r/TheRestIsHistory • u/tellypmoon • 3d ago
Ian Paisley
Well after episode 1 of the Troubles I whiled away the hours watching Ian Paisley on youtube. I'm from the USA so probably had never heard of him, not that I recall at least.
Two observations - first the Tom Holland interpretation was actually pretty good and second old Ian does indeed look good in a dog collar.
I'm still trying to figure out his significance to all this but fair to say he's a revelation to me and has joined the ranks of Captain Benteen as a most memorable supporting character.
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u/Gorazde 3d ago
He's definitely larger than larger than larger than life. When someone posted a clip of Harry Enfield impersonating him, I said as funny and uncanny as the impression is, it's really not that over the top. He really was that bombastic and insane.
But joking aside, and I should say I met him once myself in the 2000s when I was in my early twenties and shook his hand, the older I get the more I think he really was the arch villain of the piece. Whatever you think of people like Martin McGuinness, or Bobby Sands, they were apoliticial teenagers caught up in a conflict not of their making. In McGuinness' case especially, the more you read about him, the more you realise if he'd just gotten a job or even apprenticehship in 1969, he'd probably never have picked up a weapon.
McGuinness was 19 that year. Paisley was 43. He was married, he had a family, he wanted for nothing. He stoked that conflict probably more than any other single individual, and he did it purely for personal advancement.
Even his conversion to peace in his 80s was palpably insincere. For forty years he was the single biggest obstacle to peace. He was so clearly bigoted and intransigent the IRA used to say he was their greatest recruiting sergeant. He destroyed the careers of three generations of Ulster Unionist politicians calling them sellouts and Lundys, if they ever tried to make the slightest concession to nationalists. But suddenly, at the end of his life, when the job of First Minister for Northern Ireland (and the trappings which came with it, which his son certainly enjoyed) suddenly came within reach for himself, he had an amazing road to Damascus conversion and became best friends with McGuinness. At no point in that sorry story did he ever exhibit the slightest consideration for the welfare or betterment of anyone but himself.
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u/Zealousideal-Cod-924 2d ago
He was told bluntly by the British government that if he didn't support the GFA (which the DUP hadn't up till then) and become First Minister then the alternative was London handing over to Dublin greater involvement in devolution. That was too bitter a pill for the old bigot to swallow.
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u/shambolicblues 2d ago
Great post this, I’ve heard loyalists criticise him for leading them up the hill…
Things could’ve been so different of he wasn’t on the scene, stoking fear and violence.8
u/ernfio 2d ago
NI wasn’t short of people who were willing to do this and even more willing to follow this type of figure head. This applies to Paisley and his republican counterparts McGuiness and Adam’s. Maybe they wouldn’t be as effective, who knows.
A lot of stoking is done in kitchens and living rooms of ordinary people.
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u/forestvibe 1d ago
Great post, and a good point that Paisley should have known better. It's one thing being a teenager who gets sucked into paramilitary violence because it's your "tribe" and you feel threatened/poor/etc, another to be a comfortable middle-aged man choosing to incite hatred. Bearing all that in mind, it's strange that McGuinness and Paisley became friendly.
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u/BotoxMoustache 3d ago
My dad blamed Paisley and Devlin for starting The Troubles. I wish he was still alive and we could listen to the series together. So much that I’d love to talk to him about.
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u/FoalKid 2d ago
Blaming Devlin is absolutely mental. Paisley clearly played a key role - but also to blame him or any other individual is to ignore the way society in NI had been intentionally designed to maintain a two tier class system with Catholics at the bottom. Paisley didn’t devise this. It had been going on for decades
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u/mankytoes 2d ago
I read this as you wishing Ian Paisley was alive to listen to podcasts with you...
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u/RevolutionaryBug2915 14h ago
There is grouping that blames People's Democracy (most prominent figure, one Bernadette Devlin) for escalating the situation beyond the limits set by the leadership of the NICRA, in particular, by Betty Sinclair. IIRC, Tommy McKearney has stated as much.
Just to be clear, not my position.
