Religion, Nationalism, and Terror

Era Ends in N. Ireland as Paisley Says He’ll Retire - New York Times, March 5, 2008

LONDON — Ian Paisley, the 81-year-old Protestant evangelist who spent decades in implacable opposition to a compromise settlement of Northern Ireland’s sectarian violence before agreeing last year to join Irish nationalists in a power-sharing government, announced Tuesday that he will resign in May as the province’s first minister and as the leader of the Democratic Unionist party he founded.

The resignation was not a surprise; Mr. Paisley told associates months ago that he planned to leave office sometime this year. Political commentators in Belfast, the Northern Ireland capital, said the announcement was prompted partly by the approach in May of the first anniversary of the deal that made Mr. Paisley a partner in government with Martin McGuinness, the Sinn Fein leader who was previously a senior commander of the Irish Republican Army.

The I.R.A.’s campaign of armed resistance made it Mr. Paisley’s nemesis in the years when he barnstormed across the province condemning any deal that opened the way for power-sharing with the Catholic minority. For decades — first as the founder of a splinter evangelical church, the Free Presbyterians, and later as founder of the Democratic Unionists, who functioned as the church’s action wing — his style was characterized by his fire-and-brimstone rhetoric.

But aides who have watched as Mr. Paisley and Mr. McGuinness have governed together say there has been a remarkable absence of rancor between them. Though Mr. Paisley is first minister and Mr. McGuinness is deputy first minister, they govern as effective equals under the complex power-sharing arrangements reached last March. Mr. McGuinness, 52, has taken care to show deference to Mr. Paisley, reaching out a hand on more than one occasion to help steady him on public occasions.

Mr. Paisley’s announcement brought a flow of valedictory compliments from British and Irish political leaders. The former British prime minister Tony Blair told the BBC: “In the final analysis, he made it happen. The man famous for saying no will go down in history for saying yes.”

Ironically, Mr. Paisley’s resignation appears not to have been hastened by any disillusionment with the nationalists, who he has depicted as having accepted “British rule,” but by growing fractiousness within his own Democratic Unionist Party.

Powerful elements within the party have remained unreconciled to the deal with the nationalists, and its standing has slipped among Protestant voters, who gave the Paisley party its first election victory in 2003. In January, it lost an important by-election, and there was widespread talk in party ranks of a move to oust Mr. Paisley.