The most successful far right politician ever to operate within the wider British political system is finally taking retirement. Ian Richard Kyle Paisley - the one-time manic street preacher who is stepping down from the job first minister of Northern Ireland - built a substantial following among the protestant working and lower middle classes of the Six Counties, deploying his impressive oratorical abilities in the cause of anti-Catholicism.

Transplanted into other historical contexts, that particular brand of demagogy could easily have taken a dictatorial turn. Although he obviously wouldn’t appreciate the parallels, the project he oversaw for the bulk of his political career invites comparison with the reactionary Catholic nationalist movements seen in continental Europe in the last century. Paisley - pictured - might well have served as a home-grown Jozef Tiso, had Britain ever required that of him.

But, his defenders argue, he always rejected the illegal activities of loyalist paramilitaries. Well, strictly speaking, anyway. Many of the activists behind the physical assaults on civil rights marches and the anti-Catholic pogroms of the sixties and seventies regarded him as their major inspiration. He may not have thrown the firebombs through the broken windows personally, but the moral authorship of such acts rests with him just the same; Paisley was a Schreibtischtäter with a thick Ulster accent.

Yet many Irish Catholic leaders - from Gerry Adams and Martin McGuiness to Bertie Ahern - have paid tribute to Paisley on his departure. Gordon Brown commented: ’Ian Paisley has made a huge contribution to political life in Northern Ireland and the United Kingdom’. That much is beyond dispute, I suppose; the issue is exactly how that contribution is evaluated. Many would say it consisted chiefly of the needless loss of thousands of lives.

Paisley’s militant unionism was for decades the chief obstacle to a political settlement in the north of Ireland. His breakaway Democratic Unionist Party was expressly designed to scupper the efforts of O’Neillite moderate unionism to come to reach accommodation with insurgent nationalism.

His legacy is that even today, Northern Ireland is governed on the basis of bureaucratically enshrined sectarian balance. Underneath the democratic façade of the Chuckle Brothers cutting the ribbons on brand new shopping centres in Belfast, sectarian privilege remains as firmly entrenched as ever.

The unionists retain their veto on the united Ireland that a majority of those on the island as a whole clearly want, with the British state standing in the background to back them up if necessary. Thanks to the works of this man of God, there is not one single religiously integrated school, while the peace walls remain very much in place.

Paisley’s self-serving decision to steer the DUP into coalition with Sinn Fein, thereby awarding himself the trappings of office for the closing years of his career, hardly compensates for the lifetime of sectarian bigotry he exemplifies.

I CANNOT imagine what sum of money could possibly make up for permanent blindness in one eye. But where someone suffers that outcome as a result of a workplace accident, compensation is set at a minimum of £31,500, plus an additional sum for loss of earnings. The court may even decide on a further amount, which varies in line with the impact on the victim’s lifestyle.

If that’s the yardstick, where does that leave the £12,000 on offer by way of ‘recognition payment’ to the families of the 3,700 people who died in four decades of political violence in Northern Ireland?

And is any payment whatsoever rightly due to the relatives of deliberate killers? Can it possibly be right to make a straightforward equation between the life of a paramilitary killed ‘on active service’ and the life of a teenage British squaddie of limited political horizons, an RUC man who frequented the Orange Lodge in his time off, a Saturday afternoon shopper with no involvement with either the state or any armed faction, or come to that, a toddler?

Pondering these issues now, I cannot help but remember that when I first became involved in politics in the 1980s, the British left took sides in all this. Many activists – including those who have since reinvented themselves as libertarian media brats - were uncritical cheerleaders for the IRA, ready to justify any Republican action, however bloody the consequences.

For my part, I lined up with that section of the Labour left, headed by Ken Livingstone, which cultivated ties with Sinn Fein. While we hedged our support for ‘the armed struggle’ in ‘the six county statelet’ with this or that qualification, nobody in principle doubted that the IRA had some sort of moral right to utilise ‘the armalite’ as well as the ballot box against the British army.

Reconsidering the question nearly 30 years on, I still understand the logic of that position. But there my ethical certainties end. The scenario does not now reduce itself in my mind to good guy freedom fighters versus Brit baddies and their local sidekicks, with the odd kiddie getting blown to smithereens by way of unfortunate collateral damage. Everything was far more complex than that.

And that brings us to the practical point in terms of the Consultative Group on the Past’s deliberations. Such was the manner in which the low intensity conflict was fought out in Northern Ireland that a pick and mix approach to recognition payments is untenable.

The arguments over whether or not any particular group of paramilitaries fought with just cause, and over whether or not there was moral equivalence between the paramilitaries and state forces, can never be resolved to general satisfaction. Recognition money has to go to all, or to nobody at all. Anything else remains just too divisive.

But it is worth noting that at £12,000, the cash sum is only twice what you can expect if your boss is to blame for your fractured arm. In what remains one of the poorest parts of Europe, it seems that this is compensation – sorry, I should say ‘recognition’ – enough.

BY WHAT kind of chop logic is it possible to brand a couple of guys earning a low-wage living ferrying Quattro Formaggios around in a small town in Northern Ireland as ‘British collaborators’?

Were 19-year-old Anthony Watson and an unnamed Polish man about to sign up with the armed forces? Were they supplying intelligence to MI5? Did anyone even canvas their political opinion? No.

Yet in the eyes of some, they were guilty of propping up the British imperialism’s occupation of the Six Counties by the heinous and underhand means of delivering takeaway pizzas to anyone who rang the local branch of Domino’s and ordered one; so that’s OK then, gun the bastards down.

That Republican splinter groups can advance such tenuous justification for their work underlines just how minimal their chances of securing widespread support in the community they claim to represent truly stand, and ultimately set back their own cause.

The best that the Real IRA and the Continuity IRA – not entirely discreet entities, it is often said – can do is to kill a couple of squaddies and a copper now and then, simply to prove they haven’t gone away, you know.

With just a hardcore of a few dozen activists, almost nothing by way of a wider base, and little access to either finance or serious munitions, most analysts see them as incapable of mounting a large scale attack on a significant target. So the best guess is that, despite alarmist speculation, we are not looking at a return to the Troubles, or anything like that.

But it is not that the underlying social problems in Northern Ireland have been resolved. How could they possibly be, when their continuance constitutes the defining feature of the political formation itself?

The North is as firmly part of the UK as ever, with Unionists retaining their veto, and the British state standing in the background to back them up if necessary. Foreign investment and economic growth have not led to a single integrated school or caused a single one of the ‘peace walls’ to come down.

The Good Friday Agreement has seen all of the main currents within the nationalist minority buy in to a reactionary neoliberal consensus at Stormont. Yet the deadlock is unbroken, as must necessarily be the case with a peace process designed simultaneously to convince Republicans that the way is open to a united Ireland and to reassure Unionists that the way is closed.

The case for a united Ireland – with the arrangements necessary to safeguard the rights of the Protestant minority – remains as unanswerable as ever. Until a settlement is reached and the fundamental injustice of partition is overcome, permanent tension and sporadic violence is likely to remain the country’s lot.

ANYTHING I could possibly write about the scandal rocking Northern Ireland politics right now will obviously prove superfluous in the face of the comprehensive take already on offer from Splintered Sunrise, and this inspired satirical cover version of a certain Simon and Garfunkel classic, courtesy of comedian Keith Law. That won't stop me airing my second-best opinions on the topic later this week, though.

Hat tip: Stroppyblog