There will not be a united Ireland any day soon, says First Minister Ian Paisley.
FUTURE GENERATIONS will want to know about Ian Paisley's mood and demeanour in the final phase of his political career. The key word is: relaxed.
Northern Ireland's First Minister is at ease with himself and the world. Having come through a very turbulent voyage, through stormy and uncharted seas, he clearly enjoys being on the bridge of the good ship Powersharing which rests at anchor in the calm waters of the peace process.
He is about to hand over the captaincy to his longtime deputy Peter Robinson, and his interview with The Irish Times this week was one of his last opportunities to hold forth with the full authority of his office as First Minister.
Some accuse Paisley of starting the Troubles. Others blame Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness. Still others blame the pair of them equally. But as John Hume said, "you don't make peace with your friends, you make peace with your enemies", and now Paisley and McGuinness are joined together in political partnership and singing from the same hymn-sheet on many issues.
As far as the Rev Paisley is concerned, the Troubles are over. "I think that we will not go back to the bad old days," he says, sitting back in his armchair at "Glencairn", the British ambassador's residence in south Dublin.
"The two peoples, from a Christian point of view, the Roman Catholic people and the Protestant people, they will never go back to the divisions that we have had. There will still be political discussions and differences but I can't see it ever going back to what it has been."
He holds this view despite occasional setbacks such as the bomb attack on a policeman in his car near Castlederg, Co Tyrone this week. He visited the injured man, as did Mr McGuinness.
The Rev Paisley has come to the ambassador's residence for a private dinner with members of the business community in the South. He wants to encourage them to invest in the North because he knows that peace depends on prosperity. This discreet event is the hottest ticket in town, with representatives of the banking, retail, telecommunications and industrial sectors on the guest-list.
"A working people will be a happy people and a working people will see that there's gains for them. And if they're family people they'll want a house at a decent charge and they will want a good job and they'll want their children educated," he says. "I think we'll get away completely. I think we have got away, I don't think we'll have the Troubles again as we have had."
He was delighted with the attendance at the conference for US investors in Belfast at the start of the month. "Our enemies said it would be a failure, and I never saw anybody, after the thing had taken place, even mentioning the word failure."
Among the attendance of more than 100 prominent American business people were Mayor of New York Michael Bloomberg and other "very, very prominent investors". He was also very pleased with the meeting of his successor Peter Robinson with Taoiseach Brian Cowen in Belfast last month, where a new initiative was unveiled whereby thousands of finance jobs could be created in the North by companies which would continue to have their headquarters in the South and benefit from the Republic's lower corporate tax rate of 12.5 per cent.
London has balked at permitting Northern Ireland to reduce corporation tax to the same level as the Republic but Rev Paisley says it wasn't a big issue at the conference. "It didn't come up. The only person that mentioned it was Tony O'Reilly." He smiles: "I'll not say anything more - he wasn't to mention it, but he did mention it."
But he's less enthusiastic about Gordon Brown's proposal, revealed at the conference, to allow the Belfast administration to retain an increased amount of revenue from sale of public land, such as former army bases. "I don't think selling off assets is a good thing. We would have to look very carefully at that."
He was "very much" encouraged by the sentiments expressed at the conference by Mr Cowen, from which it was clear he would take the same approach as Bertie Ahern. "It showed that the Taoiseach is to walk in the same way as his predecessor. The former taoiseach was very good to us, so he was. He encouraged Europe and the British government and anything we said we wanted to do, we had full backing from him. If the taoiseach hadn't backed the things we wanted, we wouldn't have got them."
Asked if the same level of co-operation would exist between Brian Cowen and the new first minister, he said: "I would be very optimistic and I don't think that there's going to be much difference. They are two different men and they'll do their own thing and it's not for me to sit back and criticise. I don't intend to get into the critic's chair, I intend to stay in the encouraging chair: 'You're doing well boys, keep at it'."
Having given due regard to Mammon, the First Minister turns to matters spiritual. Asked if there was a major decline in religious faith in Ireland, he replies: "The majority of people want morality and they don't want a lawless society . . . There's a great keenness that the family should be safeguarded and that we should be a family nation . . . As goes the family, so the nation will go."
The welfare of young people is a major preoccupation of his. "You can't force young people to do anything today." He sees "herds of young people" on the streets at night. "That terrifies me," he says, and laments the fact that many parents don't know what their children are doing.
He is confident the controversial issue of devolving policing and justice powers from London to Belfast can be resolved in time. He is concerned, however, that the Northern Ireland police debt of some £50 million (€62.9 million) will also be devolved to the powersharing government.
He believes there is an overemphasis on investigating controversial events from the past, and that little will come of this. Citing the expensive and long-running probe into the Bloody Sunday shootings in Derry, he says: "There's nobody satisfied with Londonderry."
He acknowledges a change within Sinn Féin, commenting: "They are supporting the police."
The suggestion has been made that he could become a part-time roving ambassador, promoting investment in the North, subject to approval by the Assembly. He is not averse to the idea.
Of the future, he says: "I believe that we can live together. We're not going to have a united Ireland within 50 years or maybe 100 years but then I'll not be here anyway, so it doesn't matter."
