Paisley's Gone!

From the BBC:
"Obituary: Ian Paisley"

Ian Paisley was famous for his thunder. He was known to his supporters as "the big man" whose most reported words were "no", "never" and "not an inch". Yet in a political career that spanned nearly 40 years, he went from throwing snowballs at one Irish prime minister to embracing another one; from political "never man" to Northern Ireland's first minister. With his thunderous rhetoric and his bull-like voice, Ian Paisley was always the epitome of an American Deep South preacher. He was born in 1926 in Armagh. His father was a Baptist minister and his mother a preacher. He grew up in Ballymena, which was to become his political powerbase. But before politics, he was a preacher, delivering his first sermon aged 16 in a mission hall in County Tyrone. He was just 25 years old when he founded the Free Presbyterian Church. His early reputation as a Protestant extremist was forged in the 1960s. He once produced a Roman Catholic Eucharist wafer during a televised speech to the Oxford Union mocking it and those who who believed it sacred.  When Irish Prime Minister Sean Lemass was invited to Belfast in 1965 by NI Prime Minister Terence O'Neill, Paisley was furious and led 1,000 loyalists to Stormont to demonstrate. Two years later, he famously threw snowballs at another Irish Prime Minister, Jack Lynch, when he visited Northern Ireland.  He often took to the streets. He was sent to prison for six weeks for unlawful assembly when he organised a demonstration on 30 November 1968 and forced civil rights marchers to cut short their parade in the city of Armagh. He stood as a Protestant unionist and was elected to the Stormont Parliament in 1970. Two months later he took the North Antrim seat at Westminster. By 1971, he had founded the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) and he began a long battle with the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) for the trust of the unionist electorate. He opposed the formation of a power-sharing executive at Stormont in 1973 and became involved in the Ulster Workers Council strike that brought Northern Ireland to a standstill and led to the executive's collapse. Though he could be kindly and amusing in private, to his enemies and critics Ian Paisley was a sinister figure, a bigot and a dangerous presence.

They pointed to his involvement in Ulster Resistance. In 1981, he organised a demonstration of 500 men who paraded late at night on a County Antrim hillside, brandishing gun licences. The signing of the Anglo-Irish Agreement in 1985 saw him join forces with the then Ulster Unionist leader James Molyneaux. Thousands attended a protest meeting under the banner "Ulster Says No" in Belfast city centre. He was totally opposed to the 1993 Downing Street Declaration between the British and Irish governments, and one meeting with John Major ended abruptly with the DUP being asked to leave.
The party was convinced a secret deal had been done to secure the 1994 IRA ceasefire.  Paisley opposed the peace process from the beginning. He agreed to attend talks at Stormont in 1996, but when Sinn Fein was allowed in the following year, he walked out. He came back on the night before Good Friday 1998 to register his disgust. The Yes camp won and, in a new assembly, the DUP was in the same political arena as Sinn Féin, even if they did not sit around a cabinet table together. Ian Paisley never hid his hatred of republicanism, but he did nominate two DUP ministers to a new executive.  Mr Paisley's hardline stance of "no surrender" and "not an inch" seemed gradually less sure in his final years as other parties inched towards accommodation. He decided not to stand again for the European Parliament in 2004. In his career, he launched countless attacks on Catholicism and Irish republicanism. He condemned the Pope and the Roman Catholic Church as "the whore of Babylon" and staged a one-man protest against the Pope when the pontiff addressed the Strasbourg Parliament in October 1988.


^ There are some people (especially political leaders) who have done so many horrible things in their life that when they die the world breathes a sigh of relief and then rejoices. That is the case here with Paisley.  He was a so-called minister who did everything in his power to go against the preachings of the Christian Bible he claimed to adore (Protestant or Catholic) and preached nothing but hatred and violence. He helped lead Northern Ireland to almost 30 years of The Troubles. He refused basic civil rights to people and then had them attacked when they peacefully demonstrated. He is the Northern Ireland's equal to the bigoted, racist American Southern. I have been to England, Scotland, Ireland and Northern Ireland and have heard of him while over there, but the one thing I will never understand is why anyone ever followed him or his hatred. All I have to say is: good riddance to bad rubbish! The world is now better despite of you. ^

http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-northern-ireland-16910949