IAN PAISLEY

The 'Rev.' Ian Paisley is a Member of the British and European Parliaments. He is the founder and only head of the Free Presbyterian Church, which has a fundamentalist Christian perspective on most issues. It has 49 Churches in British Occupied Ireland and 10 abroad. While no priest has ever been elected to government office in the 26 Counties, even though Paisley claims the Republic is controlled by the Roman Catholic Church, Protestant ministers, including Mr. Paisley, have always been prominent in the electoral politics of the North, "a Protestant State for a Protestant People." Ian Paisley is the head of the Democratic Unionist Party.

Political writers Moloney and Pollack describe him as a man of contradictions, "... a Christian minister who incites religious hatred and threatens bloody civil war. He is a constitutional politician who leads coat trailing, sectarian street protests. He claims to believe in democracy yet runs his church like a Protestant pope and his party [DUP] like a medieval despot."

Disputed Divinity Degrees
from the U.S.

He received an honorary degree from Bob Jones University of South Carolina in 1966 and is a regular preacher there. To this day, his actual ordination is the subject of controversy. It was never valid under Presbyterian rules. He obtained a B.A. in Divinity from Pioneer Theological Seminary in Rockville, Ill. in 1954 and an honorary doctorate 7 months later. He received a Masters Degree from Burton College and Seminary in Manitou Springs, Colorado. Both are bogus, disreputable correspondence schools described as "degree mills" by the US Dept. of Education.

In 1993 he visited the Cub Hill Bible Presbyterian Church in Baltimore, Maryland and often tours American fundamentalist churches. He is described as a "fearless preacher of God's word and a contender for the faith once delivered unto the saints." He is also one of the most vicious anti-Catholic hate mongers and is implicated by the actions of his own followers in conspiring to deprive Catholics of their lives, rights and property in the British Occupied Counties of Ireland.

His Position on Catholics

• In 1956, Rev. Paisley abducted a 16 year old girl, Maura Lyons, who was in a dispute with her parents about joining the Free Presbyterian Church. He attempted to use her as an anti-Catholic propaganda stunt and would not inform police where she was. Paisley was later ordered in court never to go near the girl or her family again.
  
• In 1959, the Presbyterian Moderator of Ireland was on tour of churches and visited a Catholic priest, the Rev. J. Wilson, whom he had befriended. Rev. Paisley described this act of human friendship as an act of "blasphemy".
  
• In April, 1958, Rev. Paisley sponsored Juan Arrien, a Spanish ex-priest, who performed exaggerated "mock masses" as part of an anti-Catholic road show. When Fr. Murphy of Ballymurphy protested that a public facility was to be used for this sectarian, anti-Catholic show, Rev. Paisley responded in his magazine, Revivalist, "We know your church to be the mother of harlots and the abomination of the earth."
  
• On June 17, 1959, at a Belfast rally, he publicly chastised "the men of the Shankill for allowing papists, pope's men, and papishers" to live on the Shankill Rd. Angry crowds went to the addresses called out by Paisley, burned out the occupants and looted their homes.
  
• As religious ecumenism was progressing between Churches and Religions during the 1960s, a Catholic priest actually preached in Westminster Abbey and Protestant ministers were welcomed in Catholic churches, Mr. Paisley was -- and still is -- wild with recrimination and bigotry at any intra-religious experience or sharing of ideas.
  
• In keeping with the above attitude, he called Pope John XXIII a "Roman anti-Christ" and his Church the "Harlot of Babylon". On June 3, when the Pope died, Paisley roared, "This romish man of sin is now in hell."
  
• In May of 1968, during the height of the Civil Rights movement in the North, Paisley addressed a mob of 500 loyalists and burned a photograph of Prime Minister O'Neil who was shown to be visiting a Catholic convent the week before.
  
• After inciting loyalists to burn Catholic families out of their homes, the Rev. Paisley explained the problem to the press: His exact words were "Catholic homes caught fire because they were loaded with petrol bombs; Catholic churches were attacked and burned because they were arsenals and priests handed out sub-machine guns to parishioners; and the massive discrimination in employment and shortage of houses for Catholics were simply because they breed like "rabbits" and multiply like "vermin".
  
