Whether as feared enemy or benign grandad, Ian Paisley has been a constant presence throughout most people's lives. Now that he is stepping down, what will their memories of the 'Big Man' be?
TODAY, Ian Paisley will resign as leader of the Democratic Unionist Party. Next Thursday, he will step down from his position as First Minister of Northern Ireland. It's a move towards obscurity that must seem alien to a man used to an uncontested position at the forefront of the public mind, his unmistakable hectoring "gulder" echoing down the decades. In fact, for many people in the North - those from younger generations - there has never been a time before Paisley. He has simply always been there, both loathed and adored, an enduring cultural constant. Now that he is preparing to fade from the political limelight, what memories do these children of the Troubles have of the "Big Man" - and have their perceptions of him changed in the last year of startlingly harmonious power-sharing?
While many of today's youngsters see Paisley as a vaguely benign, doddery grandad figure, and have little awareness of his controversial past as a fiery demagogue, those born in the 1970s and 1980s speak of him with much more intense feeling.
Bernard Keenan (25), a postgraduate student from Belfast, now studying in London, says: "Ian Paisley has always been my big other, the negation, the minus one, the Antichrist if you like. I remember the words written high on the wall of a block of flats on the Annadale Estate , just round the corner from my primary school: "Ulster Says No". I wondered how they got there. The letters were 10ft tall, stark, painted in straight white lines.
"How did they manage to reach up there? At a very young age, I rather liked this huge sign, singular and abstract. It was a simple statement of fact; bold, triumphant and somehow menacing. Yet already, before I knew who he was, Paisley was marking the limits of my understanding."
Keenan recalls how, as his awareness of Paisley's politics grew, so did his own fear and suspicion of the man and what he stood for. "We were Catholics and they were Prods . . . and now I knew that Paisley and Ulster were saying no to us," he says. "I remember a general election, Paisley on the TV. He was vicious, shouting his head off about something or other. 'Viper', said my grandmother. I asked my dad why the IRA hadn't killed him years ago. He said: 'He's probably more useful to them alive.' Paisley embodied the enemy in a way that made them easier to hate."
Many childhood memories are coloured, like Keenan's, by the visceral response of nearby adults to Paisley's rhetoric. Shane Horan (27), from Belfast, says, "My first memory of Paisley dates back to 1988, the year of his infamous denunciation of the pope . I recall my grandmother's disgust and her claim that he shouldn't call himself a man of God."
"I remember my neighbours spitting blood and kicking walls when Paisley called the pope the Antichrist," says Stephen Mullan (28). "That was far worse than his 'never, never, never' - the Anglo-Irish Agreement was nothing beside the dignity of Mother Church. As an eight-year-old, I was terrified that Paisley might be right, that the pope trod on souls with cloven hooves, that our idolatrous Romanish creeds made the baby Jesus cry. I began to curse my mucky papist ancestors for not devouring that lovely Protestant soup during the Great Hunger."
Some, like political activist Claire Hanna (27), remember experiencing a bewildering confusion between the two religious figureheads: "My family moved to Belfast when I was four years old, and even then I was aware of Ian Paisley. I asked my mum, is Paisley our leader or is it the pope?"
Yet one of the most frequently mentioned positive recollections of Paisley is his - apparently anomalous - concern for his Roman Catholic constituents.
"When I was wee I remember often hearing, 'No matter what you say about him he's always good to his Catholic constituents'," says Kelly Mullan (32), who grew up in Co Derry. "And the example cited was that he had put on a school bus from Ballymoney to the convent in Portstewart."
There's a wistfulness for what might have been too. Shane Horan says: "As a young politics and government student, I remember thinking that he could have been the best thing for Northern Ireland with his gift for oratory - had he represented everyone."
MANY MODERATE PROTESTANTS were repelled by Paisley's fire-breathing language, but were conscious that there was more to the man than his trademark stridency. Political researcher Kris Brown (38) says: "We weren't a Paisley household. Paisley was too religious and gospel hall in his language, not to mention opportunistic in raising political temperatures. But if his politics were a poor fit, this doesn't mean that he wasn't liked. There was a streak of mischief, provocative and barbed, which played well with almost everyone I knew - and the stereotype of the Paisleyite gulder was widely understood to be just one side of him.
"A schoolfriend of mine was a Free Presbyterian, and so he came into contact with the Big Man on a regular basis. His party piece was doing impressions of Paisley: the eye-popping, head-juddering bellow would melt away into a softer, back-of-the-throat, sing-song voice, complete with occasional lisping whistle. My friend would alternate between the two when buying sweets, or talking about the events of the day. And of course, Paisley himself was always known to oscillate cannily between barking and purring".
What's more, the widespread perception of Paisley as an almost cartoonish, one-dimensional figure, and a crude political operator, failed to account for his appeal to Protestant voters. Kris Brown says: "Even if you didn't like the harder populism of Paisley's politics, you could easily grasp his ability. He didn't just ratchet up tension, he could put his finger on the pulse of anxiety that lay within many sections of Ulster Prod society, and he could express that with real force. He also had an air of authenticity about him . . . a true believer whose position in the last ditch was already reserved.
"But balancing this was a canniness; he was a political survivor with solid footwork, who had outflanked the main Unionist party on numerous occasions. He might go quiet for spells, but there was always the moment when he would sink his teeth in. He was always that blend of principle and hard-faced pragmatism, charm, and hunger to be top dog - a politician to his fingertips."
For a while, following the Good Friday Agreement, it seemed that Paisley was yesterday's man, a political anachronism, consigned to carp and thunder from the sidelines. A teenager at this time, Bernard Keenan recalls seeing Paisley shouting through a megaphone outside Belfast City Hall. "He was spouting such archaic language that it seemed absurd that anyone could ever have taken him seriously. He was an embarrassment, a relic, and we hoped his kind would soon die off," he says.
More recently, many people are still struggling to get their heads around Paisley's extraordinary transformation from harsh naysayer to cuddly senior statesman. As far as Kris Brown is concerned, however, the chuckling up at Stormont is no real surprise.
"Why wouldn't Big Ian be magnanimous in victory? He has seen off his principal foe of the last 40 years: the Ulster Unionists lie broken and twitching," he says. "People derided Paisleyism as being 'stupid unionism'. But what's so stupid about using your communal rivals to splinter and exhaust themselves in doing the hard peace-processing, and then pushing them aside as you sweep to power with your own constituency intact?"
Paisley's last political turn as dignified peacemaker fills many with relief, mingled with regret for the wasted years of the Troubles. David Lewis (33), who works at Belfast's Linen Hall Library, says: "It's good that his message has finally changed. There was always another side to Paisley than the lunatic bigot. But a couple of years of the avuncular grandad routine doesn't wipe out the far longer time he spent stirring up the situation."
"Now the dialectic is over, he can finally let go," says Bernard Keenan. "I hope that his final triumphant speech is something everyone can share in, and marks the beginning of a new politics for Northern Ireland."
"We won't see his like again" is the consensus on the streets of Belfast as the First Minister prepares to go, still "cake-in-the-rain handsome" (as Martin Amis memorably put it) and, of course, still absolutely convinced of his own God-given moral rectitude. As historian Roy Foster points out, he was widely seen as a hilarious survivor from another age, and yet Paisley turned out to presage the Northern future.
It's a final contradiction that should keep the Big Man chuckling for a long time as he leaves the stage.