The Troubles Are Over

DUP leader Ian Paisley has said he believes a corner has been turned in Northern Ireland and that the Troubles are now over.

 

The Stormont First Minister was speaking at a press conference following today's first North-South Ministerial Council in County Armagh.

 

Dr. Paisley said he believed "the conflict in Northern Ireland now over" and that it was now "up to the politicians to consolidate the peace".

 

He said one reason for this dramatic change of thinking on his part was the recent meeting  between the Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams and PSNI chief contable Hugh Orde.

 

The Democratic Unionist Party is the leading unionist party in the north of Ireland and has had known ties to loyalist paramilitaries such as the Loyalist Volunteer Force, Ulster Volunteer Force and others who have all murdered Irish Catholics and hindered the peace process in the past when in fact Sinn Féin was willing to talk.

 

Dr. Paisley  has in the past refused to sit at the peace table with Sinn Féin due to their connection with the Provisional Irish Republican Army and all the while turned a blind eye to the loyalist secterian attacks on civillians.

 

Dr. Paisley is and will be remembered more in history for his outburst at a EU meeting when he called the Pope John Paul II the anti-christ but not for his "heroic" stand at the peace table.

 

Dr. Paisley waited to long to grow wise, many more people would have been alive today, on all sides, had it not been for his refusal to commit to peace as he does now.