Ian Paisley in America
Ulster unionism’s Western front
There is almost no historical record of the four days that the Reverend Ian Paisley, leader of the Democratic Unionist Party, spent in Londonderry, New Hampshire. But I can assure you, he was there; I interviewed him. It was September 1985, and I was 22, two years out of college, living at home, freelancing for my local paper, the Nashua Telegraph. I’d been covering zoning board meetings, planning meetings, Girl Scout troop activities, all manner of town meetings and celebrations in the nearby towns of Derry, Londonderry, and Pelham. The big religious news was supposed to be the 250th anniversary of the Londonderry Presbyterian Church, whose commemorations I dutifully attended, wrote about, and photographed. Nobody was expecting a controversial outsider hoping to sow religious division.
This is the story of how Ian Paisley tried to open an American front in 1985, just months before the signing of the Anglo-Irish Agreement, and why it failed in one small New Hampshire town.
Early in September 1985, the Telegraph had gotten word that Ian Paisley was coming to town to support the newly established Londonderry Free Presbyterian Church of Ulster, which was led by a young pastor from North Carolina, Rev. David Brame.1 Londonderry was my beat. I’d just come back to the state after six months as a research intern for ABC News in London, writing briefs on Soviet arms talks and global famine, so the regional editor, John Haywood, deemed me qualified to do the initial reporting.
I was born in Nashua and grew up in nearby Hudson, so I knew my beat well. I was not raised in any church or synagogue, but I’d been to friends’ churches (Catholic, Protestant, Greek Orthodox) on occasion. And so, when I arrived to interview Brame, I was both a reporter and in my usual mode of a curious, respectful visitor. I was naturally interested in the competing Presbyterian churches as well as the obvious question: why was Paisley coming to our little town when all the action was across the ocean? Was his visit really about a new church?
I thought that my articles from this time were lost to history, but I rediscovered them in the midst of a recent office move. They are being shared here, for the first time – a Fitzwilliam exclusive. You can read more of my reporting from that era on my substack Anecdotal Value. That piece also contains the full text of the articles quoted here.
The first story I filed about Paisley was as straightforward as I could make it. Just the facts:
Controversial minister in town only ‘to preach the Gospel’
September 12, 1985
LONDONDERRY – Ian Paisley – member of Parliament, leader of the Democratic Unionist Party in Northern Ireland and Presbyterian minister – will be speaking in Londonderry this month. The controversial fundamentalist is on a restricted visa and will not be allowed to make any political statements or answer questions about politics in Northern Ireland. He is here, according to the Rev. David Brame of Manchester, “to preach the Gospel.”
…Brame admits that Paisley is a controversial figure and that it is difficult to separate the political man from the religious man. “Dr. Paisley’s political involvement is with the Democratic Unionist Party of Northern Ireland – that is a completely distinct thing from the Free Presbyterian Church,” Brame says. “They are not mixed, but very often that issue is clouded in this country.”
The small towns on my beat were all an hour or so drive north of Boston. Many families took the liberal Boston Globe instead of the more apolitical Telegraph or the cranky right-wing Manchester Union Leader. Boston politics mattered in part because of sports: in Southern New Hampshire, you root for the Red Sox, the Bruins, the Patriots, and the Celtics.2 Locals followed the Troubles just as we’d followed the ugly Boston busing riots in the 1970s. Everyone knew that down in Boston, Irish bars passed the hat for “the cause”, including support for the Irish Republican Army via NORAID. Boston’s own Speaker of the House of Representatives, Tip O’Neill, was at the centre of a powerful Irish-American political machine.
O’Neill, Ted Kennedy, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and Hugh Carey, the “Four Horsemen” of Irish-America, had formed the Friends of Ireland caucus in 1981. Andrew J. Wilson’s Irish America and the Ulster Conflict is a good book about the American political dynamics that were at play. Violence after 1969 and the hunger strikes in the early 1980s had disturbed Irish America. The Friends of Ireland used statements on the floor and hearings on aid to Ireland to push a line of constitutional nationalism, to condemn NORAID, and push the Carter and then Reagan’s State Departments to oppose arms sales to the Royal Ulster Constabulary. Their goal was peaceful reform in Northern Ireland.
