily Catholic constituency of Foyle, Hume received over 70 percent of the vote...
...But facts don't really matter when it comes to casting all papists as Feinian terrorists...
...But the real business of the place is not succor but security...
...The Provisional IRA serves that function nicely, especially if they can be seen not as an extreme faction but as the true expression of the Northern Catholic population...
...All but the most dense tourists to Ireland, no matter what notions they hold before arriving, are barely out of Shannon airport before it's clear to them that among the people of the Republic there is no widespread support for IRA violence in,the North...
...It's called a "lounge'' and offers the amenities — coffee, stout, and sandwiches...
...Too many of the latter, after all, are immigrants from places like Pakistan...
...The reasoning also makes any agreement with the Irish government a deal with the devil...
...But this year there would be no off-the-cuff remarks by the prime minister...
...I saw Paisley again on November 15, the day Garret FitzGerald and Margaret Thatcher met to sign the agreement...
...Margaret Thatcher was a betrayer, and anyone who respected the agreement was a quisling, Paisley told the crowd...
...It went like this: * 'Eire'' had placed itself outside the community of civilized nations by its covert and overt support for the IRA terrorists...
...Unionists feel very proprietary about the queen...
...We will get them...
...Serve sticky buns and tea...
...Once into the interview, such caution was unnecessary...
...It would go forward...
...And whom would they kill...
...He and James Molyneaux arrived outside Hillsborough Castle Ml of threats and dire predictions...
...MARY pat kelly (Mary Pat Kelly is a screenwriter with Columbia Pictures and a filmmaker who has just completed a documentary, ' 'To Live for Ireland.'') Commonweal: 694...
...A solid line of RUC officers was listening to every word of this exchange...
...When the nationalist parties, North and South, met to frame the New Ireland Forum two years ago, they refused participation to any party that espoused violence...
...He represented an overwhelming power for evil which made any intransigence, any excessive reaction on their part, seem excusable...
...Theseseemed to be himself on the one side and the IRA on the other...
...Even coat linings are turned inside out...
...They would withdraw from any contact with representatives of Britain...
...When I talked with Paisley, the light dawned...
...At this moment I had to ignore the convention...
...Another enemy, just as formidable, was necessary...
...No Pope here," they screamed in an echo of an early Thatcher statement on Anglo-Irish cooperation, "Out, Out, Out...
...Hillsborough Castle and its environs had been sealed off the night before...
...And, Paisley added, they would fight...
...Nearing sixty, he's heavy but not fat and combs his white hair straight back...
...The men of Ulster would kill rather than cooperate with Dublin...
...I expected him to answer the IRA or the Dublin representatives who would come to Belfast...
...They live in Loyalist areas...
...But the presenter felt it more politic to slur my last name — too obviously Irish Catholic...
...The soft, pampered English politicians, he suggested, would never be able to stand up to the "hard men" of the North...
...On November 9, six days before the signing of the historic Anglo-Irish agreement on Northern Ireland, I was in that lounge when Ian Paisley strode in...
...But there is none of the ' 'good old boy" quality about him...
...Sinn Fein could not attend...
...I asked what he 20 December 1985: 693 meant by "fight...
...The pope used to serve as the enemy against whom Ulster men could rally...
...Just give them the queen and Ulster, thank you...
...He was kissing babies on TV...
...Some fifty Unionist supporters had spent the night and when the press corps arrived they were ready...
...But people all over the world were flocking to the pope these days...
...Aye, dear...
...Yes, he would...
...Paisley is tall, self-contained, remarkably well-dressed, even natty, for a champion of the working class...
...The British government doesn't understand what it is up against...
...Well, dear, we know them...
...Senior civil servants on both sides had spent five years working on this agreement...
...Now the unwritten law in the North is that one does not talk or make eye contact with either the police or the soldiers...
...Still, when a stranger with a Northern Irish accent approached, Paisley did not retreat...
...Would he agree...
...That was a key statement...
...It is to her that they pledge their loyalty, not to Parliament, not to fellow citizens of the United Kingdom...
...I was surprised to find him alone and unguarded...
...If the police take with "contempt" the threats of their co-religionist who saw progress toward reconciliation as nothing but treason, then truly history was being made at Hillsborough...
...No reply, at first...
...Their bombs and bullets justify his diatribes and the threats of counterviolence they contain...
Vol. 112 • December 1985 • No. 22
