Ian Paisley seriously ill !

[NAG1]

Are we now so desensitised and dehumanised, that the death agony of a human being, and the suffering of his family is a matter for joviality and levity. Catch a grip on yourselves lads, your behaviour is worse than anything the man you are mocking ever did

[/b]Surely your taking the piss??

Unbelievable this is the way this man is going to be portrayed the Belfast media, never mind his actions against the catholic population in the North for 60years.

Pangurban please go and read back over the history of this man before you compare what he has done to the postings on this thread.

[sammymaguire]

*******BREAKING NEWS**********
The Rev Dr Ian Paisley has been moved to the Royal Hospital in Belfast because the Ulster has said NO!
*******BREAKING NEWS**********

[bennydorano]

Was reading in the 'i' newspaper today, that it has been requested that prayers be said for the Rev, didn't specify what you should be praying for thou.

[Orior]

Did you know that back in the late 50's or early 60's Ian Paisley once kidnapped a young girl?

[theskull1]

Was reading in the 'i' newspaper today, that it has been requested that prayers be said for the Rev, didn't specify what you should be praying for thou.

Well I'm gonna say a hail mary

[muppet]

Did you know that back in the late 50's or early 60's Ian Paisley once kidnapped a young girl?

Ahhhh, was her name Ulster?

[ONeill]

Different Paisley.

[Forever Green]

Taking his time. Worth the wait I suppose

[seafoid]

http://forums.catholic.com/showthread.php?t=256786

Prayer to the Virgin Mary (never known to fail)

Oh most beautiful flower of Mt. Carmel, fruit wine splenderous of
Heaven, Blessed Mother of the Son of God, Immaculate Virgin, assist me in my necessity. Oh Star of the Sea. Help me and show me herein you are my Mother. Oh Holy Mary, Mother of God, Queen of Heaven and Earth, I humbly beseech you from the bottom of my heart to succour me in my necessity.There is none that can withstand your power. Oh show me here you are my Mother. Oh Mary conceived without sin, pray for us who have recourse to Thee (3 times). Thank you for mercy towards me and mine. Amen. This prayer must be said for 3 consecutive days and after that the request will be granted and the prayer must be published.



Never known to fail but the Paisley case is a stretch

[DoYerJob Linesman]

Very, very bad taste.

[glens abu]

Did you know that back in the late 50's or early 60's Ian Paisley once kidnapped a young girl?

Yip think it was Moira Lyons

[DuffleKing]

Was reading in the 'i' newspaper today, that it has been requested that prayers be said for the Rev, didn't specify what you should be praying for thou.

Who would you pray to?

WHEN IAN PAISLEY was a gawky, relatively unknown bachelor-preacher, Catholic bigotry was much in evidence in Ireland. In the north, Bishop Farren of Derry warned Catholics: 'If you allow your children to be contaminated by those who are not of the fold, then you can expect nothing but disaster.' At least one of the fold, Maura Lyons, a 15-year-old Belfast working-class girl, ignored the warning. Eldest of a family of five from the Catholic Falls Road, she was a stitcher for the Star Clothing Company where, in 1956, visiting gospellers caused her to doubt her Catholicism. She contacted a minister of the Free Presbyterian Church who introduced her to Ian Paisley.

Paisley was about to marry Eileen Cassells, an east Belfast shopkeeper's daughter who has always called him 'Honeybunch', and he invited Maura to the wedding. The encounter - and its bizarre sequel - made Paisley a household name.

While 'Honeybunch' was on his honeymoon, Maura joined his church and told her parents. Her father beat her and called in three Roman Catholic priests who 'seemed determined to force me into convent life', she said later. She escaped by jumping from a bedroom window. Free Presbyterians smuggled her into Scotland - a criminal offence. Irish newspapers, north and south, went wild. The Royal Ulster Constabulary searched for the girl, and found a wall of silence.

