Ian Paisley – Page 2 – Slugger O'Toole

Ian Paisley, a profile for Prospect Magazine from 2007…

Mick Fealty on September 12, 2014, 8:41 pm

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A version of this article first appeared in the May 2007 edition of Prospect Magazine… It’s replicated here on the occasion of the death of Ian Paisley Senior. Ian Paisley has been the single most disruptive figure in Northern Irish politics over the last 40 years. He has also been around longer than anyone else—the 81 year old has been a significant figure before, during and now after the Troubles. Yet at the end of March, the veto-wielding “Doctor No” …

Lord Bannside / Ian Paisley (1926-2014)

Alan Meban (Alan in Belfast) on September 12, 2014, 1:07 pm

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Born in Armagh in 1926, Ian Paisley grew up in Ballymena. Religiously he shifted from being an independent baptist preacher to found the Free Presbyterian Church after a Presbyterian church was forbidden to allow him to speak at a meeting in their church hall. Politically, his journey started by campaigning for a West Belfast Ulster Unionist Party candidate through the National Union of Protestants, activism through Ulster Protestant Action and Ulster Constitution Defence Committee, the Protestant Unionist Party and then …

Kyle Paisley, Pastor McConnell & Peter Robinson

Kilsally on May 30, 2014, 9:50 pm

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Kyle Paisley has commented on the recent McConnell / Robinson Islam debate over on the Eamonn Mallie blog. While there are irreconcilable differences between the theology of Biblical Protestantism and the theology of traditional Islam, this is no reason for any man to go out of his way in order to insult another. One has to wonder what Kyle Paisley therefore thinks of Rev Ian Paisley protesting the Pope or Ian Paisley Jnr being ‘repulsed’ by gay people. All Free …

Cartoon – Fighting the marriage equality tidal wave

Brian Spencer on April 28, 2014, 10:02 pm

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Earlier, David McCann laid out the conservative case for marriage equality. Fellow conservative Andrew Sullivan has written for a number of years on the question and recently called the current situation “The Marriage Equality End Game” and spoke of “The Tidal Wave For Marriage Equality“. Looks like we’ll have to wait a while longer. Andrew Sullivan also recently shared a quaint anecdote from his visit to Belfast in 1995, have a read. Enjoy the cartoon. Brian SpencerBrian is a …

Paisley’s religious legacy

Turgon on January 26, 2014, 7:06 pm

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Watching the two hours of the BBC’s documentary on Dr. Paisley brought to mind my blog from six years ago of Paisley and Prospero where at the end of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Prospero turns to the audience and says “Now my charms are all o’erthrown And what strength I have’s mine own.” At times it felt a bit like Mallie was interviewing a slightly more quick witted version of Leonid Brezhnev in his latter years. I had intended doing a …

Ian Paisley: a word in favour of a fading patriarch

Brian Walker on January 21, 2014, 2:22 pm

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Eamonn Mallie has always preferred the bludgeon to the rapier. In Episode One he confronted Ian Paisley with some the most unsavoury quotes of an agitator’s past. Did you really mean it, Mr Paisley? In episode two he faced him with other people’s hesitant mutterings of rejection. How did you feel Mr Paisley? What did he expect the old man to say? Repudiate the past in the first case and turn the other cheek in the second? That is not the Old …

Paisley: Genesis to Revelation (New Testament) – betrayal, hurt and a lack of grace and forgiveness

Alan Meban (Alan in Belfast) on January 21, 2014, 12:01 am

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After last week’s warm-up, the second programme featuring Eamonn Mallie’s extended interviews with Ian Paisley (recorded between October 2012 and March 2013) began with an introduction to Ian Paisley’s strong relationship with his wife Eileen. It went on to cover: The Leeds Castle talks. Tony Blair’s admission that he was converting to Catholicism. You can hear Eileen laughing off-screen as he jokes about “getting a cane” if any of the Paisley children had come with a Catholic boyfriend/girlfriend. Clips of …

DUP: “the public may well ask whether then or now they have been misled” #Paisley

Alan Meban (Alan in Belfast) on January 19, 2014, 11:14 pm

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In the internet age, rebuttals come in fast. Tonight’s statement from the DUP manages to arrive just in time to make it into some of tomorrow morning’s newspapers and news bulletins and even before those media outlets’ journalists have been able to report their analysis and opinion on what they gleaned from Friday afternoon’s embargoed preview of the second part of Eamonn Mallie’s documentary. Statement from Democratic Unionist Party Spokesman “Lord Bannside is entitled to his own opinions – however, …

“For the celebrity, the interview is thus generally reduced to an exercise in saying as little as possible without confounding the self-love of the journalist on the sofa”

Alan Meban (Alan in Belfast) on January 19, 2014, 10:42 pm

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Alain de Botton spent seven days living in a Heathrow hotel and working from a desk in the newly opened Terminal 5 in order to write a short book A Week at the Airport . He cast his voyeuristic glances in all directions, commentating on the sense of passion and the moment of separation of lovers, sitting on the closed runway in the middle of the night, as well as discovering that the terminal’s largest bookshop didn’t stock any of …

Cartoon – #Paisleydoc

Brian Spencer on January 18, 2014, 12:41 pm

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Brian SpencerBrian is a writer, artist, political cartoonist and legal blogger. Actively tweeting from @brianjohnspencr. More information here: http://www.brianjohnspencer.com/ www.brianjohnspencer.com/

