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.
For goodness sake. Most of the reality of who funded and enabled both Paisley’s so called Loyalists and Adams and Mcguinness mirror image republican paramilitary thugs, is well documented.
They were both funded by the British. Frank Kitson, the British military man responsible for brutal and brutalising counter insurgency strategies for both the British and the US political states from the late 1960s on, ran Operation Banner in Northern Ireland with no legal or criminal oversight whatsoever. Eg I remember seeing Sir Clement Freud’s £25,000 declared donation to Sinn Fein/ IRA in Hansard on the net in the late 90s. Remember Kincora ? Tip of a very dirty British iceberg.
Why fund rape, torture, murder and destruction of innocents across the community ? Divide and conquer. A political policy the British are still callously playing at in mass media silenced Northern Ireland. What for ? The favoured privileged few, as ever.
Why such vile behaviour against their own innocent citizens should have been indulged and enabled by succeeding British governments for so many decades needs to be immediately investigated by the courts that deal with crimes against humanity in the Hague. Enough is enough.
If a hard border is imposed across Ireland, the one the DUP are working towards with this hard right conservative Brexit junta,& I live in NI in a DUP stronghold where they talk openly about their real plans, they will have succeeded in wriggling out of EU jurisdiction and their past crimes will continue to go politically unexposed and legally unaddressed. Hence their hysterical desire to take the entire UK down rather than allow Norther Ireland yo remain under EU regulations.
Ian Paisley was a strange mix. Away from religion he was an assiduous constituency MP looking after all his constituent’s interests, whatever their religion. One also saw an anti-establishment figure who did not get along with the official Unionists. Although he might not have liked this he was a Irishman, though of a (very) different stripe from those in Dublin. Perhaps this was the secretive water grand trine working out.