Ian Paisley, 1926–2014
The Doc
Ian Richard Kyle Paisley was born in Armagh on 6 April 1926, the second son of a Baptist pastor. The family moved to Ballymena in 1928 when his father took the larger congregation there, and that town — not Ahoghill — was where he grew up. He was ordained at twenty-two and based his ministry at the Martyrs' Memorial church on Ravenhill Road, Belfast. In March 1951, after a row over the modernising drift of the Irish Presbyterian Church, he and a small group founded the Free Presbyterian Church of Ulster at Crossgar in County Down. The denomination spread through mid-Antrim quickly, and the Ahoghill congregation was one of the early ones. He went on to build the DUP in 1971, sit at Westminster from 1970 to 2010, top the United Kingdom poll in the 1979 European elections, and in May 2007, at the age of eighty-one and after a lifetime of saying he would never share power with republicans, he was sworn in as First Minister of Northern Ireland with Martin McGuinness of Sinn Féin as his deputy. The two men got on well enough that the press took to calling them the Chuckle Brothers. He resigned in 2008. He died on 12 September 2014 and was buried, by his own wish, in the Free Presbyterian plot in Ahoghill rather than in Belfast.
A denomination from one row in 1951
The Free Presbyterians
The Free Presbyterian Church of Ulster was founded in March 1951 at Crossgar, Co. Down, by Paisley and a handful of others who had walked out of, or been pushed out of, the mainstream Irish Presbyterian Church over what they saw as theological liberalism and ecumenical drift. The Ahoghill congregation grew up shortly after, and the building is on the road into the village from Ballymena. The denomination is small — a few thousand members across about sixty congregations, almost all of them in Ulster — but its political weight, through the DUP, has been disproportionate for half a century. The Free P's are sabbatarian, evangelical, opposed to Catholic ecumenism and to the modernising of any Protestant denomination, and the Sunday in Ahoghill is still recognisably the Sunday of the founding generation: church, dinner, church again, no shopping, no pub. Visitors are welcome at the service if they sit quietly at the back. Be aware that the preaching is long and direct.
Farming village, planters' grid
The field of the yew wood
Before any of the twentieth-century politics, Ahoghill was and is an agricultural village in the rich farming country between the Bann and the Antrim plateau — dairy and beef and a little tillage, mostly Presbyterian smallholdings descended from the Scots planters of the 1600s. The square and the long straight main street are the giveaway of a plantation layout, set out for fairs and a weekly market. The village had a station on the Belfast–Cookstown branch from 1856 until the line west of Cookstown Junction shut in the 1950s — Ahoghill's own station closed in 1959 — and that closure took the place down a peg. What is left is a commuter belt for Ballymena and a Sunday-morning church village. The fields around it have been farmed by the same families for three centuries and the cattle marts at Ballymena six kilometres east are still the economic centre of gravity.