KEY POINTS:
NORTHERN IRELAND -Back when I was a teenager and the Troubles were just beginning, I was allowed to attend one of the first civil rights marches, on November 30, 1968. I can remember the excitement and trepidation as the marchers set off from the Killylea Rd towards the town centre, their ranks swelled by coachloads of protesters from across the province.
The source of that trepidation was one man, the Rev Ian Paisley, a Free Presbyterian firebrand, who, having been born in Armagh in 1926, had returned with a vengeance to haunt the city. Convinced that the Northern Irish Civil Rights Association was "a front movement for the IRA", he had called for "every Loyalist in Ulster" to assemble in Armagh that same day and "take control of the city". This they duly did, though only in their hundreds, assembling in the town centre, where, according to the rumours that sped through the marchers, they had armed themselves with crowbars, cudgels and pick-axe handles.
The marchers never made it through the town. At the start of Thomas St, the route was blocked by British soldiers and RUC men in riot gear.
The mood turned from restless to defiant, the strains of We Shall Overcome giving way to more provocative chants such as "SS RUC" and "two, four, six, eight, organise and smash the state". The Paisleyites were being held back by another phalanx of soldiers and policemen.
Like many lapsed Catholics, I shook off the dogma of my upbringing but never shed the sense of hurt nor threat that Paisley embodied in his virulent strain of anti-Catholic rhetoric.
His tone was that of a hectoring bully, his style that of the biblical ranters of another age, steadfast and unyielding. He was the great wrecker, the demagogue, the living, fire-breathing epitome of Edward Carson's definition of Ulster as "a Protestant state for a Protestant people".
Paisley was also the hater of all things papist. He once produced a Roman Catholic Eucharist wafer during a televised speech to the Oxford Union in the early 1970s, mocking it and the fools and blasphemers who believed it sacred. That single act of oafish offence put Paisley well and truly beyond the pale in every Catholic household in Ireland.
That was the first time Paisley impinged on my consciousness, where he remained, rooted and unchanging, for the entire duration of the Troubles and beyond. He was a bogeyman and a bigot, a bombastic preacher who plied not peace and understanding, but hatred and division. As the Troubles descended into tribal blood-letting, and the dark days of the 1970s, the civil rights era became the great lost moment of Northern Irish politics, and the Provisionals began their long, murderous campaign against the security forces, Protestant businesses and civilians, Paisley became the dominant voice of Loyalism.
He remained embedded in my consciousness that way until, that is, a few months ago, when the unthinkable happened. The first clue something was not quite right was written on his face: Paisley suddenly started smiling.
Immediately, the text messages started arriving from the wags at home: "The Brits have been putting something in Big Ian's Fanta" and "Paisley's on the Prozac".
Then, something even more unimaginable. He started using the Y word as if he couldn't stop. He said "yes" to sitting down with his sworn enemies, Sinn Fein's Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness. He said "yes" to devolved power-sharing. He said "yes" to tea and buns with Albert Reynolds. The fledging First Minister metamorphosed into the province's first "Yes" Minister.
It was almost too much to take. After the shock of the Sinn Feiners' transformation into a political party capable of compromising what had long been thought to have been core principles, the Democratic Unionists seem to have caught the progressive bug.
Paisley, after all, was the man who coined the phrase "Ulster says no", who roared "no" at Terence O'Neill, the ineffectual Prime Minister when the Troubles began, who said "no" to the Sunningdale agreement and the policy of "rolling devolution". "No" again to the Anglo-Irish and the Belfast agreements as well as to a succession of Northern Ireland Secretaries.
Was it Prozac? The onset of sudden, benign, old age? Or, could it be that even Paisley has been seduced, in the autumn of his long life, by the aphrodisiac of power? A transformation has occurred, some kind of late epiphany that is nothing less than a leap of faith. Not only has he been seen smiling in the presence of the Shinners, he has even started cracking a joke or two. When asked by Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern why he always had boiled eggs for breakfast, he replied: "It would be hard for you to poison them." It is almost impossible to believe that Paisley and McGuinness will be sitting down together this week, as First Minister and Deputy, to try to do real politics rather than going for each other's jugulars. It is a moment we never thought we'd see..
It would be great to be a fly on the wall when they put their pasts behind them and walk down the long, rocky road of compromise. But even by the protracted standards of Northern Irish politics, that may take a long time.
-OBSERVER
