Paisley, Ian (Richard Kyle) (1926– )

Northern Ireland politician, cleric, leader of the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) from 1971, and Northern Ireland's first minister from 2007. An imposing and deeply influential member of the Protestant community, he is a founding member and moderator (chairperson) of the Free Presbyterian Church of Ulster. Throughout his life he has been staunchly committed to Northern Ireland's union with Britain and fiercely opposed to a reunified Ireland or closer cooperation with the Republic of Ireland. His political career has been one of high drama, marked by protests, resignations, fervent oratory, and a pugnacious and forthright manner. In 2004, he retired from the European Parliament, but remained a Westminster MP and in the Northern Ireland Assembly. After support for the formerly dominant Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) crashed at the May 2007 elections to the Northern Ireland Assembly, the DUP emerged as the largest single party and the veteran Paisley became first minister, with Martin McGuinness, of the IRA's political wing Sinn Fe(acute)in, as deputy prime minister.

In 1971 Paisley set up the DUP as a more hardline and working-class oriented rival to the ruling dominant Ulster Unionist Party. He was influential in the actions of the Ulster Workers' Council and their general strike, which destroyed the Sunningdale Agreement in 1974. Paisley's powerful speeches and image of strength won him great support within the Protestant community, and he was elected to the European Parliament for Northern Ireland in 1979.

In the 1980s, Paisley stuck rigidly to his ‘no surrender’ policies, temporarily resigning his seat in 1985 in protest at the Anglo-Irish Agreement, since it provided for an Irish input into the British governing of Northern Ireland. He also opposed the 1998 Good Friday Agreement on power-sharing in Northern Ireland, and was supported on this issue by his constituents in the May 1998 referendum (his North Antrim constituency was the only of Northern Ireland's 18 seats in which there was a majority against the accord). He went on to lead the opposition to the agreement within the new Northern Ireland Assembly. In 2000 he won the North Antrim seat in the Westminster Parliament.

Paisley was born in Armagh, the son of a Baptist minister, and was educated locally and at theological colleges in South Wales and Belfast. He preached his first sermon at the age of 16, and was ordained by his father in 1946. He founded the Free Presbyterian Church of Ulster in Belfast in 1951 and by the mid-1980s it had more than 10,000 members. When Catholic civil-rights agitation began to flourish in the 1960s, Paisley set up the Ulster Protestant Volunteers in 1966 and organized marches and speeches in opposition. This led to imprisonment for six weeks in 1968 for unlawful assembly. In April 1970, one year into ‘the Troubles’ in Northern Ireland, Paisley won the seat for Bannside in Northern Ireland's Stormont assembly, and he went on to win the North Antrim seat two months later.

Paisley's Presbyterian beliefs were inextricably bound up with his political aims, and in 1988 he was ejected from the European Parliament for interrupting an address by Pope John Paul II. Paisley was deeply sceptical of the various initiatives to solve the problems of Northern Ireland, particularly those involving any ‘sell-out’, in his view, to the Dublin government, the Irish Republican Army (IRA), or Sinn Fein (the IRA's political wing).