• William Beattie, a loyal lieutenant of Rev. Paisley, addressed a DUP Youth Group after the Anglo-Irish Accord was signed by the Dublin and London governments in 1986: "We must hire assassins to kill Catholics and pay them when the job is done."

On Violence

• Several founding members and early leaders of the Ulster Defense Association were close confidants and workers for Paisley. Between 1971 and 1976 alone, the UDA [Ulster Defense Association] and its cover organizations murdered 600 Catholics. Freddie Parkinson, a leader of the UDA, stated in 1984, that Paisley was "a tarantula who spreads the venom of further conflict and has been a major contributor to our prolonged tragedy."
  
• John McKeague, a disciple of Free Presbyterianism, founded the murderous Red Hand Commandos. Billy Mitchel, a gunman for the Ulster Volunteer Force murder squads, was a Sunday school teacher for the Free Presbyterian church. William McGrath, founder of a paramilitary group that called for the banning of the Catholic Church, was convicted in 1981 of sexual abuse of children.
  
• Paisley's most trusted aide in London is Rev. Brian Green, a man with close links to the National Front, a Nazi organization.
  
• Billy and Gusty Spence, founders of the UVF murder gang, and Ken Gibson, Tommy Heron and Davey Payne, leaders of the UDA, served as organizers at Paisley's rallies, In 1969, bombings around the North were falsely attributed to the IRA. Paisley's bodyguard, Sammy Stevenson turned Queen's evidence admitting he and Tommy McDowell, a Free Presbyterian, conspired to set off the bombs in loyalist districts in order to further incite the loyalist community.

On Freemasons

They got their strength from the excreta that runs from the sewer pipes of Hell." Once Paisley learned wealthy Freemasons in America were supporting his churches, he had a vision that Freemasons should be admitted to the Free Presbyterian church.

On Jews

"The Unionist party are boasting he [Harold Smith] is a Jew. As a Jew, he rejects our Lord Jesus Christ, the New Testament, Protestant principles, the Glorious Reformation and the sanctity of the Lord's day. The Protestant throne and the Protestant constitution are nothing to him."

On Journalists

"... the whirring multitudes of pestiferous scribbling rodents... who usually sport thick lensed glasses, wear six pairs of ropey sandals, are homosexuals, kiss holy medals or carry secret membership cards of the Communist party... spineless, brainless mongoloids. But, because of it, maliciously perilous as vipers."

On Censorship

The Democratic Unionist Party, the political wing of the Free Presbyterian Church, passed a resolution at its 1978 annual conference to condemn blasphemous literature like John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men.

On Women

Valerie Shaw, secretary of a Free Presbyterian church, discovered sexual abuse of boys at Kincora School by Paisley confidant William McGrath. She tried to get Paisley to give the matter his spiritual attention for years. When he did not, she left the church. Since then, no woman can hold official office in the church leadership.

On the EEC

Paisley berated the European Economic Community as part of a "papal plot" and the "bride of the anti-Christ." He sought the seat to the European parliament because God told him to "sit amongst the frog eaters [French] and the snail mongers [Belgians]."

On Being British

In a debate with Bernadette Devlin in June 1968, Paisley defended himself regarding a position Devlin thought was unfair by stating he "would rather be British than be fair."

Others on Ian Paisley

• DUP barrister Robert McCartney stated that "Paisley is a fascist who is more interested in an independent Ulster, a mini-Geneva run by a fifth-rate Calvin, than Union with Britain."
  
• Imprisoned UDA leader Freddie Parkinson, in appeal for non-violence by Paisley: "I remember the paramilitary megalomaniac who beckoned us to follow him but who later abandoned us to be scored as common criminals."
  
• On the day of MP Robert Bradford's funeral, the Daily Telegraph [London] stated, "The posturing of Mr. Paisley continues to persuade the British people that Ulster is a strange and alien land which tends to inspire not terror but ridicule."

Back to Main Page