Ian Paisley wanted to be the leader who definitely brought an end to troubles in Northern Ireland

Some say religion and politics should not mix. But one cannot fully understand Ian Paisley without understanding biblical tradition from which he sprang.  Calculation, religious conviction and the changed perception of paramilitarism after 9/11, explain why Dr Ian Paisley eventually became  “Dr Yes”

As he approached the end of his life, Ian Paisley really wanted to be the man who was seen to have brought an end to Troubles in Northern Ireland. 

Not long before the eventual breakthrough on the issues of policing and power sharing ,Ian Paisley had suffered a serious illness. He told Tony Blair, after he had recovered, that he had recently had a “near meeting with his Maker” and added that he did not want to end his life, remembered as an old man saying no to every proposal that might  bring a settlement . 

He struck the same conciliatory tone   in his final speech to the House of Commons . He said then that one must face the fact that the people of Northern Ireland are diverse, politically and religiously, and, as such, must find a way of living together. They were not a “hard people”, but a” caring and a loving people”. He recalled that, in his youth, his province was a much more neighbourly place than it later became.  Calm and peace were now being restored, he said, and the day would come, although he “might not live to see it”, when the troubles would be forgotten.

How can this transformation of a man, who stirred up so much animosity for over thirty years, be explained?

How did someone, who had campaigned for the rejection of  the Good Friday Agreement  in the  referendum of  1998, came to take office as First Minister under the same  Agreement, nine years later? 

Of course, there was an element of political calculation. Once his party became the largest Unionist party, compromise was more attractive than it would have been if David Trimble were to be  the principal beneficiary.  Similar calculations explained Sinn Fein’s change of heart, once they became the biggest nationalist party.  But I believe part of the explanation lies in Ian Paisley’s recognition of his own mortality, and in an evolution his own evangelical Protestant faith. 

Long before he finally accepted the Good Friday Agreement, he had already modified his attitudes towards Catholics.

For example, he had noisily denounced Pope John Paul as an” Anti Christ” in the European Parliament in 1988.  But when the same Pope died in 2005, his words were warm and conciliatory,  and very different from the bitter words  he had  spoken   on the death  Pope John XXIII  in 1963 .

How might such a theological evolution have come about?

While living in the United States, I was told that President George W Bush   played a part in convincing Dr. Paisley that there was a biblical justification for accepting an accommodation with nationalists.  President Bush was someone who read the bible every day, and could find the right   authority there for a change of political course .  

Ian Paisleys father, James Paisley, was Baptist Minister, and a signatory of Edward Carson’s Ulster Covenant.   Ian, born in 1926, followed him into religious ministry and trained in a school for evangelical ministers in Wales.

Returning to Northern Ireland, he quickly became involved in politics.  Before founding his own party, he was a member of an organisation known as the National Union of Protestants, headed by the Stormont MP Norman Porter. 

In 1966, he founded his own newspaper, the Protestant Telegraph, and the Protestant Unionist party, the precursor of the DUP.

In this phase of his career, he was vigorously anti Catholic, in both the political and the religious sense.  Yet, even then, he always was  a good constituency MP in the service  of his Catholic ,as well as  his Protestant, constituents in North Antrim.

He was against any involvement of the Irish state in the governance of Northern Ireland, and this was why he opposed the Anglo Irish Agreement. But he was not averse to an internal settlement with nationalists within Northern Ireland itself.  His reasoning here was one sided.  Just as his unionist constituents would feel exposed and insecure in any arrangement that had no British dimension, northern nationalists felt even more exposed and insecure in any arrangement that lacked an Irish dimension.

On other matters he was more clear sighted. He once said that it would be “naive to take the IRA at its word”. Many chose, deliberately, to be naive about the IRA, arguing mistakenly that this served the cause of peace. Two developments changed the argument.    

9/11 utterly changed the attitude of Irish Americans to all paramilitary organisations. And the Northern Bank raid, and sundry other IRA atrocities, like the McCartney murder, changed Irish nationalist and liberal opinion. Even the IRA itself realised its previous position on arms decommissioning was untenable.   On decommissioning, Dr Paisley could justly claim that others came around to his point of view, not the other way around. 

When, in 2007, he eventually took office as First Minister, he was 81 of age. When he retired as a member of the House of Commons, he was the oldest MP there. 