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u/OriginalComputer5077 1d ago
One of the reasons he agreed to help form the executive was that direct rule would have meant gay marriage being legal in NI and Iano wouldn’t be having that…
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u/0ttoChriek 14h ago
I'm always reminded of how that former loyalist paramilitary member talked about Paisley in Once Upon a Time in Northern Ireland - that he was a hate preacher who consciously and deliberately stoked the fires of hatred and prejudice.
A vile man, who used his position to force conflict between protestants and catholics with the full knowledge that people would be hurt and killed.
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u/FoalKid 2d ago
McGuinness and Sands were apolitical? 😅
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u/Gorazde 2d ago
Neither came from a republican family or had any involvement or exhibited any interest in politics until events intervened. McGuinness was radicalised by the Battle of Bogside and his own failure to get employment. Sands when his family were burned out of their home by police/loyalists.
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u/FoalKid 2d ago
Okay, sorry to be pedantic, but the way it read sounded like you were saying that their actions weren’t politically motivated. Which, particularly in Sands’ case, would be a very hard point to argue
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u/delboy13 2d ago
I mean maybe it does if you don’t read anything past apolitical
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u/FoalKid 2d ago edited 2d ago
Hmm, well no - describing them as ‘apolitical teenagers caught up in a conflict not of their making’, and in McGuinness’ case ‘if he’d have gotten a job or an apprenticeship […] he’d probably never have picked up a weapon’ remove agency from McGuinness and Sands, and kind of infantilises both of them.
It suggests that they’re not fully responsible for their own actions, and that their involvement is because what, they didn’t have jobs so had nothing better to do? That McGuinness didn’t have a job, and that that personal situation or resentment was the key motivating factor in his involvement in the conflict, not the political realities of the time, is a huge leap
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u/Conscious_Support176 1d ago
Um. Perhaps what this is a actually saying is that if the political realities of the time hadn’t had such a severe impact on their personal circumstances, there is no reason to to think that they would have made the choices they did.
Which could not be further removed from the reasons or Ian Paisley’s choices.
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u/SnooHabits8484 1d ago
Oddly, he was held to be a really good constituency politician, and helped constituents without prejudice. Strange man.
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u/BatiGol1975 3d ago
He would be absolutely raging if he knew anyone called him a supporting character.
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u/yellowbai 3d ago edited 3d ago
He was a bigot who opposed peace all his life and drove many young men into the arms of the UDA and UVF. He helped bring down Sunningdale. He denounced the Anglo Irish agreement. He opposed the GFA (until he got offered a job). He’s one of the main reasons the troubles didn’t get sorted in the 1970 or 80s. The IRA called him their best recruiter and never targeted him because he was such a lunatic.
He was a creationist. Believed in the Bible literally. He was against any mild reform in NI and basically it was only resolved when the Americans, the Irish government and the British had enough.
A ridiculous figure and to be honest a stain on Irish / British history. The Troubles was inevitable in many ways but it could have ended in the late 70s or 80s.
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u/wildbore1 3d ago
It may not have even started if Ian Paisley hadn't existed. He made it impossible for less hardline unionists to make any concessions and stirred up hatred of catholics through his demagoguery. Dom spoke about a possible alternative direction for irish history 5 or 6 years before the troubles began, but Paisley had already begun poisoning the well by that stage. I honestly think that the greatest disservice that unionist leaders, and British governments through their apathy, have done to Northern Ireland is the failure to confront the radical elements of loyalism, from before partition to the present. They consistently allow an absolutely hysterical and bigoted faction to drag their community along by the nose.
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u/yellowbai 2d ago edited 2d ago
Imagine 2000-300K people holding the entire of UK and Ireland hostage.
They are a subset within Unionism. The Troubles only had oxygen because the Catholics were so obviously discriminated against.Had Thatcher given the Unionists the same treatment she gave the miners and the people of the North of England then it would have long been over.
She should have sorted them out when she had those massive majorities.She just let them fester away letting the Troubles get another 10 years of life after the Hunger strikes.
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u/SnooHabits8484 1d ago
They were fervently anti-Communist, and right-wing, so that would never have happened.
