Beauty and Atrocity: People, Politics and Ireland’s Fight for Peace. Joshua Levine

years ago, outside a very famous hotel, in Durban in South Africa, a gospel evangelist was giving out gospel tracts. In that hotel there was staying a very famous actor, and down at the quayside was a great liner called the Durban Castle. And that famous actress had booked a passage and had a ticket on that liner, and she came out through the door, to get the cab to take her to board the vessel, and this Christian gentleman stepped up, and he handed her a gospel tract. And when she saw it, she threw it on the pavement and she stamped her heel through it and she said, “Damn your God!” She went aboard the Durban Castle. But when it docked at Southampton, she had disappeared. There was an inquiry, a steward was arrested, he was tried and he was found guilty of murder. And he murdered that actress, and it was found that he had pushed her dead body through the port-hole. And she had been buried in the briny deep. Her name was Gay Gibson, a famous actress. “What think ye of Christ?” “Damn your God!” My friends, you don’t need to use such a blasphemous expression, but tonight, by turning your back on Christ, you can go to the same hell that that Christ-rejecting actress went to! SHE DIDN’T KNOW THAT SHE WAS ON HER LAST JOURNEY! And her body perished in the depths of the sea, but her soul baptised in the waves of infinite wrath, for all eternity paid the penalty for her doom and for her Christ-rejection. Friends, how is it with your soul? Men and women, eternity! Eternity! WHERE WILL YOU BE, IN ETERNITY?’

      Yet as well as being a hell-fire preacher with the ability to inspire and terrify his congregants, Paisley has also been the most influential Protestant politician of the past fifty years. It has often been difficult to gauge where his politics ends and his religion begins. When he has thundered against Catholicism in sermons – ‘Romanism is the enemy of liberty! Romanism is the enemy of this province! Romanism is the enemy of God!’ – he has been speaking as both cleric and politician. He has articulated the political fears of his people with an evangelical fury: ‘The Protestants of Ulster are not going to be trifled with! We are in no mood to permit anything that is going to hinder our defence and preservation of Ulster as part of the United Kingdom!’ The Troubles might not have been religious in nature, but the wily, ambitious Paisley certainly was, and his presence was one of the major reasons why Northern Ireland careered into chaos at the end of a decade that had promised hope.

      At the beginning of his tenure, O’Neill made speeches promising that his government would no longer be acting solely in the interests of unionists. His words were received positively by many Catholics, but this only served to make him unpopular with the harder-line unionists. It was a matter of basic mathematics that if he were to bring more jobs, more houses, and more votes to Catholics, that meant fewer of each for Protestants, and this fact was never lost on loyalists.

      These were the fears that Paisley was able to articulate, while turning himself, in the eyes of some of his supporters, into a prophet of semi-biblical proportions. In 1964 he threatened to march his supporters to the republican headquarters in west Belfast to remove a small Irish flag that had been spotted in the window. The police had decided not to intervene, but under pressure from Paisley they smashed the window and removed the flag. Riots ensued and attitudes hardened on all sides. There are many, many incidents which have been said to have led to the Troubles. Of all of those commonly cited, this is probably the earliest.

      In 1965 O’Neill invited the Taoiseach (Prime Minister) of the Irish Republic, Sean Lemass, to Stormont. It was an attempt to normalize relations between north and south, and to promote economic cooperation. Previous prime ministers of Northern Ireland had refused to meet leaders of the Irish Republic, on the grounds that the Republic still laid constitutional claim on the north. The visit was controversial and was only publicly announced as Lemass was arriving at Stormont. Even the Northern Ireland cabinet had not been informed until that morning. Grasping for the right words with which to welcome his guest, O’Neill rejected ‘Ulster’ and ‘Northern Ireland’ and settled on ‘Welcome to the North’.