The tributes (and detractions) are pouring in from around the world. One of the most interesting tributes is from Dr. Paisley's once sworn enemy, none other than Gerry Adams who remembers when Paisley first "came to prominence" before and after the riots that occurred when the tricolour 'flegs' were forcibly removed by the RUC from the Republican office on Divis Street in Belfast in 1964.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/sep/12/ian-paisley-northern-ireland-sinn-fein#comment-40770079
Adams was 15 then and I was 19. I remember going on the Falls Road bus down through the Divis destruction a night or two after those riots, police lining the route, the sights and smells of the burnt-out days of violence still lingering in the air. Despite thinking that he was largely responsible for the riots, I have mixed feelings about his passing. He was one of the first public figures to point at the abuse that was going on in Catholic institutions in Ireland and around the world way back in the early 1960s. He wrote damning accounts of this in the Unionist Northern Constitution newspaper which somehow found its way into our very Catholic house in Ballinascreen although I had been well indoctrinated into thinking that these were all The Big Man's bigoted lies. His hatred of "Rome" was never far from the surface of his message and it probably led to many confrontations and to violence but at its heart there was a large measure of truth in his condemnations as we would, decades on, discover.
For obvious reasons I never did attend any of his rabble-rousing meetings in Belfast back in those days but I did have the pleasure in September 1995 of attending one of his religious services in a Free Presbyterian Church only a few kilometres away from where I write these words in Scarborough, Ontario, Canada. It was a tense affair. Fintan Vallely, my nephew and I were welcomed at the door and ushered right up to the front of the church to sit/kneel not a dozen feet away from this larger-than-life, loud, elderly preacher man who proceeded to try "saving" us along with all the other sinners there. He watched us closely because as Fintan put it, "We had "Fenian" written right across our foreheads"! There were burly bodyguards around among the well-dressed sinners who I'm sure would have humped us out of there if we had shown any sign of disrespect, dissent or threat to the special guest who went on to tell us that if we wanted to hear more than the few juicy shots at "Rome" he had just fairly discreetly delivered, we were all welcome to attend the coffee and tea get-together in the basement room of the church after the service when more compelling details would be forthcoming. We didn't stay for that.