New Hampshire was Reagan country. Everyone noticed that the year before, Reagan made a trip to Ballyporeen, County Tipperary, his ancestral home. In Washington, the trip signalled that Reagan was willing to treat Northern Ireland as a serious issue, to keep Irish-American leaders on side. Now safely in his second term, he needed congressional support for a new big tax reform bill he hoped to pass. More to the point, Reagan needed Tip O’Neill’s support. In 1985, Reagan’s team coordinated with O’Neill and Moynihan on supportive public statements for the emerging Anglo-Irish framework, even as they reassured Margaret Thatcher that the Special Relationship came first.
The Four Horsemen supported proposals for peace which involved giving some advisory role in Northern Ireland’s affairs to the government in Dublin. Whether Reagan had been persuaded by the Taoisearch Garret FitzGerald’s case for an “Irish dimension” during his 1984 visit or whether the Four Horsemen pulled him there afterwards can be debated. The Friends of Ireland used their leverage in Congress to argue that Washington should back a formal British-Irish agreement that preserved British sovereignty but gave Dublin an advisory role, and the White House signalled that such an arrangement would be welcomed in public when and if London and Dublin agreed on the text.
Thatcher was already moving in that direction in late 1984, despite her earlier dismissal of such proposals with her “Out, out, out” press conference in November. By late summer 1985, the document that would become the Anglo-Irish Agreement was being hammered out behind the scenes.
All of this meant that, by 1985, Paisley had good reason to feel a shift in political winds. Wilson’s book describes how unionist leaders came home from their Operation U.S.A. tour in 1982, admitting failure and bemoaning the “all-pervasive influence” of Irish nationalists in the American media and on Capitol Hill. London and Dublin were negotiating over unionists’ heads, with Reagan’s support. The usual combination of parliamentary obstruction and street pressure would likely no longer be enough.
So, in what seems like a Hail Mary play of desperation, someone decided to organise some political theatre in a small New Hampshire town.3
Ian Paisley was a global figure by the mid-1980s, but he wasn’t very well known in New Hampshire, except as someone vaguely right-wing, outspoken, and anti-Catholic. I’m not sure I could have told you much about the Democratic Unionist Party, which he had founded in 1971. In those pre-internet days, I learned what I could in the local library, and I called up my friends at ABC News. Paisley had made a career of saying “No” to any initiative that involved bringing Northern Ireland and the Republic together. He had helped sink the Sunningdale Agreement in 1974.
Why Londonderry, New Hampshire? Because Londonderry was settled in 1719 by Ulster-Scots emigrants from County Londonderry. Nearly every small town in the region reflected its heritage, and Londonderry was Scots-Irish. But Nashua was a mill town filled with French Canadians who had come down to work in the mills along the Merrimack and Nashua River. I grew up seeing signs reading “On parle Français ici” in Nashua into the 1980s. You might see that in Pelham, but you wouldn’t see it in Londonderry or nearby Derry. Derry is Robert Frost country, the poet of “good fences make good neighbors”, whose mother immigrated from Scotland and whose father was a descendant of leaders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony from the 1630s. Apparently, someone sold Paisley on the idea that Londonderry would be welcoming soil.
In New Hampshire, Derry and Londonderry are separate towns. But it was darkly poetic that the town Ian Paisley chose shares its name with a city subject to Northern Ireland’s most infamous naming dispute.
