Northern Ireland: Call to Arms

Fanning sectarian embers

"We will yet defeat the most nefarious conspiracy that has ever been hatched on a free people."

If those stirring words uttered last week by the Rev. Ian Paisley, 54, the durable firebrand of Ulster politics, had a strangely familiar ring, it was not accidental. Precisely the same call to arms had been issued 69 years earlier by Ulster Hero Sir Edward Carson, when he rallied fellow Protestants fighting to keep their ties to the United Kingdom rather than accept Irish home rule and Catholic domination. Paisley, too, was seeking...