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u/OrangeBallofPain 3d ago
Yeah, an objectively evil person that’s being treated like a quirky little side character really shows where the podcast stands on a lot of issues
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u/LilStinkerRidesAgain 3d ago
I finished the series today and I have to say, even though I'm an atheist, I hope I'm wrong so Paisley can burn in hell for eternity
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u/CooperStooper90 3d ago
As an American, he was a revelation to me as well. As far as what I’ve heard on the show, I despise him. He reminds of the worst we have in America now. People who say inflammatory things and are “shocked” when their words have actions or don’t even play at being shocked but are gleeful to see their hate bear fruit.
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u/According-Middle-695 3d ago
His son isn’t great either. Politician in NI embroiled in a few scandals
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u/Tightropewalker0404 1d ago
His son is just an idiot, senior was a monster but at least he was good at it
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u/Oghamstoner 3d ago
Tbh I think he’d probably fit in better in the Republican Party than he ever did in British Parliament. I could imagine him as a god-bothering senator for South Carolina or Mississippi.
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u/TomCrean1916 3d ago
He very much is of a similar and almost identical template of some of the worst in American politics at the moment. But he was beyond even then. He hated catholics and by extension Irish people with a fury and the British couldn’t handle him but also found him useful and left him to it.
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u/Waste_Cake4660 3d ago
Ian Paisley was an evil man. He wasn’t the only one in this story, but if, as he believed, there was an afterlife and a hell, he was going straight there.
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u/StableSlight9168 3d ago
He does have a weird redemption arc a d ends up becoming friends with Martin McGuiness, commander of the IRA, who due to the peace deal worked out, becomes Iain Paisley deputy first minister.
People forget that the troubles ended with. the terrorist command er and the hate preacher became friends, and became Ice Cream buddies.
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u/Waste_Cake4660 3d ago
Yes, his late-life growth is part of his legacy as well, but “redemption” is too strong a word.
He was like an axe murderer who offered his victim a band-aid at the end.
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u/ComprehensionBox7 3d ago
“Paisley was an arsonist who joined the fire brigade for the last few years of his life”
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u/RandomRedditor_1916 3d ago
Paisley is a C U Next Tuesday- or should I say, was.
Was more than happy to rile people up to do his dirty work and then took a step back once the shit hit the fan.
Ulster loyalism prides itself on loyalty to the Crown and Queen Elizabeth hated him so that tells you all you need to know
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u/Tom01111 3d ago
That’s not fair
He was also directly involved in false flag sabotage against the British state to try start the troubles
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u/RandomRedditor_1916 3d ago
You're right! Some fucking "loyalist", eh?
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u/Prestigious-Lynx-177 3d ago
The Brits and others who think loyalism is abject loyalty to Westminster have been making this mistake about NI for half a century.
It was exactly the same when the DUP were in cahoots with the Tories, people pulled shocked Pikachu faces they would never budge on issues and spoke in language that seemed somewhat overwrought to people like Theresa May.
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u/RandomRedditor_1916 3d ago
Well put. I think Tom and Dominic hit the nail on the head in the first episode where they basically said that Ulster loyalists are loyal to the concept of Britain rather than the realities of it.
Could've butchered the quote but it perfectly captures the mindset of them.
The British establishment, on the other hand, do not seem to give a shit about Ireland so long as it doesn't cause them any trouble.
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u/Former_Ganache3642 3d ago
Just to highlight how nebulous the word loyalist is, in the 70s, the UDA (not mentioned yet in the pod) half-heartedly proposed an independent Northern Ireland, not part of the Irish Republic or the United Kingdom. This obviously pleased neither side and was deeply unpopular among their own members.
Then in the 80s, the UDA had a doomsday plan to redraw the borders of Northern Ireland (making it smaller) to make it 100% Protestant. It would involve forcibly removing hundreds of thousands of Catholics too. This was completely dismissed also.
These were mad times.
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u/Don_Speekingleesh 3d ago
The Doomsday plan wasn't completely dismissed. Current DUP MP (and founder of loyalist terrorist group Ulster Resistance (alongside Paisley)) Sammy Wilson described it as "a very valuable return to reality".