The theory, in retrospect, was simple. The “Irish-American” identity of St. Patrick’s Day parades, green beer, Tip O’Neill, and the Kennedys was Catholic and urban. Paisley’s people believed there was another history. They wanted to activate the descendants of the Scots-Irish Presbyterians who had settled frontier America, fought in the Revolution, and then disappeared into the generic category “WASP.” Unionists had kept the spark alive in Orange lodges and Scotch-Irish societies in places like Pennsylvania. There were small groups that put on Twelfth of July parades, wrote letters to the editor insisting there was no discrimination under Stormont, and tried to counter what they saw as an anti-unionist bias in American coverage of the Troubles. None of this ever amounted to an organised constituency, but there was enough activity to suggest the idea that a hidden Ulster Protestant America was still out there. Londonderry, New Hampshire, looked like promising ground for that revival.
If those communities could be reminded of their Ulster roots and make the public case that the Friends of Ireland spoke only for only some Irish, a new diaspora political constituency might come into being: one that backed Ulster unionism, and could lobby Washington to give Thatcher reason to rethink, rather than push her toward Dublin.
In 1951, as Brame told me, Paisley had founded the hardline evangelical Free Presbyterian Church of Ulster. He met Bob Jones Jr. in 1962 at an anti–World Council of Churches conference in Amsterdam. They were both Cold War fundamentalists, fiercely anti-Catholic and anti-communist. Paisley preached at the Bob Jones University Bible Conference in 1964 and came back to Greenville, South Carolina, often. Over the next twenty years, he built a small North American network, with the Rev. Alan Cairns running an extension of the Free Presbyterian theological hall in Greenville and training American ministers who went on to plant churches in other states. By the mid-1980s, there were congregations in Florida, Georgia, Arizona and California.
After meeting Brame, I went to see what Roland Westerveldt, the pastor of the other Presbyterian church, the Londonderry Presbyterian Church, had to say. My piece on that conversation appeared the same day:
Paisley’s Londonderry visit ‘an insult’
September 12, 1985
LONDONDERRY – “Paisley speaking here is an insult to the people of Londonderry,” says Roland Westerveldt, pastor of the Londonderry Presbyterian Church. “I’m sorry to see this happening.”
…“Paisley’s speaking here during our 250th celebration is probably a coincidence,” admits Westerveldt, “but if it wasn’t, I would resent it.” Westerveldt said he didn’t think Paisley’s presence in town would affect the mood of the celebration, and he hasn’t decided whether he’ll speak out from the pulpit against the Northern Ireland minister.
“I may read something about our work in Northern Ireland. We support a retreat center, Cory Meela [sic], in Northern Ireland, where Roman Catholics and Protestants work and talk together about solving problems.”
Not having any affiliation with a local church benefited me in getting everyone to talk.
I understood that Paisley had been having visa problems, which had only recently been solved. The State Department had long seen Paisley as trouble. In late 1981, Séan McManus and the Irish National Caucus, backed by the Friends of Ireland in Congress, lobbied Alexander Haig to revoke Paisley’s visa, calling him a preacher of “the gospel of bloodshed” and warning that his tour would inflame sectarian hatred. The State Department eventually ruled that his presence would be “prejudicial to the American public interest” and cancelled the visa, which provoked editorials across the United States defending his right to speak.
But the Reagan administration, always keen to contrast with the Soviet Union, was aiming to promote religious freedom abroad. Turning away a visiting Protestant minister might undermine the rhetoric.
By 1983, a compromise was reached: a narrow, religious-only visa. Paisley could come to Bob Jones University or to a Free Presbyterian church, he could preach, but he could not legally use the visit to make the unionist case or raise money. It was under these constraints that he came to Londonderry.
Over the few days following my story, pressures were mounting. The Highlander Inn and Resort cancelled a block of reservations for Paisley’s meetings “without explanation.” When I called for comment, the manager did not return my calls.
The Catholic Diocese of Manchester stepped in too. The Rev. Francis J. Christian, the diocesan chancellor, issued a statement. “It is our fervent prayer that Ian Paisley’s presence in New Hampshire, and the foundation of a community which subscribes to his misguided principles, will have no lasting negative impact upon the citizens of our state.”