Two months later, Paisley publicly played a tape-recording of Maura Lyons describing her conversion. He was laconic with the truth: the tape, he said, had been found among milk bottles on his doorstep. He also showed his talent for playing the beleaguered hero. 'If I knew where the girl was I would not take her to the police,' he said. 'Very well, I am committing an offence. I will do time for it. I would be proud to do time for Protestant liberty.' Eighteen months later, the Belfast High Court noted that 'Mr Paisley was in touch with the girl when prima facie she was abducted'. Then, on the order of the court, Maura Lyons was returned to her parents - and to the fold.

Most Ulster Protestants were embarrassed. Nevertheless, since the Maura Lyons affair, politics, as much as religion, has made 'the Big Man' a persevering force among his voters and votaries. A Protestant housewife in his North Antrim constituency says: 'I remember him when he was just a clergyman in Ballymena. He would only attract 12 people to his meetings at the town hall. It's only since he went into politics that he got his following.'

In 1986, Paisley's daughter, Rhonda, told me: 'There are some kids who kiss his picture every night, though he is against all idolatry.' But with a constituency majority of 20,000, her father is idolised. Many, according to a local Protestant councillor, Price McConaghy, are 'people who follow him blindly but don't stop to think'. Despite Paisley's hatred of Rome, many Catholic constituents think he is an effective MP.

Chris McNabb, a reporter on the Ballymena Observer, says: 'He's not loved by Catholics, but is respected.' Two years ago, when parents in the nationalist district of Cushendun fought a proposal to close Culranney Catholic primary school because it had only ten pupils, it was Paisley who petitioned the Department of Education on their behalf. A local Sinn Fein councillor, James McCarry, says: 'To be honest, he has worked for both sides of the community. When Catholics get jobs, but Protestants won't work with them, they go to Paisley, and he delivers the goods. That's quite ironic.'

It puzzles people. Having established his credentials as a bigot by denouncing the Pope, mixed marriages, the allocation of houses to Catholics and the appointment of Catholic teachers to state schools, he is attentive to Catholic constituents who seek his help. The mainly Catholic population of Rathlin Island, off the Antrim coast, owes its wind-powered electricity and improved harbour to his efforts.

Much about him is fairly predictable: favourite film, Cromwell; favourite book, the Bible; favourite poem, Kipling's If; favourite music, Handel's Messiah. But he is capable of springing occasional surprises. When the Pope visited Ireland in 1979, Paisley said it was 'no concern' of his. A few years earlier, he was said to be genuinely upset when members of his congregation roughed up a Fleet Street journalist for taking notes of a sermon. Price McConaghy, who lives in the whiskey town of Bushmills, Co Antrim, strongly opposes Paisley's views and style, but adds: 'If the distillery was ever threatened with closure, Mr Paisley would be the first to fight for it to stay open, even though he's a teetotaller.'

Paisley was born in April 1926 in a largely Catholic section of Armagh. His father, James Kyle Paisley, was a Baptist pastor and drapery store assistant who had served in the Ulster Volunteer Force during the 1912-13 Home Rule crisis. His mother, Isabella Turnbull, was a railway worker's daughter from Stirling in Scotland, who had been converted to 'born-again' Christianity in Edinburgh when she was (like Maura Lyons) just 15. Later, when the family moved to Ballymena, the boy and his elder brother Harold were ordered to keep to themselves and the Bible.

In his teens, Ian rose at 3am to pray. Harold joined the Royal Ulster Constabulary, but left the force after a spot of trouble when drunk. By the time Harold rediscovered his fundamentalism as a Plymouth Brethren evangelist, his younger brother had passed through the local technical college, worked on a farm and preached his first sermon in a 'tin hut' mission hall, and was ordained into what became the Free Presbyterian Church. 'Lord, give this young man a tongue like an old cow,' prayed the old cleric who laid hands on him in 1945.