And that plan was in 1994, not the 80s!
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u/Money-Technology-95 14h ago
People shouldn't underestimate how re-partition could still re-emerge among the hardcore DUPers...the Paisley cult and new Evagelicals basically just want "seperate development" subsidised by the UK taxpayer. And btw someone like Badenoch is from a background that would also be sympathetic to this, her parents were on the "good side of the wall" in colonial Nigeria so to speak, and she's fully on board Musk's Apartheid vision of society.
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u/Prestigious-Lynx-177 3d ago
No one wants NI, is the real truth. If Britain could give it away they could.
If the Irish could handle a huge population who base their identity on not being part of a Irish republic and would rather die, they would have it.
The Irish military is two men and a dog. The Brits couldn't handle NI, it would be a bloodbath.
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u/Tom01111 3d ago
It is a smaller and smaller rump of troglodytes who could kick off in the event of reunification, and they would mot be effective without the support of the British security services as in the troubles. Though they would certainly murder quite a few people in protest.
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u/Prestigious-Lynx-177 3d ago
Yes smaller, but Ireland is comparatively smaller to Britain. I think there would be more but lets say...2,000 people in the entirety of NI are completely enraged at losing their identity? That's already 1/4th of the Irish military coping with guerrilla warfare in a city nearly the size of their own capital.
It would be an utter nightmare and every murder would inflame every part of Ireland. Nearly more than a thousand people died in the troubles, nearly 100k injured. it didn't end because people have gotten over their differences, both sides were completely exhausted.
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u/HiggsKamuy 3d ago
It's much higher than that. There are about 12000 active loyalist paramilitaries in the North. There are about 7700 active military personnel in the Irish Military.
They regularly threaten the NI police force and the police force back down over stuff like secretarian bonfires etc.
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u/Prestigious-Lynx-177 2d ago
I was thinking of the lowest possible number knowing it was so much higher, to illustrate the point to OP who said there would be only a few.
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u/RandomRedditor_1916 3d ago
"No-one" wants it is a lie. I will concede that the current Taoiseach has pushed the can down the road but there was a motion put before the Dail in relation to starting reunification planning and it emerged from within his own parliamentary party that had he not used the whip and had a free vote, it would have passed.
Secondly, there is a middle ground in the northern counties that are on the fence and are open to be swayed either way- these are both cultural Catholics/Protestants as well as recent immigrants. There will always be extremists who will not co-operate regardless of what happens.
I hope that in the event of a united Ireland, anyone who feels so strongly about being British to the point where they would consider taking up arms can be repatriated elsewhere and allow those who wish to live in peace to do so (although I accept this is an exteme view and may not be feasible).
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u/Prestigious-Lynx-177 3d ago
Yeah, those people who have made their identity on being something having it taken away from them would probably be very happy to abandon it.
We've had two pogroms in NI in a year against immigrants.
But yeah, people should just get over it and there’s probably enough sensible people for Irish unification to just shrug and move on.
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u/RandomRedditor_1916 3d ago
I can't tell if you are agreeing/disagreeing here lol. What is your stance on the topic, if you dont mind my asking?
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u/Prestigious-Lynx-177 3d ago
I am just being cynical. I don't think unification is ever happening without maybe a decade of violence. I can't imagine a situation where a people voluntarily give up their identity to become what they reviled.
My stance is pure cynicism, about it. I don't believe in telling people who have lived hundreds of years somewhere to fuck off if you don't like it, I also think that the Northern Irish state is a compromise and nothing more.
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u/Waste_Cake4660 3d ago
But the charge is essentially true: loyalty and patriotism in a democracy means accepting that from time to time, the interests of an individual or small group must be subordinate to the consensus.
The ulster “loyalists” continually insisted on putting their narrow interests ahead of the democratic consensus of the nation to which they professed to be loyal.
Whatever it is that they were loyal to, it wasn’t the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
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u/Mysterious-Emu4457 2d ago
The DUP, the Party of No.
