Night Waves - Free Thinking Special

Tonight, Night Waves meets up with one of the most distinctive voices in the United Kingdom. Recorded in St George’s Hall in the heart of Liverpool - as part of Radio 3’s Free Thinking Festival - Philip Dodd talks to a man who conjures up a whole way of life – the Reverend Ian Paisley. He was born in 1926, in the cathedral city of Armagh in Northern Ireland and became a born-again Christian at the age of 6. He was ordained at the age of 20 by his Baptist minister father. At the age of eighty one, Ian Paisley became the First Minister of Northern Ireland having helped to found the Democratic Unionist Party - the largest unionist party in Northern Ireland. To the astonishment of many, he ruled Northern Ireland alongside representatives of Sinn Fein who, for much of his earlier life, he had “detested for their blood stained ways”. Philip Dodd talks to Ian Paisley - about his upbringing, his religion and his politics, about the changes in Northern Ireland and about the apparent transformation in his own life and beliefs. What has impelled him to sit down with his mortal enemies? Ian Paisley, the Night Waves extended interview, this Thursday night at 9.15 here on BBC Radio 3.