On Sunday, September 15, I attended services at the new church. I was determined to get an interview with Paisley. I also seem to have done some good reporting that week. I spoke to the FBI and must have spent time in the library researching Paisley’s past U.S. visits. I filed this on Friday the 20th, the day before Paisley’s arrival:
Minister hopes Paisley visit will be trouble-free
September 20, 1985
LONDONDERRY – “We’ve been fortunate so far,” said the Rev. David Brame during Sunday’s church services. “Let’s pray things continue to go smoothly.”
Members of Londonderry’s newest church, the Free Presbyterian Church of [Ulster], hope that the Rev. Ian Paisley’s four-day visit to this area does not spark any trouble… [C]hurch members have been wary of Londonderry’s proximity to largely Catholic South Boston and any protests the visit might cause.
FBI spokesman John J. Cloherty said nothing had come to the bureau’s attention about any problems stemming from Paisley’s visit.
I was walking a fine line, reporting on the past but not presuming anything about the future. I recall driving around, scouting the sites, figuring out where protesters would be, if they showed up. The venue had moved to a tent on the property of prominent local attorney Henry Paul, on Litchfield Road, in Londonderry.
Sunday, September 22, was the first sermon, under a white tent on Paul’s property.
“They have shaken hands with the devil”
Monday, September 23, 1985
LONDONDERRY – Nearly 100 protesters chanted, sang, decried and swore outside the “old-time Gospel tent” on Litchfield Road where fundamentalist Ian Paisley preached the first of his four scheduled religious services.
The protesters, some of whom traveled from Boston, New York and Canada to voice opposition to Paisley’s religious and political beliefs, were kept apart from those in the tent by half of the Londonderry police force, who maintained a strong presence throughout the evening.
Carrying placards and waving flags, the crowd, many calling themselves supporters of the outlawed Irish Republican Army, harassed those who came to hear Paisley speak, broadcasting their hostility through bullhorns before and during the one-hour service.
“There is a terrorist among you!” cried one protester. “Next you’ll be inviting Hitler and then Idi Amin to speak here!”
“Ian Paisley is the greatest bigot in the world,” said Nashua resident Mike Conway.
“He spews hatred and is responsible for the continuing bloodshed in Northern Ireland,” said Conway, a native of Limerick, Ireland.
Paula Cunningham, who was raised in Belfast, shook with rage as she spoke of her loathing of Paisley. “Every Irishman and Irish-American disagrees with Ian Paisley and disapproves of America granting a visa to him. They have shaken hands with the devil.”
Buses had arrived from Massachusetts and New York. Most demonstrators were Irish-American. Some carried the Confederate flags and banners linking Paisley to the Ku Klux Klan and South African apartheid. Police tried to keep the two groups apart; two men were arrested.
Outside, I took notes on chants, signs, and conversations. Inside the tent, I allowed myself to experience the raw power of a revival meeting.
Under that tent in Litchfield Road, the mood was electric. Paisley’s voice rose and fell. Hands went up. People shouted responses and sang with gusto. The protesters’ megaphones were audible from a distance, but inside the tent, they were part of the background noise rather than the main event.
I was there as a reporter, but I was also watching and half-participating in an unfamiliar form of worship. I was approaching the story as a kind of Method reporter, acculturating myself to the room that I was in, seeking to understand. I note now, however, that I did not get to know any protesters beyond quoting their slogans.
I did, however, talk to the town leaders I’d gotten to know all week:
Officials walk the yellow line
Monday, September 23, 1985
LONDONDERRY – Town officials walked the yellow line on Litchfield Road between protesters and worshippers last night during services conducted on the property of Henry Paul by the Rev. Ian Paisley.
“And that about tells our color,” quipped Selectman Norman Russell, who, like other town officials, had “no comment” about most of Paisley’s or the protesters’ views.
