Since the great moment at Farmleigh 10 days ago, I have been remembering an evening which spread into a night, and a night which spilled into a gloriously bright December Sunday morning in 1971, and wondering if Ian Paisley's famous handshake with a Taoiseach might not have come much sooner, writes Henry Kelly.
The events on that night more than 35 years ago happened by accident. Ian Paisley, Stormont MP for Bannside and his political lieutenant, Desmond Boal QC, MP for Shankill, had been having tea in the Europa Hotel in Belfast. Vincent Browne, then of the Irish Press, the late Liam Hourican of RTÉ and myself stumbled into their company. We started to talk at about eight o'clock in the evening. Paisley kept telling us he wanted an early night because Sunday was an important day for him with services in his Martyrs Memorial Free Presbyterian Church on the Ravenhill Road. More tea. More talk.
Everyone was depressed about the situation. Politics had never been more divided. Opposite sides hardly even spoke to each other in corridors, whether at Stormont or in hotels. Explosions were going off at the rate of one a day. The death rate was rising. I can't say exactly at what moment the conversation broadened into a wider discussion but at one stage everyone seemed to agree that because Catholics, by and large, wanted a United Ireland and Protestants wanted to stay in the Union, the only hope for rapprochement in Ulster would be some reconciliation of what the then Taoiseach Jack Lynch was fond of referring to as "the two traditions".
Ian Paisley is a known character. He has never been anything but courteous to me but I never let him forget over the years how offensive much of what he said could be to Catholics. When thus challenged he always looked uncomfortable. For those too young to place him, Desmond Boal was a formidable barrister and politician. He was intellectually vicious and brilliant in cross-examination and in his speeches in the House of Commons. He never used a note. He was Paisley's political guide and mentor. They cut an unlikely pair: Paisley over six feet tall, with a huge-striding gait, Boal almost tiny beside him and walking with the slow determination of a man seemingly perpetually deep in thought. I wrote some very harsh things about Boal in the columns of this newspaper but he never complained. So there we were; more tea and talk and it was now well past midnight. Paisley was asked straight out, I think by Vincent, what the Republic could or should do to ease the situation or to make a sort of political overture to the North. Paisley referred to the Republic's 1937 Constitution and said that if those parts of it which were, by their very nature, sectarian - indeed if the whole Constitution, which he dubbed "theocratic in a Roman Catholic context" - were changed, there could be "good neighbourliness in the strictest sense of the word" between North and South. Liam Hourican pointed out to Paisley that it was all very well for writing journalists to take down his words, but he had listeners who needed to hear them. Paisley had no problem with that and the two went to a bedroom for half-an-hour to record what myself and Vincent were able to confirm from our notes. When they came back, Liam played us the interview. For some reason Boal blew his top at one aspect of it, but Paisley only chuckled and that was that.
It was now broad daylight and we left the hotel. Going down the stairs Paisley put his arm around me and thundered: "Will you be going to Mass, young Kelly?" I let it pass but I vividly remember turning to him in the foyer of the hotel and saying: "Ian, if you wanted to, you know what you've just said, if followed up logically, could make you the first prime minister of an all-Ireland country." I can hear to this day his thunderous laugh as he whacked me on the back (Bertie Ahern knows now how strong that whack can be) and said: "Aren't you the wag and all? Desmond, [ this to Boal's retreating back] Master Kelly thinks he'd like me to run the whole of Ireland, Ulster and the Republic, the lot!" And another thunderous roar followed as they disappeared into the December morning.
That lunchtime RTÉ radio ran Paisley's interview in full, followed the next morning by pages of it in The Irish Timesand Irish Press. All three of us, and our editors at the time, were convinced Paisley had said something crucially important. We waited for some reaction. It's just as well we didn't hold our breath. Paisley's words fell on deaf ears. Not a word from Taoiseach Jack Lynch or any Dublin minister. Not a kite flown even by a Fianna Fáil backbencher. The arch-ogre of those early days could say what he wanted. The Republic didn't care.
It was a great missed opportunity. One Fine Gael senator, the late John Maurice Kelly, said he didn't actually believe Paisley and added that the day he saw Protestants voting for a united Ireland he would think about changing the Constitution.
A few weeks before Christmas I bumped into Paisley, again in the Europa. He made it quite clear that he had expected some response from Dublin and was genuinely disappointed when none came. He kept using the word "neighbours", a word which cropped up again in his recent statement at Farmleigh. We wished each other a Happy Christmas and continued to chat. Paisley noticed I was carrying with me a copy of The Battle of the Boyneby the splendidly named Demetrius Charles Boulger, which I had just bought for £10 from Jack Gamble's antiquarian bookshop on the Antrim Road. He flicked through it, remarking casually that he wondered what the site looked like 300 years on.
I asked him if he ever actually had a desire to go and see where the battle had taken place. After all, there was an annual Orange Parade every July at Rossnowlagh in Donegal and no-one seemed bothered by Orangemen marching on a "Catholic" beach.
"If someone asked me, I'd go," Paisley said.