The other face

Out up north of Belfast past Lough Neagh, through Antrim and Ballymena and Rasharkin in a windy field a shortish march from a Presbyterian church outside the hamlet of Finvoy on Sunday afternoon, there was a low cart with half .a dozen or so

chairs on it, two flag-poles each flying the Union Jack, a portable foot-operated organ, the principal figures of the local Orange Order Lodges and, towering above them, the Reverend Ian Paisley, Member of Parlia- ment. Here in Bannside—O'Neill coun- try—and with the Antrim hills hidden to the east and the Sperrin mountains sometimes appearing to the far west below the low grey misty clouds, Paisley spoke to his con- verted.

There were a hundred or more cars in the field and round about, and people listened in them or stood in the field beside the cart. All told there may have been five hundred, come to hear Paisley make politics and preach, taking as his theme one of the verses from Paul's epistle to the Galatians, that to my mind terrible and powerful founding text of Protestantism. Pais- ley chose the first verse of chapter five: 'Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage.'

`We need,' he shouts, `to trumpet it out across the villages and the fields, across the valleys and the hills, STAND FAST THEREFORE IN THE LIBERTY WHEREWITH CHRIST HATH MADE US FREE! We are not the son of a bondwoman but the son of a free. Protestan- tism starts with a birth, a new birth, a new Covenant. Romanism depends upon the priest, the mass, the ceremonies, the con- fessionals. I don't know what Rome would do if they ran out of candles. There'd be no light. Or if she ran out of priests. They all want to get married. There was a priest who used to write for the Catholic Herald. He's got married. He's going to be a true father one of these days.'

Paisley possesses the awful certainty of the

old presbyter. He utterly rejects the 'liberal' minister who had written in one of the papers the day before that neither the Church nor the Bible was infallible. 'I'd like to tell him that he's wrong,' Paisley shouts, `Thank God. We have an infallible Bible.' The people on their chairs on the cart in the middle of the windblown field had faces also fixed in certainty.

`There are people,' Paisley said, 'who would like to bring this land under the yoke of Roman bondage, who would like to stain the land crimson with the blood of the Protestant people . . We have had that dastardly awful thing on the cross roads and that kind old lady Mrs M'Keague who was burned to death.

`Anarchy stalks. We are left defenceless. The men who used to guard our lives, the Ulster Special Constabulary, have been disbanded. The police have been disarmed. And the army have not got the wisdom and the intelligence to do the job because they are strangers here. They cannot do the job, and I see Ulster again being entangled with the yoke of bondage!'

There is almost no modulation in his voice. He bawls above the wind and into it and you wonder how his throat and lungs can stand it until, by way of emphasis, he bawls out yet more loudly. I have seen and heard nothing like it in British politics. It is foreign. It could not happen in England at all, and it would sound funny in Scotland and Wales, I think. It does not sound at all funny in Ulster.

`They would not let the Protestants go from Kilkeel to Portadown through Newry "because we cannot give you protection through Newry", the police said. So we had to go around the world. If they had their way, there'd be no marching, no parades, no church services.

'The roads of this land have got to be kept open!

'God has called us on to Liberiy and these flags that fly are the flags of Liberty!

'Brethren, we are called to Liberty! We will not be cajoled,threatened, intimidated ... This is not the day for the kid glove and the velvet tongue. This is the day for straight speaking. Do you men want to go back to Babel and the Babylonian idolatry of Romanism? Let the dog return to its vomit, let the sow that has been washed return to its wallowing. But will we do that?'

A few cried 'No' with voices thin in the wind.

'No British Protestant with brains between his ears will go back to Popery!' Paisley bellowed. 'We will stand behind the Covenant and our Scottish forefathers!'

They went around with a collection, using plastic buckets.

And then he was shouting again, 'May God help us to stand. STAND! Don't com- promise, don't give in. You'll be misun- derstood. You'll be misrepresented. The world will get you wrong. But Jesus will understand. Christ makes men free! We turn this afternoon to God Himself! Jesus Christ makes men free!

'Let us now sing "0 God our help in Ages Past".'

They sang and Paisley the loudest of all. They also sang 'God Save Our Gracious Queen, Good Save Our Queen'.

And then they formed up, and marched down the empty road. Paisley smiled and chatted to some of the leaders, his raincoat above his cassock.