'Love endures,' says the Rev Ian Paisley. But despite flashes of tenderness, he shows no sign of political mellowing when he talks to Gerry Moriarty, Northern Editor, in advance of the DUP annual conference today
Interviewing the Rev Ian Paisley is like interviewing no other politician on this planet. Midway through, he phones his wife Eileen. "Mammy," he says, "there's a journalist here asking me every nasty question about the antichrist and the Pope and his red socks, typical Irish Times. He wants to know when we met? 1950. Right. When did we get married? 13th October, 1956."
Dr Paisley has very affectionate words to say about his 52-year relationship with Eileen. She was a shorthand typist. In 1950 he asked her to type a longhand script that he was delivering at the Orange Hall on Belfast's loyalist Sandy Row. He recalls the meeting vividly, but is hazy on the dates. Hence the phone call.
"Love endures," he says. "Would I marry her again?" he adds, posing this question to himself. "Yes, I would. She has been a rock, and a great woman, she gave me a great family, she is a great mother, and is the only person that can order Ian Paisley about."
Such tenderness is at odds with the bombast, belligerence and fury often associated with Paisley. He is a man of many moods. In this interview, on the top floor of Parliament Buildings in Stormont, he is in reasonably convivial form, worrying a little about the salvation of his questioner.
Minutes earlier, Paisley and his son Ian Jr, in their identical pinstripe suits, had delivered one of their typical bravura press conferences. Ian Jr is the only one of his and Eileen's five children to persist with politics. Rhonda is an artist who has faded from the public political scene, while Kyle is a minister in his father's church. Two other daughters, Sharon and Cherith, prefer to keep out of the limelight.
Today, in the Europa Hotel in Belfast - in the bad old days, one of the most bombed hotels in Europe - DUP delegates gather imbued with sober good cheer for their annual conference. With Dr Paisley as their leader they are taking politics on the upbeat. Their pro-Belfast Agreement enemies are deflated. They feel it can only be a matter of time before the agreement comes crashing down like the walls of Jericho, to be replaced by an edifice more of the DUP's making.
"No, there's nobody like me," says Dr Paisley ahead of his keynote speech. "You just don't get my type of oratory any more." It isn't so much a boast as a simple acknowledgment that he is a unique phenomenon. People take specific sides over whether he is a force for good or ill, but no one denies he is a force.
Dr Paisley knows well that there are scores of influential people who believe there can never be true peace until he meets his Maker. That's because, their argument runs, while pragmatists such as Peter Robinson and Nigel Dodds could eventually deal with Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness, the fundamentalists such as Dr Paisley and the Rev William McCrea mean never when they proclaim, "Never, never, never . . . never."
He is in no rush to meet the needs of his more conciliatory brethren. He is still the Big Man, but a smaller Big Man. He isn't as Herculean about the shoulders any more, his girth has reduced considerably. He is down from 19 stone to 15 stone. "I got six inches off my middle simply by not eating after 7 o'clock at night." But how is his health? "Excellent," he thunders, brooking no contradiction.
To get away from politics for a moment, we enter the tricky ground of his Free Presbyterianism. I put an argument to him: fundamentalist Protestants believe that to be saved everyone must be born again. Being born again is not a principle of Catholicism and therefore he, and thousands like him, must view Catholics as damned.
Now few deny that Dr Paisley works equally for his Catholic constituents as for his other constituents. Yet, if Catholics are bound for hellfire, must it not follow that fundamentalists who hold that line would entertain an inherently sectarian view of Catholics, seeing them as lesser people? And was this not pervasive through a strong body of unionist opinion, particularly over the Stormont years? I remind Dr Paisley of a comment he reportedly made when Pope John XXIII died in 1963: "This Romish man of sin is now in hell."
This quotation was inaccurate, he says. "What I said was that the reformers in all the great doctrinal statements of the church viewed the Pope of Rome as the man of sin and the son of perdition." He adds: "The only thing that can bring a man to heaven is rebirth, unless he be born again he cannot seek the kingdom of God. God makes the pronouncement and if a man says, 'I don't accept the Bible', and rejects what God has said, then God's judgment is on him." That creates some distance from the reputed comment about Pope John, but not much.
Poor Pope John is having a torrid time if the reformers and their interpretation of the Bible is correct. "This is not my view, it is the view of the Bible, but I believe it," says Dr Paisley. "I am absolutely tied to that." It sounds bleak, but he makes no apologies. It does not mean he views Catholics as inferior, nor that it affected unionist political thinking, he insists. "I have an attitude of love to all men. We are all sinners and we all need to be saved. I am anxious that all sinners might enjoy the pardon and the peace and the love of God."
You would wonder, too, does Dr Paisley ever worry, like Yeats, that some words of his sent men out to inflict and experience great suffering. It isn't hard to find former or current loyalist paramilitaries who say they rue the day they ever heard Paisley's booming declarations.
Dr Paisley rejects all such accusations, just as he rejects the argument that had he and others like him accepted Sunningdale or the Terence O'Neill reforms of the 1960s, the IRA and loyalist paramilitaries could never have established a foothold in Northern Ireland, and we might have been spared such death and destruction.
Further barren interview territory is his opinion of the allegation of Catholic discrimination, or even David Trimble's Nobel speech acknowledging that in the past Northern Ireland was a cold house for nationalists.
"It was no colder than it was for Protestants who opposed the regime of official unionists and the hierarchy of the Official Unionist Party," says Dr Paisley, who has always viewed Big House unionism with disdain.
People persist in talking about quiet but intense Paisley-Robinson power plays at work within the DUP, similar to the reputed but undeclared rift between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. The fact that Robinson, Nigel Dodds and Gregory Campbell have appeared on TV and radio programmes with Sinn Féin is cited as evidence that Robinson is positioning the DUP for a shift to the centre.
That's just because the broadcasters won't allow the DUP separate studios any more, says Dr Paisley. Any suggestion of divisions opening up within the party is pure mischief-making, he states.
With demographic changes expected to be announced shortly showing a growth in the nationalist population, Dr Paisley has a different notion of consent than that contained in the Belfast Agreement. On the principle of 50 per cent plus one creating a united Ireland he snorts: "It is ridiculous to say to me that if one person in Northern Ireland says so we should all go into the south of Ireland." There must be a weighted majority, although he won't say what percentage vote could create a united Ireland.
"Anyway," he adds. "It is not going to come in your day or my day . . . You know Protestant people breed too." It is probably a foolish question, but, regardless of his antagonism to republicanism, I ask did he not even have some minor respect for the strategic sense of Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness in weaning the IRA away from full-blown violence? He doesn't. "If that was so, we would not have this spy ring, we would not have the break in to Castlereagh, we would not have Colombia and Florida [gun running\]." He won't even contemplate the thought of "Sinn Féin/IRA" dividing into a political movement and a retired force. "Why should I worry about that, there is no chance of it happening."
After 76 years on this Earth, Dr Paisley is a lucky man. He has a loving wife and an adoring party. After a long period of barren politics and terrible violence, his conscience is clear. "I have no regrets, only that I have not prayed hard enough, that I have not worked hard enough, have not read the Bible hard enough, and," eyeing his interrogator with a glint of humour and fervour, "that I have not worked for your conversion hard enough, or you would be a converted man."