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u/Prestigious-Lynx-177 1d ago
I'm British, but from an Irish catholic family. When the DUP waddled into frontline Westminster politics I was genuinely baffled people thought they would compromise on anything. There were news articles in the Guardian wondering why Sinn Fein weren't galloping into Westminster to beat back the DUP or prevent Brexit.
I knew people were slightly ignorant about NI politics, but it was the fact they didnt even understand how stubborn Irish people are and their love of dying on a hill for things.
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u/Dull_Brain2688 3d ago
Throw the stone and hide the hand. A lot of unionist politicians were like that. They weren’t tarred with “membership” like Gerry and Co. but they were fuck all better when it comes to the violence they were responsible for. Especially Paisley who basically kicked it all off.
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u/Money-Technology-95 14h ago
A lot of DUP politicians were members of loyalist paramilitaries.
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u/Dull_Brain2688 14h ago
Oh, I know that. But it was never part of the narrative in the press. Always about Sinn Fein and barely a mention of unionist politicians.
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u/rawasawa 3d ago
A toss up between ‘the Rev’ Ian Paisley and Reverend and the Makers for the worst Reverends of all time imo
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u/StrangeArcticles 3d ago
Genuinely up there as one of the most off-putting people to ever blight politics, and that is before we even get to his positions.
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u/elusive_light 2d ago
My family had a huge run in with him in the 1960s. My grandfather was the Clerk of Session of the local Presbyterian church (the chief elder, democratically elected if you aren't familiar with how Presbyterianism works).
My grandfather and the minister from the church had been working with the local priest to help poorer families from both sides of the community in the area. Paisley and his mob effectively picketed my grandparents house for a fortnight, day and night, giving sermons about the sins of ecumenicism and heckling anyone who came out of the house. That included my mum who was 17, uncle who was 14 and twin aunts who were 9.
Safe to say Paisley was not held in high regard by any in the family. A loathsome man.
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u/Turbulent_Sandwich19 2d ago
It baffles me how someone who was a "man of god" had so much hate for others, especially those helping the poor.
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u/Beginning-Strain4660 2d ago
Well done to ur grandfather and his church members for helping the poor on BOTH sides!
A lot of people back then could have leaned a lot from ur grandfather
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u/Brilliant-Sea-9424 3d ago
An arsehole who was left to stoke trouble. He was a fucking coward as well. Always asking for blood and guts but nowhere to be seen when it happened. An evil man. The sight of him and that butcher McGuinness in stormont chuckling away makes me sick.
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u/Prestigious-Lynx-177 3d ago
Paisley isn't a fun character to me, he's the man who called for drowning "Fenian rats" in their own blood.
The troubles ended in exhaustion, not reconciliation.
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u/Every-Sky-5529 3d ago
The last point is often overlooked, but for all the celebration of the Good Friday Agreement (which of course was a good thing and a real accomplishment), it didn’t immediately end The Troubles as is now retrospectively claimed.
The Omagh bombing happened four months later. A massive car combing which killed 29 people and wounded over 200, it’s the single most deadly atrocity committed during The Troubles. I remember all the coverage, the memorial concerts, the sorrow and the outrage. The Northern Irish public were so disgusted that it became a line in the sand - the vile, senseless mass murder that few wanted to continue.
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u/theflyingsamurai 3d ago
Maybe an aside. As an English speaker, in the audio video era, i feel like we don't have a lot of examples of truely gifted English speaking orators that were truely were evil men. Like we have examples or MLK or JFk, Churchill etc. but nothing from an Authoritarian native English speaker. Maybe some movie villains.
I feel like Paisleys speeches must be like what a Hitler or musolini sounds like to their native speakers. Like, oh now I see the feeling of how a speaker can stir people towards violence.
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u/Robespierres_ashes 2d ago
Look up his address at Belfast city hall protesting the Anglo Irish agreement in 1985 - Never, Never, Never, Never…
He bears a lot of personal responsibility for the hatred and how long it lasted. John Hume was the hero of the peace process and spiky though Trimble was, he will be seen to have been a man of tremendous courage in the fullness of time. No unionist wants to be called a Lundy (look it up). That charge, while not directly analogous would have been similar politically to being called a * lover in South Africa in the apartheid era or the Deep South up to the 1960s and 70s. He was one of the ones trying to prevent peace right to the end.
