Northern Ireland leader Ian Paisley will step down

BELFAST, NORTHERN IRELAND — Ian Paisley, the fiery Protestant preacher who eventually embraced peace with his Roman Catholic adversaries, announced his retirement Tuesday as leader of Northern Ireland’s power-sharing government.

Paisley said he would quit in May as first minister of the 10-month-old coalition and as leader of the Democratic Unionists, the party he founded 37 years ago on a platform of thwarting compromise with the Catholic minority in this British territory.

Paisley took power in May 2007 alongside veteran IRA commander Martin McGuinness. Observers waited for Paisley and McGuinness to bicker and split. Instead, they frequently joked together in public and became known as “the chuckle brothers.”

Analysts called Paisley’s decision the end of an era. Speculation had swirled for months that Paisley, 81 and physically faltering, would end his run as Northern Ireland’s most enduring politician through three decades of war and a decade of slow-blooming peace.

“Ian Paisley’s not easy to be pushed around,” he said as he rejected claims that he was being forced out by unrest in his party. “Younger people have to come in now and do their bit.”

Paisley has faced growing rumbles from the most extreme Protestant wing, which marched with him against the Catholic civil rights movement of the 1960s — the conflict that spurred the rise of the modern Irish Republican Army. They felt betrayed by his decision last March to sit down with the IRA-linked Sinn Fein party.

But analysts agreed that Paisley faced a far greater chance of ouster from senior Democratic Unionist loyalists.

Tensions grew this year when the Democratic Unionists suffered their first electoral setback in a decade, a by-election loss for a vacant seat in the Northern Ireland Assembly.

Dozens of party loyalists spoke out to praise Paisley’s legacy. The Democratic Unionist deputy leader and likely successor, Peter Robinson, called him “a unionist colossus.”

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