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Biography
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The Reverend Ian Richard Kyle Paisley (born April 6, 1926) is a politician and church leader in Northern Ireland.
Ian Paisley was born in what was then the town of Armagh, and brought up in the town of Ballymena, where his father was an independent Baptist pastor. After completing his education at the Model School in Ballymena, he undertook independent theological training at a Bible college in Barry, South Wales and, later, for a year, at the Reformed Presbyterian Hall in Belfast, Northern Ireland -- though he gradutated from neither.
In 1946 he was ordained, in a ceremonly at an independent church on the Ravenhill Road in Belfast, by four ministers from four different denominations, none of whom had ecclesiastical authority from their churches to ordain. A common mistake is the assumption that Ian Paisley personally led an exodus from the mainstream Presbyterian Church in Ireland (the largest Protestant denomination in Northern Ireland). In fact, Ian Paisley was never a member of that church, and was never one of its ministers.
Ian Paisley's academic history has always been something of a sore point for him. He styles himself "Dr Paisley", on the basis of the award of an honorary Doctor of Divinity degree from Bob Jones University, Greenville, South Carolina. Bob Jones, Jr., was a very close personal friend and a co-leader with Ian Paisley in the international Fundamentalist movement. At the time of the award of this degree, Bob Jones University was a segregationist private, unaccredited Christian college which banned black students from its campus. This policy was later reversed by stealth -- completed in 2000 when the college abandoned its policy banning inter-racial dating following a national debate in the US which was occasioned by George W. Bush's decision to speak from the college's pulpit during his presidential campaign. Bob Jones University remains an unaccredited college.
In the early 1950s Ian Paisley helped to establish the first Free Presbyterian Church in Northern Ireland. He then, following a vote in his own church, joined the Free Presbyterian Church and was subsequently elected its second moderator, a post he has held for several decades. He eventually set up his own newspaper, the Protestant Telegraph, a strongly anti-Catholic paper, as a mechanism for further spreading his message. He is also the founder and leader of the Democratic Unionist Party which is currently the largest unionist party, and the fourth largest party in both the United Kingdom and Ireland.
'No Surrender'
In the 1960s he campaigned against Prime Minister of Northern Ireland Terence O'Neill's rapprochement with the Republic of Ireland and his meetings with Taoiseach of the Republic, Seán Lemass. He opposed efforts by O'Neill as prime minister to deliver civil rights to the minority nationalist community in Northern Ireland, notably the abolition of gerrymandering of local electoral areas for the election of urban and county councils. In 1964 his demand that the RUC remove an Irish Tricolour from Sinn Féin's Belfast offices led to two days of rioting, after this was followed through. (The public display of the Irish flag was illegal until the mid-1980's). Paisley's hardline approach (summed up in his catchphrase "no surrender") led him in turn to attack O'Neill's successors as prime minister, Major James Chichester-Clark (later called Lord Moyola) and Brian Faulkner. In 1966 he set up the Ulster Protestant Volunteers, which commenced a bombing campaign in order to destabilise O'Neill's government. This group later amalgamated with the Ulster Volunteer Force, with whom it had an overlapping membership. In March 1969, he was jailed, along with Ronald Bunting, for organising an illegal counter-demonstration against a civil rights march in Armagh. Paisley opposed the 1972 suspension by the British government of Edward Heath of the Northern Ireland parliament and government (known collectively by the term Stormont due to the location of Parliament Buildings on the Stormont estate). He opposed the Sunningdale Agreement which sought to rework relationships between Northern Ireland, the Republic of Ireland and the United Kingdom, and which provided for a power-sharing executive (government) involving both communities in Northern Ireland, and a controversial (among unionists) all-island Council of Ireland linking Northern Ireland and the Republic on a legal but not constitutional level. Sunningdale collapsed following the Ulster Workers' Strike which cut water and electricity supplies to many homes, and the failure of the British Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, Merlyn Rees and the British Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, to defend the power-sharing executive. Supporters of Paisley played an important role in orchestrating the strike. In January 1974 he was subdued and thrown out of the Stormont assembly by members of the Royal Ulster Constabulary. In April 1977 Paisley famously declared he would retire from politics if a forthcoming United Unionist Action Council general strike was unsuccessful. The strike failed, but Paisley, to the joy of his supporters, broke his promise.
...(more on Wikipedia)
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This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Ian Paisley".
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