Dr.+Ian+Paisley


 * [[image:Dr. Ian Paisley.jpg width="360" height="362" align="center"]] || =**Dr. Ian Paisley (1926-2014)**=

**"Ian Richard Kyle Paisley, Baron Bannside**, [|PC] (6 April 1926 – 12 September 2014) was a [|loyalist] politician and [|Protestant] religious leader from [|Northern Ireland] . He became a [|Protestant] [|evangelical] minister in 1946 and would remain one for the rest of his life. In 1951 he co-founded the fundamentalist [|Free Presbyterian Church of Ulster] and was its leader until 2008. Paisley became known for his fiery speeches and regularly preached and protested against [|Catholicism], [|ecumenism] and [|homosexuality]. He gained a large group of followers who were referred to as 'Paisleyites'. "Paisley became involved in [|Ulster unionist] /loyalist politics in the late 1950s. In the mid-late 1960s he led and instigated loyalist opposition to the [|Catholic civil rights movement] in Northern Ireland. This [|led to] the outbreak of [|the Troubles] in the late 1960s, a conflict that would engulf Northern Ireland for the next thirty years. In 1970 he became [|Member of Parliament] for [|North Antrim] and the following year he founded the [|Democratic Unionist Party] (DUP), which he would lead for almost forty years. In 1979 he became a [|Member of the European Parliament] .Throughout the Troubles, Paisley was seen as a firebrand and the face of hardline unionism. He opposed all attempts to resolve the conflict through power-sharing between unionists and [|Irish nationalists] / [|republicans], and all attempts to involve the [|Republic of Ireland] in Northern affairs. His efforts helped bring down the [|Sunningdale Agreement] of 1974. He also opposed the [|Anglo-Irish Agreement] of 1985, with less success. His attempts to [|create a paramilitary movement] culminated in [|Ulster Resistance]. Paisley and his party also opposed the [|Northern Ireland peace process] and [|Good Friday Agreement] of 1998. "In 2005, Paisley's DUP became the largest unionist party in Northern Ireland, displacing the [|Ulster Unionist Party] (UUP), which had dominated unionist politics since 1905. In 2007, following the [|St Andrews Agreement], the DUP finally agreed to share power with republican party [|Sinn Féin] and consent to all-Ireland governance in certain matters. Paisley and Sinn Féin's [|Martin McGuinness] became [|First Minister and deputy First Minister] respectively in May 2007. He stepped down as First Minister and DUP leader in mid-2008, and left politics in 2011. Paisley was made a [|life peer] in 2010 as **Baron Bannside**.

"When he was a teenager, Paisley decided to follow his father and become a Christian minister. He delivered his first sermon aged 16 in a mission hall in County Tyrone. In the late 1940s he undertook theological training at the [|Barry] School of Evangelism (now called the [|Wales Evangelical School of Theology] ), and later, for a year, at the [|Reformed Presbyterian] Theological Hall in [|Belfast] . In 1951, a congregation of the [|Presbyterian Church in Ireland] (PCI) was forbidden by church authorities to hold a meeting in their own church hall at which Paisley was to be the speaker. In response, the leaders of that congregation left the PCI and began a new denomination, the [|Free Presbyterian Church of Ulster], with Paisley, who was just 25 years old at the time. Paisley soon became the leader (or [|moderator] ) of the Free Presbyterian Church [|[14]] and was re-elected every year, for the next 57 years. "The Free Presbyterian Church is a [|fundamentalist], [|evangelical] church, requiring strict separation from "any church which has departed from the fundamental doctrines of the Word of God." [|[13]] At the time of the [|1991 census] , the church had about 12,000 members, less than 1% of the [|Northern Ireland population] ." ||
 * Resources:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Paisley

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/eb/DrIanPaisley.jpg ||  ||