So the Big Man, as Reverend Ian Paisley is known to his fol-lowers, said "no" after all. The only surprise is that there should be any surprise that Mr Paisley decided at the last moment to spike the latest attempt by the British and Irish governments to restore Northern Ireland's power-sharing executive. Talk of a kinder, gentler Mr Paisley, suddenly desperate to take his place in history as a peacemaker after intimations of mortality brought on by illness last summer, is wide of the mark. But nor is he still the wrecker that he was for more than 30 bigoted, extremist years. After all, as the two governments outlined on December 8th, Mr Paisley's Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) and Sinn Fein, the IRA'S political wing, appear to have come tan-talisingly close to a deal. Whether or not there is a photograph of the IRA destroying its weapons—the issue on which the talks stuck-is a detail that should not be allowed to scupper a settlement between die-hard unionism and die-hard republicanism.
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