Ian Paisley’s private kingdom

This is an extract from the The Spectator, 13 August 1982: One summer’s evening, I went for a stroll by the shores of Lough Erne, just outside the city of Enniskillen, Northern Ireland. Swifts and swallows patrolled separate strands of midge-covered waters as if divided into Catholics and Protestants. Gleaming in the twilight, the Gospel Tent stood in a field beside a full car park. A small poster on a telegraph pole proclaimed a ‘Fundamentalist Convention. Preacher: Dr Ian Paisley’. The event was scarcely publicised, and few people in Enniskillen knew that Paisley was on their doorstep. Now at last I had the chance to hear the man whom Dervla Murphy, a courageous traveller in Ulster, had described in her book, A Place Apart, as ‘the presence of pure evil’, radiating sinister and ‘powerful emanations’.

An Englishwoman settled in Ulster had described to me the impact Paisley made on her when he happened to walk past her window, guarded by soldiers.