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DUBLIN - Ian Paisley will step down as Northern Ireland's first minister in May, just a year after he set aside decades of hatred and helped secure political stability by agreeing to share power with Catholic foes.
"He has decided that he will go soon after the May 7th to May 9th investor conference in Belfast," said a spokesman for the 81-year-old fundamentalist Protestant preacher-politician.
Martin McGuinness, the British province's deputy first minister and a senior member of the predominantly Catholic Sinn Fein party, described Paisley's departure as the end of an era.
"It's obviously a momentous decision for him and for the political process, but obviously I look forward to working with whoever is elected leader of the DUP and first minister," said McGuinness, a former commander in the Irish Republican Army.
McGuinness told Irish radio last year's deal between Irish nationalist Sinn Fein and Paisley's pro-British Democratic Unionist Party had been "one of the most historic political breakthroughs in the history of the island of Ireland."
Paisley's son, Ian Paisley Jr, resigned as a junior minister in the Northern Ireland power-sharing government last month, bowing to criticism of his links to a property developer.
The Good Friday Agreement reached in 1998 largely ended 30 years of violence in Northern Ireland that killed more than 3,600 people, but tension persists in some parts of the province between the Protestant majority and the minority Catholics.
- REUTERS