“The U.S. government gave him the visa,” said Town Administrator David Wright, discounting the protesters’ claim that Londonderry was responsible for Paisley’s presence. “The town had nothing to do with his visit here.” He added that the town had nothing to do with the protesters’ visit either.
“This is what democracy is all about,” said Russell, saying the protester have a right to protest and Paisley has a right to preach.
“True,” agreed Wright. “But it’s going to result in a lot of excessive expense.” He cited the cost of the extra police on duty and the other safety precautions.
On Monday, I was invited to meet Paisley at Henry Paul’s house after his second sermon. I suspect my earlier coverage made me seem safe to his circle: I was seen as interested, not hostile, and willing to quote people at length. I hadn’t asked any questions about the larger political context.
The visa restrictions meant Paisley could not hold a press conference or make any political statements in public. And so, sitting in a private living room with a respectful local reporter, I knew I was a vehicle for him to get a different message out. At the time, I still wasn’t fully grasping what his goal was. It was clear that whatever Paisley was selling, there were few buyers. I had, of course, wanted to bring up Reagan and Thatcher and peace. I also wanted to bring up Robert Frost, and I’d memorised ‘Mending Wall’ while driving around, hoping to work it into the conversation somehow. But I did not. Flipping past the notes I’d taken an hour before, I simply let him speak, asking for clarification, writing down his banter with his hosts.
My story was the lead headline the next day:
Paisley fires own charges: Explains stand in interview
Tuesday, September 24, 1985
LONDONDERRY – The Rev. Ian Paisley laughs at protesters who accuse him of fascism.
“Fascism is the child of Roman Catholicism,” he said. “Hitler and Mussolini were both devout sons of the Roman Catholic Church.”
The fiery Northern Ireland pastor and political leader also criticized those who are protesting his series of sermons here, and rapped the World Council of Churches as “shot through with Marxism.”
… In the relaxed atmosphere … Paisley spoke freely about his religious and political positions.
…Paisley said the Free Presbyterian Church of [Ulster] was founded because the Irish Presbyterian Church and other once-fundamental churches were becoming too “liberal.” He said that his objective as a minister of the Free Presbyterian Church, as a Member of the British Parliament [and] for the European Economic [Community] is to stop the spread of liberalism and the weakening of Reformation principles, and to speak out against the Roman Catholic Church.
Ian Paisley was first elected as a Member of European Parliament in 1979, and served there until he stepped down in 2004.4
“I know lots of people don’t like me,” he said of his leadership role in Ulster as a member of Parliament. But I received the largest vote – a quarter of a million people voted for me – the largest vote ever recorded for a British politician living or dead.”5
…Paisley said he draws a lot of criticism for his views, and takes many unpopular stands. “I’m anti-liquor and against the liquor shops,” he said as an example. “I believe the consumption of intoxicating liquor destroys men’s homes, their families and their minds. Drink is a curse.”
…Paisley spoke of being imprisoned by Northern Ireland Prime Minister Terence O’Neill6 for protesting the general assembly of the Irish Presbyterian Church. He said he had been protesting a series of pro-ecumenical, pro-Catholic resolutions being put before the assembly.
It was as a result of being put in prison that he got into politics7 and won the seat in Parliament that once had belonged to O’Neill, he said.
Paisley also spoke of the Free Presbyterian church’s disassociation with the World Council of Churches. He said the church had pulled out of that organization and the International Commission because the groups are part of a trend toward liberalism and away from the teachings of the Reformation.
…Paisley said that the liberalized Protestant churches are falling prey to the Roman Catholic Church. He said the Church of Rome is losing out very rapidly in many areas of the world, but is more powerful in Presbyterian areas where the teachings of the Reformation are weakening.
“The Roman Catholic Church here (in the United States) is powerful because the ecumenical pastor is willing to do everything the priests tell him to do,” Paisley said.
He asserted that many representatives of the World Council of Churches are Catholics from behind the Iron Curtain, and said the council is “shot through with Marxism.”