I last met him when, as First Minister, he visited Washington to promote investment in Northern Ireland in the company of his Deputy First Minister, Martin McGuinness.  What struck me at the time was the genuine affection there seemed to be between the two men, although I do not think they had got around to actually shaking hands by then, if indeed they ever did!

Ian Paisley may have had a Scottish name, but he always struck me as a particularly Irish political figure.

Perhaps it was the bombast, that one could never take completely seriously. Perhaps it was the sense of humour.  Perhaps it was the twinkle in his eye, that seemed to belie the violence of his words. As a politician, Ian Paisley was an artist rather than a scientist, a man who knew that one had to appeal first to people’s emotions, before engaging with their reason. He was a master of timing.

Like a lot of Irish politicians before him, he tried out a lot of wrong paths, before he eventually found the right one.  But by the time he did find that right path, he knew for sure that he could bring his people with him.   That is why he ended his long career on a high note.

EVENTS IN UKRAINE THREATEN BOTH THE INTERNATIONAL RULE OF LAW AND NUCLEAR NON PROLIFERATION

On the 1 August 1975, the then Taoiseach, Liam Cosgrave was one of the signatories of the Helsinki Final act governing relations between European states. He signed along the United States, all other European countries (except Albania), and the USSR, which at the time encompassed both Russia and Ukraine. 

Article one of the Helsinki Final Act said that the signatory states would

 “respect each other’s sovereign equality, juridical equality and territorial integrity”,

 and that they would refrain from the

“use of force or the threat of the use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state”.

As a small militarily neutral European state, Ireland has a greater interest, even than has a state which enjoys the comfort of a military alliance, in ensuring that these clear interstate principles are respected.

The Russian annexation of Crimea by force, and its present increasingly overt invasion of Eastern Ukraine is obviously a flagrant breach of the Helsinki Final Act. It is the first of its kind since the end of the Second World War, unless one includes the NATO action against former Yugoslavia over the ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, which was then part of sovereign former Yugoslav territory. I argued at the time that this was a dangerous precedent.

As Taoiseach, I happened to have been invited to address the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe on the very day the Assembly was voting to admit the Russian Federation to membership of the Council. I spoke in favour of Russian accession. Russia became a member on 28 February 1996. The Council of Europe is the source of a dense and comprehensive network of treaties on many topics, including human rights. The Council of Europe, and its Treaties, only have meaning to the extent that its members are willing to abide by international law.

The European Union itself also rests on the foundation of respect for international law. The EU only EXISTS because there is an assumption that international Treaties will be respected in ALL circumstances. The EU has no force to govern its own members beyond the force of international law in the form of EU Treaties.  The European Court of Justice interprets these Treaties and its rulings are accepted by all EU states.

Dividing the EU has been a long standing Russian goal, and President Putin’s aggressive tactics appear to be succeeding in the goal of dividing the EU, in a way that previous Russian efforts have failed. At a meeting I attended last June, the new EU Foreign Representative, Federica Mogherini,  admitted that, as  then Italian Foreign Minister, she had been “advocating for Putin” within the EU. Her promotion will now encourage Putin, and is more eloquent than any verbal warning he may have been given about the EU ending its “partnership “with Russia, whatever that means. 

Within the EU, countries like Bulgaria, Cyprus, Greece, Spain, Italy  are relatively accommodative towards what Russia is doing, while others, like Lithuania, Poland, Estonia and Latvia are alarmed and looking for resolute action. The bigger EU states are, painfully and unsuccessfully, trying to balance commercial interests against professed principles. The Russian tactics are very similar to those adopted by Hitler in his dealings with the Czechs in 1938, and the present tactics of the EU are not dissimilar to those adopted by the French and British Governments of the day.

As 28 nations, the EU will never be able to move with the dexterity of an autocracy like Russia, but if it is not to have its policies dictated in the Kremlin, as a result Russian pressure on energy supplies, it needs to make a radical change in its own energy policies. It needs to build a proper energy union in Europe, independent of Russia, with complete inter connection of its energy distribution grids. That will require a lot of (job creating) investment, and the diversion of funds from current consumption. But a long term decision like this would create a new momentum with which Russia could not ignore.

The EU also needs to reflect on the contradictory messages it is sending out about nuclear disarmament.

Libya, which had got rid of its nuclear weapons programme, was attacked by EU countries, who were supporting the ouster of the Gaddafi regime. In an agreement to encourage it to give up the nuclear weapons on its territory, Ukraine’s sovereign integrity was guaranteed, in the Budapest memorandum, by a number of countries, including Russia, the UK, and France. Against the background of what happened in Libya, more recent developments in Eastern Ukraine reduce the incentives for nuclear disarmament in a very dangerous way.