The Lord obliged. Paisley, since then, has rasped across continents: via a 'hot gospel' university in South Carolina which identified him as a kindred spirit and, in 1966, awarded him an 'honorary doctorate'; in the forums of Europe where, from his Euro-MP's seat, he attacks ecumenicalism and popery; and on BBC airwaves. In his size 11 shoes he has tramped the globe, delivering envenomed diatribes, cajoling, ridiculing, mimicking, letting off the artillery of his talent at all prepared to listen.

One of the most striking things about Paisley is that he was organising mass protest demonstrations in Northern Ireland well before such events became fashionable vehicles for the civil rights movement. He was also prepared to break the law long before he was castigating the IRA Provos for doing so.

The law-breaking became inevitable as a result of Paisley's attachment not only to militant fundamentalism but to the wilder fringes of Unionism. In the mid-Fifties, he would play on loyalist paranoia with such statements as: 'The dark sinister shadow of our neighbouring Roman Catholic state, where religious liberty is slowly but surely being taken away, lies across our province. The demands and aims of the Church of Rome are growing, and as our Protestantism declines with the blight of modernistic apostasy, the ascendancy of that Church is becoming more and more marked in our Ulster life.'

At the same time, he attended the inaugural meeting of, and subsequently joined, a group calling itself Ulster Protestant Action, which has since been described as 'a potentially armed expression of extreme loyalism'. (It disintegrated in 1966 after the murder of a Catholic by loyalist paramilitaries.) One of his biographers, Clifford Smyth, finds it 'hard to resist the conclusion' that Paisley was aware of the existence of a revamped Ulster Volunteer Force, which was then 'in all probability involved in the procurement of weapons'. In 1966, he caused a riot by marching on the General Assembly of Irish Presbyterianism, and was jailed for a short term. Across the land he led his ranting tribes, disturbing the peace and achieving a kind of martyrdom when hauled before the courts.

As a young reporter on the Belfast Telegraph, I first observed 'the old cow's tongue' scouring orthodox Unionism. Arrested for deafening the residents of Donaghadee, a County Down seaside resort, with his loudspeakers, Paisley appeared before a special court, held in the room of a local hotel. He revelled in his predicament, stunned only briefly when I told him that Mass had been celebrated in the same room the previous day. When the magistrate dismissed the charge on a technicality, Paisley boomed: 'Thank God for the victory.'

He was - is - more than a preacher in whom prejudices of a darker age found refuge. He did not - does not - accept the conditional when the absolute will do. He absolutely wanted to be the spiritual and temporal leader of Ulster Unionism. The Unionist establishment feared and loathed him. In 1966, Terence O'Neill, the reformist Prime Minister of Northern Ireland, responded with an anti-Paisley blast which,in more recent years, might easily have been taken to refer to IRA terrorism. 'To those of us who remember the Thirties,' O'Neill declared, 'the pattern is horribly familiar. The contempt for established authority; the crude and unthinking intolerance; the emphasis upon monster processions and rallies; the appeal to a perverted form of patriotism - each and every one of these things has its parallel in the rise of the Nazis to power.'

But as O'Neill's star flickered out, Paisley burgeoned from his largely self-made midden. It was he who sparked the Divis Street riots in 1964 - a precursor to the Troubles - by threatening to remove an Irish tricolour from a west Belfast ghetto. Despite his claims not to be against Catholics 'as people', he sometimes had an odd way of showing it. Hearing that an Italian ice-cream parlour had opened on Belfast's Shankill Road, he addressed a local meeting. 'You people of the Shankill Road, what's wrong with you? Number 425 Shankill Road - do you know who lives there? Pope's men, that's who] Forte's ice-cream shop] Italian Papists on the Shankill Road]'

And God help the Catholic priest who dared to cross his path. One who objected to Paisley's use of Ballymoney town hall for anti-Catholic meetings provoked a typical afflatus. 'Priest Murphy, speak for your own bloodthirsty, persecuting, intolerant, blaspheming, politic-religious papacy, but do not dare to pretend to be the spokesman of free Ulster men . . . Go back to your priestly intolerance, back to your blasphemous Masses, back to your beads, holy water, holy smoke and stinks and remember . . we know your church to be the mother of harlots and the abominations of the Earth.'

