If You Ask Me
by Fionnuala O Connor

Reality’s neon light chased the after glow of a Golden Wedding. The Paisley household must still have been knee deep in empty orange juice cartons and wrapping-paper when the mood turned.

Congratulation and flattery carry most people a fair distance. But last week saw Ian Paisley strike two startling poses and maybe that was simply one too many.

What a shock for his people, said onlookers, as the DUP leader sat smiling the other side of the table from the Catholic primate: local representative of Old Redsocks, the Scarlet Woman’s man in Ireland.It didn’t seem to take a fizz out of the Founder of Free Presyterianism. Days later he was off to Scotland to confound more journalistic reptiles and consign more of the old image to oblivion – or so it seemed.

First there were gloomy whispers that agreement was impossible. But the Paisley decibels stayed muted, his long-promised early departure delayed. The two prime ministers seized the moment to make a little presentation to 'Ian Paisley and Baroness Eileen', as Bertie Ahern put it later.

Then the mist cleared. Instead of prophesies of doom, those restored tones resonated with the invocation of a peaceful future ahead for 'all the children of Northern Ireland'.

What could it mean? On Tuesday those preparing to eat their hats – and Ian Paisley’s is a hat-wearing congregation – were spared, at least for the moment. The first meeting of a new committee to be attended, it was announced, by both DUP and Sinn Fein leaders, did not happen.

Familiar refrains filled the air. Now the DUP was intent on teaching the British government a lesson, their mission to ensure unconditional support for law and order as proof that republicans have completely turned away from violence.

So the writings that the government has allegedly given Ian Paisley, the 'sidebar deals' which supposedly filled those capacious pockets as he left St. Andrews, will be 'pushed down their throat'. The DUP will 'give them a knock between the eyes'.

Maybe the surprise isn’t the disappearance of the St. Andrews statesman so much as the apparition in the first place. After all those years of Paisley sermons on British plots to have him assassinated, was some 50th anniversary bonhomie going to relegate for ever that good old-fashioned Ulster plain-speaking, as he likes to term it, to which his people are so partial?

Hardly – especially not after the party’s Member for the European Parliament had spoken for bewildered No voters. Jim Allister’s stage has been courtroom, not pulpit. His is a muted challenge to the evolution of a power-sharing Paisley.

Enough to ensure diversionary tactics, but we must have been due those in any case. From the pews and the grassroots, recent developments must have looked more like revolution than evolution. And most don’t like evolution either.

If You Ask Me Archive