Cartoon – A brutish Calvinist street thug

Brian Spencer on January 14, 2014, 12:00 pm

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Back in April 2007 Christopher Hitchens wrote for Slate: Ian Paisley and Gerry Adams make me want to spew. Brian SpencerBrian is a writer, artist, political cartoonist and legal blogger. Actively tweeting from @brianjohnspencr. More information here: http://www.brianjohnspencer.com/ www.brianjohnspencer.com/

Ian Paisley and his monumentally dictatorial personality at bay…

Mick Fealty on January 14, 2014, 10:59 am

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Commenting on O’Neill’s ‘bridge building’ policy in 1965 Ian Paisley said ‘Traitors are like bridges, they both go to the other side’ — David McCann (@dmcbfs) So last night Eamonn Mallie gave us a last opportunity to roughly assay the life of one Ian Richard Kyle Paisley before the obit writers get a hold of it. It may be a reflection of the ‘big man”s advancing age that his interviewer’s voice predominated over his. A summer’s day it wasn’t. Paisley …

Paisley: Genesis to Revelation (Old Testament)

Alan Meban (Alan in Belfast) on January 14, 2014, 9:56 am

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Last week’s papers and news bulletins spoiled many of the story lines in last night’s first part of Eamonn Mallie’s conversations with Ian Paisley on BBC One NI. (Available to watch on-demand.) Forty hours of interviews were conducted between October 2012 and March 2013, so we’re only scraping the surface of their discussions and there are many gaps in the timeline that some viewers might have wanted to explore. Expect a book to mop up the rest! There was little …

When Mallie Meets Paisley [over the next two Mondays]

Mick Fealty on January 10, 2014, 2:03 pm

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It’s not the first time Ian Paisley has surprised pundits, but apparently for the next two Mondays Ian Paisley Senior makes his last public television appearance in a long interview with Eamonn Mallie, formerly of this parish. Some fragmentary detail is already emerging from those who’ve seen it. Dan Keenan notes: Dr Paisley said: “It wasn’t fair. A fair government is that every man has the same power to vote for what he wants. No, it wasn’t justice at all.” But …

Paisley, Question Time & Keeping up with the Jones’

Chris Donnelly on May 26, 2013, 12:48 pm

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Ian Paisley Jnr has caused a bit of a storm following his appearance on BBC Question Time earlier this week. His views on gay marriage (video clip here) provoked a twitter backlash (featured in yesterday’s Irish News) and led to several on air clashes with fellow contributors and members of the audience. What Paisley Junior had to say was nothing new to people living here, but the British audience of the programme will not have been used to hearing the …

…the British Government has planned the sell-out of Ulster

John Ó Néill on January 5, 2012, 1:47 pm

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So Ian Paisley was right after all! In his The Revivalist editorial of January 1982, he reflected on 1981 saying: 1982 is the year when the British Government has planned the sell-out of Ulster. It is essential that Ulster prepares itself for the great battle which lies ahead. Without Divine intervention all is lost. Admittedly, he had began 1981 by stating: Having made a dirty deal with the I.R.A. terrorists the Government has proceeded to enter into an underhand mini-Munich …

Vote For Me

John Ó Néill on December 13, 2011, 1:25 am

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You’ll guess how bad this is when I’m going to apologise in advance for it. Dan Boyle, former tweet-master general of the Green Party, has managed to coincide the launch of his album, Third Adolescence, with the 30th anniversary re-launch of the Green Party. Yeah, you read that right, his album. In deference to his chequered electoral history, he has included a track called ‘Vote For Me’ (if you really hate your ears – you can listen to a sample preview on Amazon). Amazingly, he isn’t the first …

Ian Paisley to retire as Free Presbyterian minister

Turgon on November 14, 2011, 10:29 pm

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Rev. Dr. Ian Paisley is to step down from active church ministry. The 85 year old former moderator of the Free Presbyterian Church of Ulster has announced that he will be preaching one more sermon in the Martyrs’ Memorial at Christmas but is going to devote his time to writing his memoirs. Dr. Paisley has always been a politically controversial figure and frequently also religiously. The Free Presbyterian Church was initially founded in Crossgar when there was a dispute over …

The feast of Columbanus accompanied by speeches from Lord Bannside & the Irish President

Alan Meban (Alan in Belfast) on November 24, 2010, 8:00 am

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Irish President Mary McAleese with artist Ian Fleming

If you listened to Thought for the Day on Radio Ulster yesterday, you’d have been aware that Tuesday was the Feast of Saint Columbanus. The speaker described him as “a bit of a stirrer”. Which set the tone for the lunchtime celebration of Columbanus organised by the Ullans Academy in an East Belfast hotel and featuring speeches from academy president Dr Ian Adamson, Lord Bannside and the Irish President. As far as I can tell, the Ullans Academy is very …

The coming Papal visit

Kilsally on September 13, 2010, 9:13 pm

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As the media frenzy over this weeks visit to Great Britain by the Pope continues, further protests have emerged. By far the highest profile protest is organised around the Protest The Pope website and includes organisation like the National Secular Society, the British Humanist Association, Atheism UK and Outrage as well as prominent atheist supporters like Richard Dawkings, Peter Tatchell & Christopher Hitchens. Gay rights campaigner Peter Tatchell hosts `The Trouble with the Pope` which airs on Channel 4 at …