On the day internment was introduced in Northern Ireland, Monday, August 9th, 1971, I met by chance a well-known unionist politician of the time, Desmond Boal, on Royal Avenue in Belfast. writes Vincent Browne.
I had been befriended by Boal on coming to Belfast the previous year as the northern news editor of the Irish Press group. I knew that Boal was opposed to internment on civil liberty grounds and invited him to make a statement condemning it.
He readily agreed and said he would go one better. He was on his way to meet Ian Paisley at a fitness club, of which Boal was a member, near City Hall. I went with him. When Paisley arrived Boal cajoled him into joining in a statement condemning internment.
Boal and Paisley had been close politically and personally since the mid-1950s. In 1964 Boal, had become a rebellious Unionist Party MP in the old Stormont, representing the Shankill constituency. He sided with the Northern Ireland Labour Party on a few occasions at Stormont and vigorously opposed the "liberalising" initiatives of the then Stormont premier, Terence O'Neill. He was not against those initiatives but opposed them because O'Neill had engaged in radical changes of policy without consulting his party.
Paisley was then in awe of Boal, impressed by his intellect, his fluency, and his devastating debating style. Boal was also a very successful barrister. They later went on to establish the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) of which they were joint leaders initially. For the first few years of its existence, Boal was the driving force behind policy, insisting, for instance, that the word "Protestant" be kept out of the party's name.
Boal inveigled Paisley into several policy positions with which the latter was very uncomfortable, one of them being that condemnation of internment. This caused Paisley embarrassment for years afterwards. It was an odd relationship (and remains so as they are still close personally) for, apart from a detestation of the old unionist establishment, they seemed to have little in common. Paisley was and is deeply religious. Boal, I suspect, is not so religious (I might be wrong about that). Boal was a regular visitor to the South (he had gone to Trinity College and liked Dublin), he was a racegoer, he was married a number of times. Paisley was/is very different.
In October or November of 1971 I arranged to meet Boal and Paisley at the Europa Hotel late one night, after they had returned from a meeting in Fermanagh or Tyrone to do with the launch of the DUP. Boal told me Paisley would make favourable noises about the South and leave options open on the united Ireland question.
I went with two colleagues, Henry Kelly, then northern editor of this newspaper, and the late Liam Hourican, then RTÉ's northern correspondent, perhaps the most brilliant journalist of our generation. Well into the early hours of the following morning Paisley did the interview, saying not quite that he would look favourably on the possibility of a united Ireland but that he could envisage good neighbourliness between the North and the South if there was "root and branch" reform of the Irish Constitution, with the sectarian bits removed. Again, this proved a huge embarrassment subsequently to Paisley.
The reason I recall this now is not to suggest that Ian Paisley is a closet republican and that Gerry Adams and he can tie things up nicely over a private late-night chat. It is to suggest that Paisley does not have intransigent political convictions. Instinctively he may be a sectarian but I think his politics are more influenced by his sense of being an outsider than by anything else. He doesn't detest republicans or nationalists. He detests the unionist establishment, now represented by David Trimble, and if Jeffrey Donaldson takes over the UUP he will detest him as well.
Now that he is the establishment, especially if he comes to feel he is the establishment, he may be easier to deal with. In personality terms, he is no conciliator but he may find it easier to give way now that he is finally in the ascendancy. Peter Robinson, clearly, has capacities as a conciliator. He would not have survived for so long within the DUP under Paisley were that not so. He also knows how to "play" the old warhorse. One way not to do it is to appear to diminish the Big Man or to ridicule him, as Gerry Adams did uncharacteristically on Friday by inviting Dr Paisley to convert him.
The Belfast Agreement was always going to remain brittle for as long as a large segment of unionism disavowed it. There is a chance now to build the peace agreement on far more secure foundations and, for that, the outcome of last week's elections is welcome. And that can best be advanced by acknowledging the extraordinary (albeit troubling) odyssey of Ian Richard Kyle Paisley, who has outlasted all his old enemies and now, finally, triumphed.
PS: Desmond Boal is retired now. He has done some legal consultancy work, however, including advising Tony O'Reilly's colleagues at Fitzwilton on how to deal with the planning tribunal over that very curious £30,000 payment to Ray Burke in June 1997.