pāzˈlē, 1926–, Northern Irish religious and political leader. A leading protagonist of militant Protestantism against Roman Catholicism in Northern Ireland, Paisley was ordained in the Presbyterian Church in 1946. In 1951, however, he broke away from Presbyterianism to found his own sect, the Free Presbyterian Church of Ulster, noted for its virulent antiecumenism. In the late 1960s he led numerous anti-Catholic marches, and he was jailed in 1966 and again in 1969 for heading demonstrations that ended in rioting. Running on a platform to end all reforms intended to help the Catholic minority, he was elected to the Northern Irish Parliament (1970–72), and to the British House of Commons (1970–). In 1971, Paisley founded the Democratic Unionist party, which supports total integration of Northern Ireland into the United Kingdom and condemns constitutional arrangements for a new assembly and power sharing between Protestants and Catholics. He supported a strike by Protestant workers that brought the collapse (1974) of the new coalition executive council and the reimposition of direct British rule. He accused British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher of treachery when she signed the Anglo-Irish accord of 1985, giving Ireland consultative rights in the government of Northern Ireland, and he opposed the 1998 Northern Irish peace accord. Paisley was elected to the Northern Irish assembly in 1999, and his party won a plurality of seats in that body in 2003.

See biographies by E. Moloney and A. Pollak (1986) and C. Smyth (1987).

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