NEXT Tuesday marks the 40th anniversary of what was the inauguration of Ulster Resistance.

On November 10 1986 about 3,000 men, by invitation only, packed the Ulster Hall to be addressed by Ian Paisley and other leading lights of the DUP including Peter Robinson – shortly after his invasion of Clontibret, leading hundreds of loyalists – and Sammy Wilson, who chaired the rally.

Paisley told the crowd that Ulster Resistance, his name for the new organisation, would “take whatever steps necessary to destroy the Anglo-Irish Agreement and the ongoing republican conspiracy”. He then put on a red beret, as did Peter Robinson.

Paisley had been planning this for some time, though it was just the latest in a series of attempts he’d made to develop an organisation he could control, unlike terrorist groups he’d associated with and kept contact with from the 1960s like the UVF.

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Now he sought to harness the unanimous unionist hostility to the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985.

The DUP would later say it “immediately distanced itself from Ulster Resistance and severed all links with it once it became known that it was involved in unlawful activity”.

However, Paisley and other DUP figures had been greatly perturbed when........

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