Ian Paisley, who became Lord Bannside, was undoubtedly a gospel man.
He was born, the younger of two sons in a Catholic section of Armagh, to James Paisley, a baptist pastor in Ballymena. His theological education was in the Barry School of Evangelism of the Reformed Presbyterian Church during the early 1940s. He was ordained in 1946 and became active in the National Union of Protestants.
His life could be broadly thought of in two sections. From the 1960s onwards, mixing his faith with politics, he became an abrasively outspoken defender of Protestant Northern Ireland against what he saw as the attempts of various governments to sell out to Sinn Fein and the Catholic Irish Republic in the South. The tone and aggressiveness of many of his declarations probably did not help the cause of Protestantism in the UK more generally as he was seen as a tub thumping anti-Catholic fundamentalist. He spent two periods of three months in prison during the first of which he wrote an exposition of the New Testament book of Romans which won him an honorary doctorate from Bob Jones University in South Carolina, USA.
