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16 April 1998 Edition

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Watching the Unionists

By Brian Campbell

I don't care what everyone says, there's still plenty of entertainment left in Ian Paisley. He has lost none of his old slapstick style, even if he has slowed down a bit. That said, entertainment is probably the wrong word. It's more that he inspires a gruesome fascination. Take his performance at press conferences over these past weeks.

``Who's that boy shouting? I'm in charge of this press conference. Now shut up,'' he told one journalist on Wednesday morning as he (Paisley) was in the middle of congratulating a TnaG journalist for being able to speak English.

``I know women find it hard to hold their tongue when a man is talking,'' he said to a female journalist two weeks ago as she tried to ask him a question. There was a sharp intake of breath from the foreign hacks but Paisley and his men laughed it off in a way that genuinely shocked them.

It is a regular performance. The TnaG journalist was told to ``get out'' by Paisley's colleagues at the press conference. Paisley browbeats journalists all the time by simply talking over the top of them and many of them decide not to challenge him. Noel Thompson, the award-winning BBC presenter of Hearts and Minds, took him on recently and Paisley went into a rambling rant which got louder and louder. Thompson perservered and even though he got nowhere, he seemed satisfied that he had exposed Paisley's refusal to engage. It was worth doing.

Paisley was also challenged by members of the PUP at Stormont last Thursday night. ``Where are you going to take us, Ian?'' ``You're a fucking mouth.'' ``Grand Old Duke of York.'' They shouted and Paisley tried to respond, but eventually he called for them to be thrown out. It was a moment which showed the deep bitterness within loyalism and it is rooted in memories of Paisley's implicit calls to arms over the years. The DUP have always been prepared to fight to the last drop of someone else's blood.

The referendum campaign will show how much power the old man has left. He can still appeal to a sizeable constituency which admires him precisely for his bluster and for his instinctive inability to compromise. Both are traits of fundamentalism and it is no surprise that his base is still firmly in rural areas where his Free Presbyterian Church finds support.

Paisley will provide the colour in the `No' campaign within unionism but the decisive influence will be elsewhere. Anyone who has listened to recent interviews with UUP MP Willie Ross will recognise an influential voice who has the potential to derail Trimble. His sharp, precise answers and his no nonsense, not an inch brand of unionism mark him out as someone who will carry weight when the Ulster Unionist Council meets decisively on Saturday to consider the Agreement.

It will be a defining moment for Unionism and already the debate is fierce. On Trimble's side is a constituency which has pushed him this far. Trimble was never a natural compromiser - how could someone who made his recent reputation by walking over the rights of nationalists on the Garvaghy Road - but within unionism there have been voices over these past few years who have urged him to make a deal.

Not that Trimble has changed his spots. Nor some of those who support him. His deputy leader, John Taylor, writing this week about the ``all-island bodies'', told us that ``a Unionist would be present at every North-South meeting carrying a veto''.

So there is little difference between the various leaders of unionism. Instead of watching them, look carefully at where the real battle will be - among the grassroots unionist community. Five weeks from now we'll know.

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