World

Irish Peace Pact Denounced

April 22, 1998 / 8:48 AM EDT / AP

With dire warnings and scathing denunciations of the compromisers, the Rev. Ian Paisley is again rallying the Protestant resistance to change in Northern Ireland.

"British we were born! British we will live! And British we will die!" Paisley roared over the applause and whistles of 500 supporters who filled an auditorium in this port city north of Belfast on Tuesday night.

Paisley's appeal was a potent mixture of British nationalism, fundamentalist Christianity and disdain for all things Catholic and Irish.

The size of his following will be key to the fate of the agreement reached by eight political parties on a new government for Northern Ireland, including structures for cooperation between the British-ruled province and the Republic of Ireland to the south.

At 72, Paisley remains a powerful preacher but support for his Democratic Unionist Party has been slipping. In an especially bitter blow, his party lost a seat in the British Parliament last year to Martin McGuinness, the reputed former IRA commander who was the Sinn Fein party's chief negotiator on the peace deal.

Supporters of the agreement say they need at least a 60 percent majority, and would like to get 70 percent or more in the May 22 referendum. A closer vote could cripple it at the start.

In Paisley's view, the peace agreement is a simple surrender to the Irish Republican Army's violent campaign to unify Ireland, and he hinted of an apocalypse to come.

"The trouble with the IRA, they have never taken on the Ulster people," Paisley said, meaning the Protestant majority in Northern Ireland.

"They have never taken them on. The time may have to come when they will have to be faced, with Ulster people fighting for their hearthstones, and for their livelihoods."

On Tuesday, a gunman on a bicycle shot a worker at a refuse collection center in Portadown. No group claimed responsibility, but suspicion focused on the Loyalist Volunteer Force, which opposes the peace agreement and has not called a cease-fire. Earlier this week, the LVF released a statement saying it was "pledged to destroy the all-Ireland process."

The meeting of Paisley supporters in Belfast on Tuesday began with a reminder of where to find the exits, a prudent thought in a land familiar with bombs and bomb hoaxes. Then one of Paisley's associates read verses from the 37th Psalm: "Fret not thyself because of evildoers."

Paisley's greatest scorn was directed at the Ulster Unionist Party and its leader, David Trimble, who get the bulk of the Protestant vote and are backing the agreement. Trimble says the agreement will strengthen Northern Ireland's place in the United Kingdom, because all parties will have to accept that nothing will change without the consent of a majority of people in Northern Ireland.

Trimble's claim of the security of the union, Paisley said, is "a colossal and atrocious lie."

He accused the British government of paying off opinion pollsters so that their surveys would show a majority in favor of the agreement.