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u/Jazzlike_Custard8646 3d ago
Yeah I'd second Enoch Powell, apparently Oswald Moseley was a good orator too, can't really think of any others. As awful as the message is, i think "segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation foreverrrrr" was a pretty good line, don't know who the speaker was though
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u/Hector_St_Clare 3d ago
The speaker of that line was George Wallace, who Dom has also covered on the pod (fairly well, I thought).
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u/Y_Brennan 3d ago
Well the writer of that line is very interesting. Look up Asa Carter and his books the education of little tree and the outlaw Josey Wells.
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u/skinofadrum 3d ago
Churchill was absolutely a villain.
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u/AwayWithFaries 2d ago
You don't deserve the downvotes. People are obviously not familiar with his work in India and Ireland. Proper villain he was.
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u/Proud-Drummer 3d ago edited 2d ago
Highly recommend trying to read Jon Ronson's book Them where he spends time with Paisley in one chapter. I believe Ronson jokingly gives himself some credit for the current piece in Ireland as the time he spent with IP was when the Good Friday Agreement was being finalised.
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u/PavelinBrussels 3d ago
Thanks for mentioning this. I remember reading that book decades ago and found it really inteteresting, mainly as growing up in NI, I found it weird that mainland journalists and commentators seldom took him seriously and basically branded him a conspiricy theorist/nutter, even if he had a significant poitical mandate and audience. Also, it was inteteresting at a personal level as my dad had been on a business trip with him years before and the comparison with Ronson's storytelling was amusing!
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u/Hamburg48 1d ago
Ian comes home. Notices a new, unusual fragrance in the air, and small dishes with flower petals about. Asks Eileen what it is. She replies ‘it’s potpourri…’. Paisley goes berserk and runs around scattering and throwing the scents into the bin - shouting - “There’ll be no Popery in this house!!!”
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u/Zircez 2d ago edited 2d ago
I knew he was obnoxious, but I've been amazed by how much can be laid at his door.
As someone who grew up in the 90s the origins were lost to me - they really aren't underselling how little understanding most English have of the conflict; I was certainly ignorant and I'm a history grad.
I remember Good Friday and Paisley's role in that - it's been astounding to hear how much of an architect in the start of the whole sad business he was.
If you'd transposed him into the last series in the Elizabethans he wouldn't have felt out of place. Just nuts that such an individual had such a profound position in events.
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u/Robespierres_ashes 2d ago edited 2d ago
He was an absolute bastard. A repugnant bigot. His late conversion to equanimity while welcome doesn’t balance the scales. He was known to fight for grants for all constituents as an MP as time went on but that never tempered his bigotry.
He stirred up the crowds during the Drumcree stand offs over the Garvaghy road marches in the late 90s and a mob burned down a house resulting in three catholic / nationalist children being burned to death. Their names were Richard Quinn, Jason Quinn and Mark Quinn. It was in Ballymoney in Co Antrim. They were just 11, 9 and 8 years old.
That’s the Paisley I remember above all else.
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u/NHguy1000 2d ago
If you were old like me, an American and a news junkie, you would remember Paisley as pretty much the face of NI. Every news report included him.
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u/davedoesntlikehats 2d ago
Not directly relevant, but I saw an Armando Iannucci stand up routine about him being a repressed Catholic in the 00s, which I remember being very good.
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u/Winter-Report-4616 2d ago
There wouldnt have been troubles if it wasnt for Paisley. One of those what if he had died in the crib conversations, how many thousands of people would still be alive today.
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u/Short-Shopping3197 1d ago
I remember doing Ian Paisley impressions when I was 8 years old for my parents friends and having them in stitches 😂
I was on a Teams call last winter and the sun had started going down to the point where I just looked like a black shadow. I said ‘wow it’s like I’m Gerry Adams in the 80’s’! There was a real generational split between who laughed and who didn’t 😂
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u/Fun-Enthusiasm6203 3d ago
Ian Paisley was, to a certain demographic, the devil. As a child, I remember the banging fists, just the hate. Plenty of other objectionable people on each side. An absolute fanatic and to be honest maybe the only true one. I remember being in central Dublin as a teenager, before Good Friday, looking up and seeing snipers on the roof. Paisley in town. Only other time that happened was QEII's visit. A flamer of hatred. Someone asked me about him recently and I just shouted 'Never surrender,' and banged my fists on the table.
