Why do rats float while good men sink? Readers may have exploded over the headline on this page yesterday. It read "A fascinating, gracious man", and crowned a eulogy on Northern Ireland's retiring first minister, Ian Paisley, written by his one-time bitterest foe, Gerry Adams of Sinn Féin/IRA.
Adams described Paisley as variously civilised, good-humoured, respectful, cordial and a man whom "I would like to know better". Funny that Adams, or at least his friends, spent much of their lives trying to kill him or his ilk. As for Paisley's role in inciting violence and tension, it "whetted my political appetite and radicalised a generation of young people like myself". It was almost a thank you. It was sickening.
I first encountered Paisley as a young reporter covering a bible-bashing rally in the grounds of Stormont Castle. It was a miserable, freezing afternoon and raining hard. The faces of the drummer boys were mauve with cold, as were the bare legs of the majorettes. The men round Paisley wore bowler hats. It was not an appetising event, yet thousands of Ulster Protestants were there.
Then the big man began. Like a revivalist preacher from the deep south, Paisley ranted over the sodden slopes of Stormont. It was electrifying and archaic. The curses of God were called down on "old red socks", the Pope, the "anti-Christ", whom Paisley was later to heckle with primitive discourtesy in the European parliament. Catholics were damned - "they breed like rabbits and multiply like vermin" - and King Billy glorified. The crowd sang hymns and roared. It was like watching a mad Celtic druid blessing the Brythonic hordes before confronting the Roman army.
The man was a monster, a fanatic, a hangover from the middle ages. I remember wondering how on earth Britain had allowed Ulster's constitution so to fester as to have this man roaming the woods and hills of Ulster. One thing Britain does not do well is postcolonial partition. It creates a fertile breeding ground for the likes of Paisley, and his antagonist, Adams.
By the 1970s and 80s the Protestant majority in Northern Ireland was beginning to understand that the long persecution of the Catholics was inexcusable. Unionist leaders from Terence O'Neil through Brian Faulkner to David Trimble struggled - some harder than others - to reform Ulster's unequal society. They did so even as the housing and schooling policies of Britain's direct rulers subsidised the polarisation of the province into increasingly segregated Catholic and Protestant districts.
By the 1980s, elected leaders of both communities were having to look over their shoulders at the militias who were coming to dominate their enclaves. The Catholics had remained overwhelmingly loyal to John Hume's Social Democratic and Labour party (SDLP) but were driven into the arms of the IRA's terrorist gangs. The Protestant unionists were sabotaged by the Paisley "loyalists" of the Democratic Unionist party. While Paisley claimed to reject violence, his bloodthirsty language laundered the brutality of the loyalist paramilitaries.
Between them Adams and Paisley made Northern Ireland ungovernable and brought death, destruction and untold misery to tens of thousands of their countrymen. They offered no leadership towards compromise and undermined those who did by pandering to the baser instincts and fears of their supporters. They were the Taliban of Europe, operating in their equivalent of Tora Bora, the fields of South Armagh and the Orange Order halls of the Shankill. The death toll rose to 3,500.
Adams and his collaborator, Martin McGuinness, destroyed Hume's SDLP, and Paisley's histrionic fundamentalism destroyed Trimble's unionism. Any effort to drag the province into the 20th century was met with a flurry of kneecappings, bombings, murders and exile. These were appalling people doing appalling things, when good people were struggling to bring peace to a corner of a nation that boasted to the world that it was a sophisticated democracy.
That grand old observer of Ireland, Conor Cruise O'Brien, once remarked that Northern Ireland will never be wholly at peace as long as its politics were dominated by religion, but that it would see periods of calm coinciding with the ageing of each generation of tribal leaders. Men such as Adams and McGuinness would not like their children hearing them being called terrorists. Paisley would tire of fearing for his life and yearn for the respectability of power and visits to Downing Street.
These men eventually eliminated moderate leaders so they could claim moderation for themselves. They smashed power-sharing so they could share power between themselves. They now pretend that change could not have been faster because the people would not let them. The climate of public opinion in the province was not ready.
That is a lie. These men were the climate, and it was one of systematic bigotry and violence. They chose their methods and terrorised all who opposed them. While religious sectarianism elsewhere in Europe was on the wane, lovers of Northern Ireland had to watch in despair as it drifted to ever greater separatism - territorially, politically and psychologically.
The Good Friday agreement did not end this polarisation. It is best described as a moment in a long process, when Tony Blair cleared from the battlefield the moderate clutter of Hume and Trimble so that Adams and Paisley could see the whites of each other's eyes.
Blair's prisoner release turned more terrorists and gangsters on to the streets of Britain than anything in modern history. By pandering to extremism it destroyed the electoral bases of both Hume and Trimble. It rewarded Adams for his negotiating cunning and Paisley for his intransigence. The spoils of violence were recouped by the men who had opposed peace.
What restored devolved government to Stormont was not Good Friday but, as Adams claimed yesterday, a decision by him and Paisley to abandon their former ways, stand on their heads and compromise. Each got what he wanted and could seek comfort in old age, lubricated with exorbitant amounts of British money.
Needless to say, Paisley was soon "Paisleyed" by the hardliners he had once led, and has had to resign. As anyone who walks the Falls will know, the Real IRA is still a menace to Adams. The legacy of four decades, if not four centuries, of communal hatred is entrenched in segregated schools and housing estates. The men who now claim to have brought peace to Ulster delayed it so long that their peace is insecure and their landscape traumatised.
A cliche of conflict studies holds that only leaders of extremist factions can deliver closure. Hence Kenyatta of Kenya, Mugabe of Zimbabwe and Begin of Israel. Hence the "feelers" put out to Moqtada al-Sadr in Iraq, the Taliban in Afghanistan and Hamas in Gaza. Eventually we must all "sit down with the men of violence".
To that thesis history can only reply, sometimes yes and sometimes no. When there is a future to be rebuilt, bygones must be bygones. But it is one thing to forgive, quite another to forget.
Simon Jenkins. See also A fascinating, gracious man