Political leader and minister of religion, Ian K. Paisley (born 1926) played a significant role in the bitter strife that plagued Northern Ireland for decades.

Ian Kyle Paisley, born on April 6, 1926, was reared in the tradition of evangelical Protestantism. His father, a Baptist minister, ordained him in 1946 when he was 20 years old and by 1951 the young Paisley felt able to found his own church, the Free Presbyterian Church of Ulster, and to make himself its moderator.

Publicity was gained by outbursts against Catholicism and the "Romeward" inclinations he attributed to other Protestant churches, and he rose to prominence attacking both ecumenism and the granting of full civil rights to a disadvantaged sector that was largely Roman Catholic. Dismissed as a rabble-rousing bigot in established Unionist and Orange circles, he eventually challenged these with his own version of both political party and Orange Order.

In 1951 he acquired local notoriety by...