Not much in that, a journalist said to me after the extended interview with the Reverend Ian Paisley which the Today programme ran on Saturday to mark the end of a 40-year-long political career. \u201cIn many respects he has lost nothing,\u201d said the programme\u2019s presenter, Justin Webb, as the old Ulsterman\u2019s gravely voice faded from the airwaves.<\/p>\n
But for anyone with the consciousness that Dr Paisley was speaking at the start of Holy Week the verdict was strikingly different. In a week when Christians commemorate progress through suffering to new life, here was a story which mirrored that great archetype in our contemporary political reality.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
\u201cThere is such a thing as forgiveness,\u201d Dr Paisley said to John Humphrys who had gone to the priest-politician\u2019s home in East Belfast for the interview. The BBC\u2019s arch confrontationalist was perplexed, so the old Presybterian offered some basic theology. \u201cForgiveness rests upon a rejection of your old ways. There\u2019s no doubt about it that Sinn Fein have done that. I have to be honest, if people repent, and show their repentance by not going back to their old ways, I have to honour that.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mr Humphrys was not going to let him off the hook. These were the very people who had once tried to murder him.\u00a0 Yes, said the old preacher, with a flourish of the old rhetoric, Sinn Fein had once had \u201cguns in their hands and murder in their heart\u201d but they are \u201centirely different now\u201d. They had told their people to aid, and even enlist in, the security forces \u201cand they have kept to what they promised\u201d.<\/p>\n
There was a curious dynamic to the exchange. Mr Humphrys seemed determined to remain in the past \u2013 harrying the politician about a phrase he had used 41 years before \u2013 where the octogenarian preferred to live in the present. \u201cYou wanted to see him in hell,\u201d the interviewer said of the former-IRA leader Martin McGuinness. \u201cI\u2019d rather see him heaven, redeemed and saved by the grace of God,\u201d replied his interviewee.<\/p>\n
And there was repentance from the old-time revivalist too. \u201cI expressed myself in a way that Ulstermen understood me. But we\u2019re not in those days now,\u201d said. \u201cNo-one could justify everything they have every done… I have many, many things I repent of. My repentance is measured by how I live now and the repentance of Mr McGuinness has to be judged by what he\u2019s doing now.\u201d<\/p>\n
Yet, if Dr Paisley had not repeatedly said No to compromise earlier in his career, might the conflict not have ended earlier, with fewer deaths? Mr Humphry\u2019s political sophistication deserted him here in his insatiable fixation for controversy. The lesson of history \u2013 from Richard Nixon with China, or Ronald Reagan with the Soviet Union \u2013 is that it takes a hard man, not a dove, to negotiate peace because the hard man is able to take his own people along with him.<\/p>\n
Should he have said Yes earlier? \u201cI don\u2019t accept that,\u201d Dr Paisley said. \u201cOther people were trying to settle it in a way that was merely a political plaster on the wound. I believe you had to deal with the wound\u201d.\u00a0 It was only on that basis \u201cthat there could be any lasting peace\u201d.<\/p>\n
There are fine political judgements involved here. But the Holy Week journey through a time of trial to one of resurrection was evident in the sense of generosity and self-criticism displayed by the man whom journalists once liked to call Dr No but who ended up praying together with Martin McGuinness when the ex-IRAman\u2019s mother was dying.<\/p>\n
\u201cI believe that God can change people,\u201d he concluded. \u201cHe certainly changed me.\u201d\u00a0 There are none so deaf as those who will not hear.<\/p>\n