Michael KellyChurch encounter persuaded hardliner to work with Sinn Fein
EXCLUSIVE
A meeting between the late Ian Paisley and Catholic Church leaders played a crucial role in getting the firebrand preacher to agree to power-sharing with Catholics, it has been claimed.
Rev. Paisley, who died last week aged 88, held his first meeting with representatives of the Catholic Church in 2006. Crucially, at Rev. Paisley’s request, the meeting was held on the eve of a historic encounter between his DUP party and Sinn Féin.
Fr Tim Bartlett, a senior member of the Catholic Church delegation that met the DUP, reveals in The Irish Catholic this week that the DUP later revealed that Rev. Paisley’s meeting with Cardinal Seán Brady and other Catholic leaders played a vital role in convincing him to abandon his opposition to power-sharing.
Fr Bartlett reveals that, while the meeting discussed issues like child poverty, abortion and the defence of traditional marriage, “it was clear that Rev. Paisley’s immediate priority lay elsewhere”.
According to Fr Bartlett, “what he wanted was ‘our guidance’, as he called it, as to whether or not he should do a deal with Sinn Féin at the forthcoming St Andrew’s talks”.
The St Andrew’s talks led to Rev. Paisley’s eventual agreement that he would
lead the DUP into a power-sharing executive with Sinn Féin, the UUP and the SDLP.
Fr Bartlett recalls how Cardinal Brady responded to Rev. Paisley’s appeal for advice and encouraged him to do a deal for the sake of all of the people of the North who wanted a political settlement. “If Cardinal Brady had argued against doing such a deal, I am absolutely satisfied that the subsequent talks at St Andrew’s, and the history of the peace process, would have been very different.
“For all his railing against the ‘Church of Rome’, it had become clear to me in this as in other conversations he had behind the scenes with Catholic priests, that Rev. Paisley still put great store by the word of a fellow ‘man of the cloth’,” Fr Bartlett writes.