…After mention of the two protesters, Paisley asked Paul whether they could go to the Police Department and ask that charges [for disturbing the peace] not be pressed. “They did it in ignorance,” said Paisley.
“Civil and religious liberty is basic to the Presbyterian church,” he said.
…Paisley, Paul and Cairns discussed the fact that no Roman Catholics had come out and protested the protesters, most of whom they said appear to be supporters of the Irish Republican Army.
“They should condemn them,” said Paisley.
“By their silence, they have supported the IRA,” said Cairns.
…“You have brought a murderer to Londonderry,” cried Paisley to Paul, mimicking the cries of the protesters and teasing his hosts.
Beyond weighing how I might pose a question about global politics, I was thinking of the ugliness of what I was seeing and hearing. Nobody I knew spoke the way he did about other people’s religions. I understood bigotry, of course. But what I was hearing in Henry Paul’s living room was so far out of the local norm it was hard to process. And so, I barely pressed him. I recorded what he and his hosts and supporters said and tried to get it onto the page accurately. I did not challenge his historical claims about fascism, Catholicism, or the World Council of Churches. I did not ask what it meant for a man on a restricted religious visa to use a local newspaper to make his case.
The next day, I also filed a story of the sermon he preached, before the interview, and the protests.
Dozen protest second Paisley service
Tuesday, September 24, 1985
LONDONDERRY – About a dozen protesters showed up last night to voice opposition to the second of Ian Paisley’s four scheduled religious services.
The protesters, armed with an accordion, a drum and a tambourine and many loud voices, kept up the chants of “Paisley out, peace in!” during most of the service, but seemed disillusioned as their ranks diminished and the crowd inside the tent grew.
Francis Curran of Methuen said it was important they show opposition to Paisley. Another Methuen man said, “We think he’s raising money for the Ulster volunteer force.”
…Following a number of hymns and a talk by Dr. Bill Woods, a missionary from Brazil, who spoke about meeting Ian Paisley 25 years ago, Paisley rose to speak.
He said another Protestant had been killed last night, shot dead by a member of the Irish Republican Army. He also said 18 churches had been bombed, burned and destroyed this year by the IRA, and added, “That same spirit is outside this tent.”
Paisley spoke for nearly an hour, calling on Jesus Christ to “Dispel the power of the enemy.” He spoke of the Lamb of God, and said “All have sinned and came short of the glory of God.” Paisley also condemned those who take part in religious rituals, and said God calls the rituals “filthy rags.”
“God is not a rag merchant,” he boomed.
“You don’t get to heaven by paying silver and gold to any priest,” he continued, and challenged that today’s religion is “Subjective instead of objective.”
… “If you look inward, you’ll be miserable. If you look around, you’ll be more miserable,” he said, with a glance toward the protesters, which caused the crowd inside to chuckle. “You have to look to Jesus,” he intoned.
The weather was not in Paisley’s favour. Heavy rains turned the tent site on Litchfield Road into mud, forcing the final service on September 25 to be relocated to the Londonderry Baptist Church on Mammoth Road. The next day, Paisley departed, and the story shifted from theology and Irish history to police overtime. On September 26, I filed “He brought trouble, God’s word,” and on September 27, “Paisley’s gone, but Londonderry won’t soon forget.” Town Administrator David Wright told me the visit had cost $2,375.10, mostly in extra police duty.
At a Board of Selectmen meeting, there was a brief discussion about whether to pass an ordinance limiting protests at religious services. In the end, there was no appetite for it. Instead, on October 1, I reported that Londonderry had decided to send the Free Presbyterian Church a bill for the $2,375.10 and to issue commendations to police officers who had “demonstrated exceptional professionalism during the four days of protests.” The motion passed unanimously.
And, as expected, the Free Presbyterian Church refused to pay.
