Ian Paisley

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Ian Paisley bigraphy, stories - Northern Ireland political and religious leader

Ian Paisley : biography

6 April 1926 –

Ian Richard Kyle Paisley, Baron Bannside, PC (born 6 April 1926) is a politician and former church minister from Northern Ireland. As the leader of the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), he and Sinn Féin’s Martin McGuinness were elected First Minister and deputy First Minister respectively on 8 May 2007. Paisley retired from religious ministry on 27 January 2012.

In addition to co-founding the DUP and leading it from 1971 to 2008, he is a founding member and was Moderator for 57 years of the Free Presbyterian Church of Ulster. In 2005, Paisley’s political party became the largest unionist party in Northern Ireland, displacing his long-term rivals, the Ulster Unionists (UUP), who had dominated unionist politics in Northern Ireland since before the partition of Ireland.

On 4 March 2008 Paisley announced that he would step down as First Minister and leader of the DUP after the US-Northern Ireland Investment Conference in May 2008. Peter Robinson took over as DUP leader on 31 May 2008, and replaced Paisley as First Minister on 5 June 2008. Paisley was made a life peer in the Dissolution Honours List of Prime Minister Gordon Brown, BBC Website 2010-05-28 Retrieved 2010-05-28 ennobled on 18 June 2010 as Baron Bannside, of North Antrim in the County of Antrim.. Retrieved 2010-06-20.

Political career

Early activism and paramilitary involvement

Paisley’s first political involvement came at the 1950 UK general election, when he campaigned on behalf of the successful Ulster Unionist Party candidate in Belfast West, the Church of Ireland minister James Godfrey MacManaway.Clifford Smyth, Ian Paisley: Voice of Protestant Ulster, p.4 Inspired by MacManaway’s blend of unionism and Protestantism, Paisley joined independent Unionist MP Norman Porter’s National Union of Protestants, but left after Porter refused to join the Free Presbyterians.

Paisley was among those invited in 1956 to a special meeting at the Ulster Unionist Party’s offices in Glengall Street, Belfast. The meeting’s declared purpose was to organise the defence of Protestant areas against anticipated Irish Republican Army (IRA) activity, in the manner of the old Ulster Protestant Association after the partition of Ireland in the early 1920s.This move followed the election win by Sinn Féin of over 150,000 votes in the 1955 elections – the strongest expression of anti-partitionist feeling in some years. The fears were well founded as the IRA was preparing for a new campaign starting in December 1956, which would have included attacks on Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) stations in Belfast were it not for that section of the plan being discovered. See article Border Campaign (IRA) The new body decided to call itself Ulster Protestant Action (UPA), and the first year of its existence was taken up with the discussion of vigilante patrols, street barricades, and drawing up lists of IRA suspects in both Belfast and in rural areas.See CEB Brett, Long Shadows Cast Before, Edinburgh, 1978, pp. 130-131, Peter Barberis, John McHugh, Mike Tyldesley, p.255 The UPA was to later become the Protestant Unionist Party in 1966., Joseph Lee and Marion R. Casey, p144, NYU Press, 2006 Factory and workplace branches were formed under the UPA, including one by Paisley in Belfast’s Ravenhill area under his direct control. The concern of the UPA increasingly came to focus on the defence of ‘Bible Protestantism’ and Protestant interests where jobs and housing were concerned. As Paisley came to dominate Ulster Protestant Action, he received his first convictions for public order offences. In June 1959, a major riot occurred on the Shankill Road in Belfast following a rally at which he had spoken.See Ian S. Wood, ‘The IRA’s Border Campaign’ p. 123 in Anderson, Malcolm and Eberhard Bort, ed. ‘Irish Border: History, Politics, Culture’. Liverpool University Press. 1999

Paisley, along with Noel Docherty established the Ulster Constitution Defence Committee, which in turn established the paramilitary organisation Ulster Protestant Volunteers on 17 April 1966 at a parade in the Shankill area of BelfastBoulton, David.The UVF 1966-73, An Anatomy of Loyalist Rebellion Dublin: Torc Books, 1973. (Boulton 34) Paisley went on to establish another paramilitary group, Third Force, on 1 April 1981.Paul Arthur & Keith Jeffrey, Northern Ireland Since 1968, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1996 Another paramilitary group, Ulster Resistance, was established by Paisley in 1986. Time