In the political arena, Paisley seized on a Catholic campaign of civil disobedience in 1972 to advance his fortunes. He announced the formation of his own Democratic Unionist Party, a double-decker bus for fundamental loyalism and fundamental Christianity. Its fuel was the Troubles. Lumbering across Northern Ireland, it did not even swerve to avoid self-contradictions. Having banned Freemasons from his church as 'the excreta that runs from the sewer-pipes of hell,' he suddenly admitted them.

Having launched a campaign to 'Save Ulster from Sodomy', he ignored warnings about a housefather of Kincora Boys' Home in east Belfast who later was jailed for sexual offences against the children. Ignoring Free Presbyterian policy to have no truck with a Romish Europe, he ran for the European Parliament.

Ed Maloney and Andy Pollack, authors of a 1986 biography, Paisley, say he keeps dissidents in line by convincing the majority 'that he is God's chosen man and that there will be divine retribution on anyone who goes against him'. When Paisley was ordained, his mother gave him a text from Isaiah: 'No weapon that is formed against thee shall prosper; and every tongue that shall rise against thee in judgement thou shalt condemn.' He took it to heart and repeats it when occasions demand.

He did not read it to John Major on 6 September when the Prime Minister ordered the Ulsterman from a room in 10 Downing Street, but it can be assumed that Isaiah has been on his mind since then.

Paisley went to Downing Street ostensibly to exchange views with Major about the IRA ceasefire and anticipated developments therefrom. But he was really there to deliver one of his famous rants, this time accusing the Prime Minister of trying to 'prise Ulster out of the UK'. Major said: 'Get out of this room.' Paisley continued his tirade. Unable to budge the Big Man, Major himself left. Paisley, determined to finish what he had come to deliver, fulminated into space before he was chucked out. It was worth it - another public 'martyrdom' that went down well at home.

A striking feature about Paisley, as may have been observed in events leading up to the ceasefire, is his talent for translating adversity into advantage, defeat into victory. When the official Unionist Party leader, James Molyneaux, upstaged him over last December's Downing Street Declaration, Paisley labelled him 'Judas Iscariot'. Similarly, on signing the Anglo-Irish Agreement eight years ago, Margaret Thatcher became 'Jezebel'. By so demonising his foes, Paisley sanctifies himself and consecrates his shaky ground.

Since neither Major nor Baroness Thatcher is particularly well versed in the lunar extremes of Ulster invective, they have not been able to put down the Big Man as deftly as they might have wished. One Englishman who did was the former Methodist leader Donald Soper, whom Paisley despised, both for his left-wing politics and for his cool theology. Paisley went to heckle Soper in Hyde Park in 1954. 'Do you deny the Virgin birth of Christ?' Paisley thundered again and again until he grew so hot he had to remove his hat. Soper bent solicitously towards him. 'Keep your hat on, the woodpeckers are about]' The crowd at Speakers' Corner fell about. Paisley slunk away. But even then, he rose from humiliation, as the phoenix from fire. Five years later, when Soper arrived in Belfast on a preaching engagement, he was set upon by Paisley's Free Presbyterians - 'the most animal-like of any', Soper recalled. Paisley was fined for disorderly conduct, refused to pay and said he was determined to go to jail. Martyrdom eluded him only thanks to payment of the fine by a friend of the Government.

The Paisley family is closely bonded, yet the Big Man's five children have never quite conformed to stereotype. One of Paisley's County Antrim followers noted: 'The typical young Free Presbyterian is plain-faced, wears no make-up and dresses very plainly, whereas Paisley's children dress fashionably, the girls have their hair styled, and Rhonda is an artist.'