Given the vast economic superiority that EU countries enjoy over Russia, it is surprising that they have so little influence on it.

If EU countries refused to buy Russian gas, Putin would have to stop and think. But the effect of such a decision would hurt some EU countries much more than others, and that would require the EU to set up a budget big enough to compensate the countries that would suffer the most . The biggest resistance to this would come from countries, like the UK, that do not want a large EU budget. Likewise German business interests who are heavily invested in Russia.

It is really difficult to see who can now stop Putin, except perhaps an awakened Russian public opinion,  that will become sickened by the casualties Russian soldiers will suffer in a needless war against another Slav country.

HAROLD MACMILLAN......A NEW BIOGRAPHY

I greatly enjoyed reading “Harold Macmillan” by Charles Williams, published by Phoenix books. The author is a Labour member of the House of Lords so he is under no pressure of party loyalty to be unduly kind to this Conservative politician.

Macmillan was Prime Minister of the UK from January 1957 to October 1963. Those who remember him at all these days will probably think of him as the man who was Prime Minister, when the Profumo scandal broke over the supposed intelligence risk of Defence Secretary Profumo’s affair with Christine Keeler , who was also sharing her favours with a Russian military attaché. No security breach was found, but Profumo had to go, because he initially denied the affair in the House of Commons. 

This affair was a small part of Macmillan’s life, and takes up little space in a very entertaining book.

Macmillan came from a background in publishing and his mother was American. In his youth, he was considered dull and pompous.  After service in the First World War, he married a daughter of the Duke of Devonshire, a big step up in the class conscious British society of the 1920’s.

As a member of the House of Commons in the 1930’s, he was on the left of the Conservative Party, and favoured economic planning and Keynesian economics. He was close to Churchill.

Around this time, his aristocratic wife started a long running semi public affair with another MP, and close friend of Macmillan, Bob Boothby. She wanted a divorce but Macmillan, with the support of both his mother and mother in law, refused.

His distant relationship with his wife was probably no harm when, in 1943 and already a junior Minister in Churchill’s coalition, he had to leave home on his own to act as representative for British interests in North Africa.

Here he had to work between General Eisenhower, whose American forces had ousted the Vichy forces and were about to eject the Germans, and the various French factions in North Africa. At this time, de Gaulle was not in undisputed charge, and the Americans did not like him at all. Macmillan’s diplomatic skills grew as did his self confidence as he resolved some these problems.

When the Conservatives came back to power, he became Minister for Housing, and later Foreign Secretary in 1955. As such he was involved in the planned Anglo French occupation of the Suez canal in covert collusion with the Israelis. This disaster angered the Americans and also led to a deterioration of relations with France. It led to the psychological collapse of Anthony Eden as Prime Minster, and his replacement by Macmillan.

The book deals with the British reaction to the moves, started in Messina in 1955, to form” an ever closer union” of the states of Europe. This eventually became the EU of today. From the outset this was a political as well as an economic project. 

Britain stayed away from the meeting in Messina and thus played no part in shaping the agenda in ways that might have suited Britain’s interests and its worldwide trading relationships. This was the fault of Foreign Secretary Macmillan, and of then Prime Minister, Anthony Eden.  A Minister of state in the Foreign office, Anthony Nutting, had begged them to send a representative. To Britain’s cost to this day, they ignored him.

Afterwards, Macmillan tried to forge a rival European bloc, a free trade area without political content, and tried to negotiate a deal between it and the EU.  When that did not work out he was eventually forced, as Prime Minister, to apply for UK membership of the EU.

Thus was forged the British reflex of trying to influence the EU, but as a semi outsider, not fully committed to the success of the project. Trying to place an each way bet.

This tied up with defence, where France wanted its own independent nuclear deterrent and Britain wanted one too, but found itself deeply dependent on the Americans. In his attempt to get his way, Macmillan event threatened to withdraw British force from the continent.  De Gaulle’s eventual rejection of the UK’s first application to join the EU derived from a fear that the British would in some way “Americanise” and globalise the EU, in a way that would dilute it, and deprive it of its purpose of reconciling the nations of the continent.

This is a good biography and draws on Macmillan’s own diaries for much of the personal colour, including the books he read to relieve the tension of a busy political life (Trollope and Walter Scott top the list)