Home > Ian Paisley
2 The largest personal vote for any politician in Northern Ireland
In the 1970s Paisley, sometimes affectionately known as 'Big Ian', established the most successful and longest lasting of his political movements, the Democratic Unionist Party which soon won seats at local council, province, national and European level; Paisley was elected one of Northern Ireland's three Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) at the first elections to the Brussels and Strasbourg-based European Parliament in 1979 and easily retained that seat in every European election until he stood down in 2004, receiving the highest popular vote of any Northern Irish, Irish or British MEP (although as the rest of the UK uses a different electoral system it is hard to compete with this total) and one of the highest anywhere in Europe. The DUP also holds seats in the British House of Commons and has been elected to each of the Northern Ireland conventions and assemblies set up since the party's creation. It has long been the major challenger to the major unionist party, the Ulster Unionist Party (known for a time in the 1970s and 1980s as the Official Unionist Party (OUP) to distinguish it from the then multitude of other unionist parties, some set up by deposed former leaders).
3 Ian Paisley says 'Ulster Says No'
In the 1980s Paisley like all the major unionist leaders opposed the Anglo-Irish Agreement (1985), signed by British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and Irish Taoiseach (prime minister) Dr. Garret FitzGerald. The AIA provided for an Irish input into the British governing of Northern Ireland, through an Anglo-Irish Secretariat based at Maryfield, outside Belfast and meetings of the Anglo Irish Conference co-chaired by the Republic's Minister for Foreign Affairs and Britain's Secretary of State for Northern Ireland. Vast crowds attended mass rallies addressed by then UUP leader James Molyneaux and Paisley at which the slogan " Ulster Says No " was used to express unionist opposition by what its critics alleged was a form of joint authority over Northern Ireland. Paisley controversially set up an unofficial paramilitary unit which met secretly called the Third Force. However though violent resistance to what was claimed to be "Dublin rule" was threatened, it did not materialise from the Third Force, which was soon discredited and faded away
4 The Good Friday Agreement
Paisley's DUP was initially involved in the negotiations under former United States senator, George J. Mitchell that led to the Belfast Agreement (also known as the Good Friday Agreement on account of the day on which it was signed.) However the party withdrew in protest when Sinn Féin, a republican party with its own paramilitary wing that had killed over a thousand people in Northern Ireland since 1970 but which had since gone on indefinite ceasefire, was allowed to participate after the ceasefire. Paisley and his party opposed the Agreement in the referendum that followed its signing, and which saw the Agreement approved reasonably comfortably in Northern Ireland and by over 90% of voters in the Republic of Ireland. As part of the deal, the south changed the wording of the controversial Articles 2 and 3 of its constitution, which had originally claimed its government's de jure right to govern the whole island of Ireland, including Northern Ireland. The DUP fought the resulting election to the Northern Ireland Assembly, to which Paisley was elected, while keeping his seats in the Westminster and European parliaments. The DUP took two seats in the multi-party power-sharing executive (Paisley, like the leaders of the Social Democratic and Labour Party and Sinn Féin chose not to become a minister) but while serving as ministers refused to sit in at meetings of the Executive Committee (cabinet) in protest at Sinn Fein's participation. The Executive ultimately was suspended over unionist unhappiness on the slow nature of Provisional Irish Republican Army disarmament (The Provisional IRA and Sinn Féin sought to justify the slow pace by claiming that others' parties to the deal, notably the unionists and the British Government, were slow in implementing other areas of the Agreement that were of great importance to republicans). The discovery of a republican spy network operating among civil servants in the seat of government and parliament, Stormont, led to the ultimate decision to suspend the institutions created under the Belfast Agreement. While the Agreement has not been scrapped, its institutions remain in suspended animation, pending a resolution of the issues of IRA disarmament and the full implementation of all the Agreement's provisions.
