Allegations that the late Ian Paisley helped fund a loyalist terror campaign in the 1960s have brought complaints from his family. It will be claimed in an eight-part BBC series on the Troubles to mark the 50th anniversary.
Ian Paisley was the most prominent face of the unionist camp during the thirty years of violence, turbulent political debate and impasse. He was born 6 April 1926 with a preacher father and co-founded the fundamentalist Free Presbyterian Church of Ulster when he was 25. He promoted a form of Biblical literalism and anti-Catholicism, believed the European Union was a part of a conspiracy to create a Roman Catholic super-state controlled by the Vatican. Known for his fiery sermons he preached against the Pope whom he referred to as the anti-Christ, ecumenism and homosexuality and throughout the Troubles, was seen as a firebrand and the face of hard-line unionism. He opposed all attempts to resolve the conflict through power-sharing and campaigned against the Good Friday Agreement which brought an end to the troubles in the late 1990s.
1926 was a year which threw up several notables including the Queen and David Attenborough as well as Jimmy Savile. Paisley was a Sun Aries in a controlling square to Pluto and a sextile to ornery Mars in Aquarius. He also had the enduring and stubborn Fixed T Square of a head-in-the-clouds Jupiter opposition Neptune square Saturn in obsessive Scorpio. With a secretive Water Grand Trine of Uranus in Pisces trine Saturn trine North Node in Cancer.
A complicated man with undoubted talents but used for the wrong ends. I remember an Irish friend saying if they had put three people in a hot air balloon at the start of the troubles – Paisley being one, Gerry Adams and another I’ve forgotten – and cut the rope, the problem would have been sorted a good deal faster. He was the most repellent sort of Protestant, of an evangelical and pig-headed strand of belief that I always associate with the Dutch Reform Church in South Africa which was integral to Afrikaner nationalism.