Ian Paisley was viewed by many as a relic of the past, but with the DUP's election gains, he is once again at the vanguard of Ulster unionism, writes Fionnuala O Connor.
Many doubted their ears this week when the Rev Ian Paisley said his party would be constructive in political talks and that he had worked all his life "to resolve this most grievous matter". Admirers and critics agree that he has devoted his remarkable ability to preserving division between the North's two major communities, in the name of preserving Bible Protestantism and union with Britain, as inextricably linked for him as Sinn Féin and the IRA.
"If you compromise God will curse you; if you stand God will bless you" is a favourite text. But after 30 years, in which he has called every unionist leader a Judas or a traitor, his party last week became the biggest party. If, as some believe, the DUP is imitating republican strategy, for every advance there will be steps backwards and sideways. A fine example on Thursday had deputy DUP leader Peter Robinson saying in Belfast, after a party meeting with White House envoy Richard Haass, that he always found Haass courteous and interested. From Brussels his leader jeered that he thought the American "very favourable to the IRA; I found his attitude totally disgraceful". The clash is more tone than substance. It is arguable that the DUP has begun the process of decommissioning Paisley, a hazardous but essential enterprise if Northern Ireland is to achieve a settled peace, perhaps not to be completed until his clout has sold the new deal to the voters.
The figure at the centre is now a strange spectacle, a lifelong bully who looks by turn mock-threatening and pitiable. Contemporaries described him as a schoolboy stammering when asked a question. In a few years, he learned to make others stammer. He wrote in middle-age about the ex-boxer who taught him to preach on the streets of Wales, and the moment he turned a Cardiff crowd against a young woman heckler: "I prayed, Lord give me a weapon that will turn as a boomerang in the face of the Devil. They started to laugh and sneer at her and she mumbled and stuttered."
Like the freedom from doubt, the talent for ridicule and crowd-manipulation has lasted a lifetime.
From his origins on the fringes where fundamentalist religion and extreme loyalism overlapped, Ian Paisley opposed all reform. But reforms have changed the face of Northern Ireland, his ambitious lieutenants want a place in the new order, and he is 77, increasingly bereft of the words that once poured forth with such effect. Even before last week's election, he had already made a striking shift.
In 1974, because Brian Faulkner had shared power with the SDLP and negotiated a limited Irish dimension, Paisley and other Unionist leaders co-operated with loyalist paramilitaries, who had killed hundreds by that stage, to bring Northern Ireland to its knees in the Ulster Workers' Strike. In 1998, he ladled venom on David Trimble's party for negotiating with Sinn Féin and attending a St Patrick's Day function in Washington at which Gerry Adams was present: "The freeborn sons of Ulster will rise again and wash out from Ulster's public life the black and treacherous spot of betrayal. They will rid themselves democratically of all those who in Ulster's darkest hour went over to the enemy and were found being entertained in the tents of the conspirators."
Three years later, he was in Washington himself. Then he appointed two members of his party to the same executive as former IRA leader Martin McGuinness. "Smashing Sinn Féin" became sharing power with Sinn Féin, his supporters satisfied by the DUP ministers' refusal to attend executive meetings.
He has frequently revealed threats to his life. A Protestant minister once asked the then IRA leader Dáithi Ó Conaill about the threats. "There's no way we would kill Ian Paisley," Ó Conaill told him, "he's the best recruiting sergeant we've got."
He can be warm and charming, then flip in an instant to full-strength tirade. The young may be tempted to think Paisley a buffoon, spouting jibes about Brian Cowen's "thick lips" and Blair's homosexual colleagues. A 1975 encounter with Northern Secretary Merlyn Rees ended with Rees rushing into an inner office and locking the door while the Rev Willie McCrea chanted passages from the Bible at him, and Paisley shouted that he was telling lies. An official describes Tony Blair staring glumly out the window while Paisley rants, though he adds that during Mark Durkan monologues Blair also looks out the window.
He may not have started the Troubles, as some in both main communities still contend, but in the preceding years his street following and lack of compunction about causing disorder saw him jailed twice, undercut the weak reformism of Capt Terence O'Neill and created competition in O'Neill's cabinet for who would take the hardest line. In the view of many contemporaries, he fanned insecurity into fear and rage.
In June 1966, a Shankill gang calling itself the UVF killed three people - an elderly Protestant woman burned in her Shankill road home by a petrol bomb meant for the Catholic-owned pub next door, and two young Catholics going home as the pubs closed. Several of those arrested belonged to groups linked to Paisley. A Belfast Telegraph editorial told Protestants after the death of 77-year-old Martha Gould that they could no longer wonder where their loyalties lay: "They can have nothing to do with those who have been sowing dragon's teeth, and can now see how terrible the harvest can be. Ulster is in danger of being thrown back into a dark past by sectarian forces which have too long been winked at by many who should know better."
Polite unionism recoiled early from the big preacher. His flirtations with paramilitary groups have repelled many, the "Third Forces" launched, then disowned when members fall foul of the law.
But much unionist dislike of him is ambivalent, and he knows it. For three decades, more than half have chosen him as their MEP; in the 1984 election, he took nearly 60 per cent of the unionist vote.
IRA violence for many legitimised Paisley's rhetorical excesses and fulfilled his prophecies of doom. In other minds, he carries a heavy responsibility for fostering the hatred that prolonged loyalist violence, by repeatedly asserting that the IRA was directed by the Catholic church, and that Catholics cannot be considered Christian. In a period of random sectarian killings, his newspaper, the Protestant Telegraph, notoriously described new Catholic residents of the Ormeau Road as an influx of "two-legged rats". He denies hatred of Catholics, but relishes their discomfort at 17th-century tirades such as: "The dog will return to its vomit. The washed sow will return to the mire, but by God's grace we will never return to Popery."
When Margaret Thatcher signed the Anglo-Irish Agreement in November 1985, he preached: "We hand her over to the Devil that she might learn not to blaspheme. O God, we pray this night that Thou wouldst deal with the Prime Minister of our country. O God in wrath take vengeance upon this wicked, treacherous, lying woman." But he is outraged by disrespect towards himself.
"David Trimble said that anno Domini had caught up with Ian Paisley. I think that is despicable, I would not wish sickness or disease on my worst enemy. I did not like it for my grandchildren. It hurt me. They started asking: 'Is Papa dying?'"
This was the preacher who, after a fall from a horse killed Brian Faulkner, told his congregation: "It was at an entrance to a Free Presbyterian home that he died, the man that said I was a doctor of demons. The mills of God grind slow, but they grind exceedingly small."
The massive ego is undiminished. At the count last week he mocked a vote-management suggestion that his son Ian Junior, standing beside him, might pull in more first preferences. Only a Paisley could defeat a Paisley, helaughed, "but you hadn't an earthly".
Political life after Paisley has been delayed too long, shrivelling those in his shadow. The consolation is that he has only become leader of unionism by shameless compromise. He may himself have begun the transition to a new era, leading his impressionable flock with a kind of contempt to an end they could never have imagined.