There is virtually no record of Ian Paisley’s visit to Londonderry, NH, in the standard history of his role in the events leading up to the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985. I found one wire report from 1985 that incorrectly stated that Paisley “refused to talk with reporters after the sermon.” Wilson’s book ends in 1995, characterising Operation U.S.A. as a propaganda defeat that left unionists enraged, convinced that Irish nationalists had fully captured the American media and Congress. Wilson notes in a footnote that Paisley later preached in Londonderry, New Hampshire, prompting a symbolic campaign to rename the town “Derry.” I saw no evidence of that.
The Londonderry, NH moment is little known because, in the grand scheme of things, nothing happened. Paisley’s Hail Mary effort to spark a new American front in the Northern Ireland conflict failed. The people of New Hampshire were more interested in co-existence than co-conspiracy.
The strategy depended on three assumptions: first, that there was a dormant Ulster-Scots “identity” in New England that could be reactivated. Second, that American fundamentalist Protestants would, if given an invitation, treat Paisley as an ally. And third, that a carefully managed “religious” visit could get around his visa constraints.
I did not interview Henry Paul at the time; he died in 2009. His obituary tells the story of a WWII veteran who stormed the beach at Normandy, served under Patton, fought in the Battle of the Bulge, and was awarded a Purple Heart and Bronze Star. After the war he married, became a devout Christian, taught the Bible, served on the Board of Directors for Bob Jones University, and raised five children, the youngest of whom married the pastor David Brame. I found and reached out to Rev. David Brame last month, who said politely that he was “not really interested” in a conversation about those four days. I respect his right to move on.
My reporting shows how from the beginning, the local Presbyterians saw the whole thing as a matter of outside agitators disrupting a long planned 250th celebration. The comparison of Rev. Westervelt’s language of bridge-building, interfaith cooperation, and community relations with Paisley’s rhetoric about Rome, Marxism, and fascism couldn’t be clearer.
Yes, there were people worshipping energetically under the tent, but none of this translated to political action. The only political voices were the protesters who saw Paisley as a bigot. The FBI and the town leaders saw him as a costly problem. My articles ran in a regional paper; the national press never picked them up. There was no national uproar.
Seven weeks after he left New Hampshire, Margaret Thatcher and Garret FitzGerald signed the Anglo-Irish Agreement at Hillsborough Castle. Paisley responded with the “Ulster Says No” campaign and a mass rally at Belfast City Hall. That was his real arena.
I’ve been thinking about those four days for the last forty years, wondering if I could have done more with the access I had. Looking back now, I think that simply chronicling what happened – and how it blew over so quickly – had its own value.
Hollis Robbins is a professor of English at the University of Utah. You can subscribe to her Substack here or follow her on Twitter here.
In 2005, the North American branches of the Free Presbyterian Church splintered from the Ulster branch to form the Free Presbyterian Church of North America.
The mid-1980s were the Larry Bird and Kevin McHale years; Bill Walton had just signed that summer. The Celtics were a big part of the “Irish vibe” of New England at that time.
“Hail Mary” was a term everyone in the Boston area was still using, less than a year after Doug Flutie, Boston College Eagles quarterback, threw what is now known as the “hail Flutie” pass to wide receiver Gerald Phelan to win the Orange Bowl in November 1984.
Since 2002, you can no longer be a member of European Parliament and of national parliament. And as of 2014, you can no longer me a member of the Northern Irish Aseembly (MLA) and an MP, as Paisley was.
While technically true, this was based on the fact that Northern Ireland counted as a single constituency and selected MEPs using a single transferable vote system, which made it easier to get a larger number of total votes compared to the various methods that have been employed for elections in mainland Britain.
Terence O’Neill, like all prime ministers of Northern Ireland, was a member of the Ulster Unionist Party, but had an image as more of a moderate reformer.
Paisley would eventually serve as First Minister of Northern Ireland from 2007 to 2008.
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Interesting piece.
Paisley wasn’t a bigot, and it was well known in his constituency of north Antrim that he worked hard for Protestants and Catholics alike.
But boy could he not abide that church in Rome!