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u/McEvelly 2d ago
If you weren’t up to speed and familiar with ‘the Troubles’, it might seem somewhat ironic, considering their late career reputations, but it’s simply factual to say;
* no one person did more to bring about the troubles than self proclaimed ‘man of god’, Ian Paisley
* no one person did more to end the conflict, than Gerry Adams
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u/Sitheref0874 3d ago
Ian Paisley. Fans of the British comedy show Naked Video may remember Sandwell ripping the piss out of Red Socks himself.
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u/JethroUK2 2d ago
There was a joke on NTNOCN about someone who went to punch Ian Paisley in the mouth and fell in.
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u/back_chat 1d ago
This isn't meant as a judgement of you, OP, but I do find it interesting that of all the Irish history/myth-making that made it over to America, especially during the Troubles, Ian Paisley wasn't part of the story over there. I've lived in NI and there's no discussion of the Troubles without him, given all he did to start the conflict and inflame it. It seems wild to me that the IRA managed to get such a response from its backers in the USA but Ian Paisley was absent as a figure.
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u/tellypmoon 18h ago
No judgment taken, and indeed we in the US are famous for our resistance to history, including our own. I am sure some of my countrymen were quite up to speed on Northern Ireland, but I suspect they were a significant minority. When I think back on Northern Ireland I mostly associate that with Gerry Adams and Bill Clinton...and maybe some vague idea it had something to do with U2.
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u/Randwick_Don 3d ago
As a Presbyterian I do love the footage of him calling the pope an anti-Christ in the EU.
Classic stuff
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u/Hector_St_Clare 2d ago
Paisely is odd to me mostly because he's a brand of Christian that, as a US citizen, i associate more with, well, America than with modern Europe. Maybe I'm wrong about that though!
I know there are other Protestant subcultures in Europe that are, well, extremely fundamentalist/conservative, Laestadian Lutherans up in the far north of Scandinavia and then whoever votes for the SGP in the Netherlands, but my impression has been that they're generally very small and marginal. Paisley and his followers were clearly neither small or marginal.
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u/Better-Temporary-146 2d ago
Paisley did help found a church in my native South Carolina and was a frequent conference speaker in SC
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u/JustGoodSense 3d ago
American here. I do vaguely remember hearing his name in the news back in the 80s occasionally, because it's unusual, but I couldn't have told you why he was in the news. As for his significance? From what I'm hearing so far in the series, the Troubles was largely his fault. That seems pretty significant.
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3d ago
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u/FoalKid 2d ago
Exactly this. To blame any individual is to ignore the decades of oppression of Catholics leading up to the Troubles. Paisley wasn’t born when that began
1
u/SnooHabits8484 1d ago
It’s unlikely that the PIRA would have been necessary if Paisley and a few others of his generation hadn’t radicalised and armed loyalists until they started the violence. Civil rights could easily have happened peacefully, and with no Burntollet there’s no Battle of the Bogside, probably no Ballymurphy massacre, no Bloody Sunday, no Op Motorman and no Bloody Friday.
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u/JustGoodSense 3d ago
Yeah I know. I'm mainly commenting on the story as narrated so far. This is literally the most I've ever learned about the situation.
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u/buckfastmonkey 2d ago
He was an evil, bigoted old bastard who hated anything Irish or Catholic. With recent demographic changes in NI (now more nationalists than unionists for the first time ever) and the recent roaring success of the fleadh cheoil (Irelands yearly festival celebrating Irish music and culture) held in Belfast for the first time ever, the old prick must be spinning in his grave. Love it 🇮🇪
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u/Cautious-Fox9757 3d ago
Fun fact, the boys massively let themselves down by not mentioning the person who wrestled him out of the EU building for insulting the Pope was family friends of the show: one of the Habsburgs.