'Moderation'- Belfast-style
Socialist Organiser1982 1982-03-11Read it in the scan (PDF), scan page 5 →
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RIOTING BROKE out at the Belfast Town Hall when it was announced that lan Paisley's Democratic Unionist Party [DUP] candidate, Rev. William McCrea, had been beaten into third place in the by-election to fill the Westminster seat vacated by Official Unionist Rev. Roy Bradford, shot last year by the Provisional Rev. Martyn Smyth, a Presbyterian minister and the Imperial Grand Master of the Orange Order, won the seat, and the antisectarian Unionist party, Alliance, came second [as it did in 1979, with about the same vote].
The DUP, which did not contest the seat in 1979, attempted to grab it from the OUP, claiming with some justification that Roy Bradford was a closet Paisleyite. The DUP holds two of the four Belfast seats the fourth is held by Gerry Fitt], and had the Paisleyite tide continued it might have been expected to win Belfast South.
Jubilant Official Unionists are saying that this result was Paisley's Water100' , and the decisive refutation of his claim to be 'the leader of the Protestant people of Ulster"
It is too early to say whether the tide has turned that decisively. But certainly Paisley's credibility must. be suffering erosion, as what looks like increasingly hard evidence emerges that he must have known about and helped to cover up for the organisation of a [homosexual] child prostitution ring in Belfast - the still reverberating scandal of the Kincora boys' home.
On the eve of the poll. William McGrath, former house father there, issued a statement from jail contradieting Paisley. The size of the problem fde. Paisley was illustrated in the election, where the DUP and OUP vehemently opposed the proposal to extend British legislation on homosexuality to the six counties. Paisley has revived his notorious 'Save Ulster from Sodomy' campaign to defeat the proposal.
The South Belfast by election was very much an intra-community affair of the Protestants. In an electorate of 66,000, the [Catholic] SDLP vote of about 4.000 reflects the communal divide. Thus the bitterness among the Protestant factions. The rioting on polling night was said to have been sparked off by two women, from the DUP and OUP. getting into an acrimonious dispute about a point of bible interpretation. This is a world in which the return to Westminster of the Presbyterian minister who is also the Imperial Grand Master of the Orange Order is a sort of victory for moderation!
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Organiser по.76 11, 1982 Page