Ian Paisley

Ian Paisley (1926 to 2014), later Baron Bannside, was a Northern Irish unionist politician and Protestant evangelical minister who dominated hardline loyalism through the years of the Troubles. He became a minister in 1946, co-founded the Free Presbyterian Church of Ulster in 1951 and led it until 2008, and in 1971 founded the Democratic Unionist Party, which he led for almost forty years. He sat as Member of Parliament for North Antrim from 1970 and as a member of the European Parliament from 1979. He opposed power sharing and the Sunningdale Agreement of 1974, the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985 and the Good Friday Agreement of 1998. After the St Andrews Agreement his party agreed to share power with Sinn Fein, and in May 2007 he became First Minister of Northern Ireland alongside Martin McGuinness. He stepped down in 2008, became a life peer in 2010 and left politics in 2011. His placement here follows his term as head of a devolved government; his religious leadership is equally central to his career.