Death of the “Anti-Christ”.

Though I did think that Ian Paisley, who died yesterday, was already dead. His huge, thundering presence was such a big part of British life that I assumed his more recent silence meant he was no longer with us. It’s impossible to overstate how famous, or infamous, he was in the 70s and 80s. Think of “The Troubles” in Northern Ireland and you instantly think of Paisley, bellowing at anyone who didn’t agree with him. His loud and uncompromising hatred of Catholicism meant that, to the North London Catholic community in which I grew up, he was the anti-Christ. Which is exactly what he called the Pope, to his face, in 1981. In a sense, the ferocious old firebrand died in 2007, the day he signed that power sharing agreement with Sinn Fein. Ulster is a much more peaceful place now than it was in Paisley’s political heyday. Back then, Belfast sounded like this.