Of the five, Rhonda is the most interesting. The eldest, Sharon, 36, is married to an east Belfast engineer, a Free Presbyterian. Cherith, 27, edits her father's magazine, Protestant Blueprint. Ian, one of the 26-year-old twins, is press officer of his father's Democratic Unionist Party. The other, Kyle, is campaigning against topless barmaids in Lowestoft, where he is a Free Presbyterian minister. At 34, Rhonda has been Lady Mayoress of Belfast, a television presenter there and in Dublin and the owner of a canary called Matisse (now deceased) which sat on her shoulder while she painted.

The people of the Irish Republic enjoy Rhonda, a former screamer who disrupted ecumenical services. Last month, in one of her regular columns in the Irish Times, she wrote about one of the earliest Irish republican heroes, Michael Collins: 'Well might Collins have had . . . passion and anger. His heart was the heart of an Irishman, and his soul knew the deceit of the British.' In another, she wrote: 'As an Irish woman, I can relate with a full heart to the agonising truth . . . We (Protestants) have been too loyal.' She has said that if a united Ireland was 'voted in tomorrow, I'd accept it freely'. While her father condemns John Hume as a 'mystical romanticist' and a 'pretender to democracy', Rhonda believes that the two men capable of 'delivering a (Northern Ireland) solution that will stick are John Hume and Ian Paisley.'

I am not quite sure what has transformed Rhonda, if indeed transformation has taken place. When I met her in the mayoral parlour eight years ago, she was demure, though capable of echoing the Big Man's eruptions in no uncertain terms. A few months earlier, she had disrupted an ecumenical service at St

Anne's (Protestant) Cathedral in Belfast by screaming anti-papal objections. After her election to the city council in 1985, her first motion was to deny Sinn Fein councillors parking facilities at the city hall. Unlike her father, however, she seemed not the sort to make peculation tremble; not the archetypal Ulster maenad, capable of striking fear and ecstasy into men's hearts.

'I never thought my Daddy was a bad man,' she said then. 'The reason my father is a good, strong leader is that his view of my mother is not that of a submissive, home-kept wife.' Eileen Paisley gave up a career in local politics to be her husband's secretary when he became a Euro-MP in 1979. Paisley has said: 'My wife Eileen's opinions are the ones I trust most.'

Being 'arty', it was inevitable that Rhonda would have friends beyond the pale of the Free Presbyterian Church, many of them Catholics. As a sporadic local television presenter, she absorbed from her working environment modern ideas that were bound to clash with those of her father. These influences probably pushed her away from the Free Presbyterians. Five years ago, she resigned from Ian Paisley's church, a decision he accepted 'with great regret'. But she was not banished, and both retain a fondness for each other.

Perhaps the most striking thing of all about Ian Paisley is his ability to march die-hard Unionists to the brink, then step back from it. He has predicted Apocalypse until he is blue in the face. Like Bishop Farren, 'Paisley invents disaster so that he can oppose it,' says McCarry.

There is nobody in Paisley's church or party who can match him in bombast. At 68, and increasingly isolated, he must be contemplating retirement. There is, very occasionally, a touch of uncertainty as well as truculence in the light-grey eyes. Sometimes, as when I met him last month at the opening of his first Welsh Free Presbyterian church, it seems to be a great effort to produce the torrent of lava on demand. Is he about to become an extinct volcano?

If he is, there may well be a battle to succeed him. At one time, Peter Robinson, one of the more thoughtful DUP men, was assumed to be Paisley's anointed. But he seems to have been eclipsed by William McCrea, cleric and MP. His and Paisley's bizarre movement's future depends on carnage or the threat of it. If Ulster settles down, bigotry and sectarianism may well continue, but Paisleyism may be finished - or, at most, become a single-decker bus with its religious fundamentalist passengers still on board.

Now, he shouts of civil war to come. But with the political ground opening under him, the Big Man may have to revise brinkmanship as a strategy, even if it has proved an effective instrument for conversions.

As for his earliest conversion - Maura Lyons - within two years of being returned to her family, she married a Catholic and raised three Catholic children. Today she declines to speak about Ian Paisley.