Back when I was a teenager and the Troubles were just beginning, I was allowed to attend one of the first civil rights marches, on 30 November 1968. I can remember the excitement and trepidation as the marchers set off from the Killylea Road towards the town centre, their ranks swelled by coachloads of protesters from across the province.
The source of that trepidation was one man, the Rev Ian Paisley, a Free Presbyterian firebrand, who, having been born in Armagh in 1926, had returned with a vengeance to haunt the city. Convinced that the Northern Irish Civil Rights Association was 'a front movement for the IRA', he had called for 'every Loyalist in Ulster' to assemble in Armagh that same day and 'take control of the city'. This they duly did, though only in their hundreds, assembling in the town centre, where, according to the rumours that sped though the marchers, they had armed themselves with crowbars and cudgels, and, according to local sources, with pick-axe handles provided free by a Protestant-owned hardware shop.
The marchers never made it through the town. At the beginning of Thomas Street, the route was blocked by British soldiers and RUC men in riot gear. The mood turned from restless to defiant, the strains of 'We Shall Overcome' giving way to more provocative chants such as 'SS RUC' and 'two, four, six, eight, organise and smash the state'. Alongside some friends, I pushed to the front of the throng, where, perched on a shop windowsill, we could see over security forces all the way down to the other end of Thomas Street. There, the Paisleyites were being held back by another phalanx of soldiers and policemen. Even from several hundred yards, you could feel their anger and hatred.
Like many lapsed Catholics, I eventually shook off the dogma of my upbringing, but I never shed the sense of hurt nor the sense of threat that Paisley embodied in his virulent strain of anti-Catholic rhetoric, a rhetoric that always seemed just a hair's breadth from the violence it often inflamed. His tone was that of a hectoring bully, his style that of the Biblical ranters of another age, steadfast and unyielding. He was the great wrecker, the demagogue, the living, fire-breathing epitome of Edward Carson's definition of Ulster as 'a Protestant state for a Protestant people'.
Paisley was also the hater of all things Papist. He once produced a Roman Catholic Eucharist wafer during a televised speech to the Oxford Union in the early 1970s, mocking it and the fools and blasphemers who believed it sacred. That single act of oafish offence put Paisley well and truly beyond the pale in our house, and every Catholic household in Ireland.
That was the first time Paisley impinged on my consciousness, where he remained, rooted and unchanging, for the entire duration of the Troubles and beyond. He was a bogeyman and a bigot, a bombastic preacher who plied not peace and understanding, but hatred and division. As the Troubles descended into tribal blood-letting, and the dark days of the 1970s, the civil rights era became the great lost moment of Northern Irish politics, and the Provisionals began their long, murderous campaign against the security forces, Protestant businesses and civilians, Paisley became the dominant voice of Loyalism whose increasing and ever-strident extremism expressed the fabled siege mentality of his tribe.
The Big Man, as his followers call him, has remained embedded in my consciousness ever since that day in 1968, a promoter of ultra-Unionist intransigence. Until, that is, a few months ago, when the unthinkable happened. The first clue that something was not quite right with the Reverend Ian was written on his face: he suddenly started smiling. Immediately, the text messages started arriving from the wags at home: 'The Brits have been putting something in Big Ian's Orange Fanta' and 'Paisley's on the Prozac!'
Then, something even more unimaginable. Ian started using the Y word, and it was like he couldn't stop. He said 'Yes' to sitting down with his sworn enemies, Adams and McGuinness. He said 'Yes' to devolved power-sharing. He said 'Yes' to tea and wee buns with Albert Reynolds. The fledging First Minister metamorphosed into the province's first 'Yes' Minister. It was almost too much to take. After the shock of the Sinn Feiners' transformation into a political party capable of compromising what had long been thought to have been core principles, the Democratic Unionists seem to have caught the progressive bug.
Paisley, after all, was the man who coined the very phrase 'Ulster Says No', who roared 'No!' at Terence O'Neill, the doomed and ineffectual Prime Minister of Northern Ireland when the Troubles began, who said 'No' to the Sunningdale agreement, and 'No' to James Prior's policy of 'rolling devolution'. The man who shouted 'No!' to the Anglo-Irish agreement, and the Belfast agreement, who said 'No' to Mo and Mandy, and to 'Babbling' Brooke before them, and John 'See you, Jimmy' Reid after them, and who also said No' to Jesus Christ, Superstar and Jerry Springer the Opera, to the Anne Summers sex shop in the city centre, and to Gilbert and George at the Ormeau Baths Gallery.
Was it Prozac? The onset of sudden, benign, old age? Or, could it be that even the Big Man has been seduced, in the autumn of his long life, by the irresistible aphrodisiac of power? Whatever, a transformation has occurred, some kind of late epiphany that is nothing less than a leap of faith. Not only has he been seen smiling in the presence of the Shinners, he has even started cracking a joke or two. When asked by Ahern why he always had boiled eggs for breakfast, he replied: 'It would be hard for you to poison them.' (This, for the uninitiated, is as close to a quip as it gets with the DUP, the rest of whom have yet to surrender the dour-faced demeanour of the long-suffering.)
It may be hard for those of you who have long grown bored with the snail's pace of Northern Irish politics to fully comprehend the incredulity many of we natives feel in the face of these momentous events. That Paisley and McGuinness will be sitting down together this week, as First Minister and Deputy, to attempt to do real - read boring, dogged, matter-of-fact - politics rather than going for each other's jugulars or indulging in another round of 'talks about talks', is a moment that most of us who lived though the Troubles thought we would never see.
I would love to be a fly on the wall, when Ian and Marty, and Geoffrey and Gerry, and the rest put their pasts behind them and walk hand-in-hand down the long, rocky road of compromise. But when the joking and smiling subside, that, even by the painfully protracted standards of Northern Irish politics, may take a very long time.