WAKE up. Look at yourself in the mirror, Ian Paisley. What do you see? There’s three children’s faces there. Tight cropped hair. Grins from ear to ear. Eyes twinkling. Mad lovely children of the kind that’d break your heart as you watched them grow, with all their mischief and boldness and beauty. Look there in the mirror, Dr Ian Paisley. Three mad lovely children looking back at you.

Settling day, you called it. In the weeks beforehand, you and Joel Patton and David Jones and the rest of the mob that gather under the banners of Orangeism stirred it up bad. You thought that if you shouted loudly enough Mo Mowlam would capitulate again, and that the croppies would be forced to lie down. You thought that you could bully your way along the Garvaghy Road, that the RUC and the British Army would bludgeon the residents out of the path when the time came. And so you pumped up the rhetoric of confrontation. You saw a small fire and you began by throwing kerosene on it – and then you threw some more.

Settling day, you called it. July 12th. If the Portadown Orangemen weren’t allowed to march down the Garvaghy Road before then – that was when you used that insidious, threatening term. When you were asked what you meant by “settling day”, you bellowed in response. “Use your imagination,” you said. And it was obvious what you meant.

There’d be blood shed.

It had always worked in the past, this kind of threat. We’ve heard it from you and Peter Robinson and William McCrea and your ilk for a long time.

We’re just warning you. We can’t be responsible. The loyal sons of Ulster will rally round the flag and there’ll be hell to pay. We’re just letting you know. Settling day.

We can, if we wish, put our minds to paralysing this country of ours. David McNarry. I think that is a factual statement. Ian Paisley.

My party warned that the proposal to remove the decision on parades from the legal security forces of the Crown and place it in the hands of an unelected and unrepresentative quango was a recipe for disaster.

We warned that it would bring about chaos and violence. We warned that it would be the catalyst for creating an uncontrollable situation that would result in mayhem.

You knew, didn’t you, that this was in the nature of a self-fulfilling prophecy? Drumcree, you told your Orange cohorts, is a battle for civil and religious liberty and a battle which Ulster cannot afford to lose.

A battle that Ulster cannot afford to lose. You are well aware what people do in battle, and still you pumped up the rhetoric. Settling day. Use your imagination.

That’s exactly what they did. In the first instance they had the imagination, the wit even, to send Christmas cards to Catholics in the areas around Ballymena, in the middle of July. Ho ho ho. Christmas cards with bullets in them. Irene Quinn got one during the week running up to the 12th. She moved out. Her daughter Chrissie moved in, with her three young children. It’s hard to know why she thought she might be immune from the threat. Or maybe she just needed a place to stay so badly that she just ignored it.

But this, you said, was a battle that Ulster could not afford to lose. And so the ones who had posted the Christmas cards in the letter boxes went on the offensive. Settling day had only started when they went about their gruesome work. A firebomb was thrown through the front window of the Quinns’ house. In a matter of seconds the place was engulfed in flames.

What happened then, Ian Paisley, is one of the most terrible things that I have ever been forced to contemplate. Brenda Power described it in the Sunday Tribune, and the detail of the children crying out, and of what they said, was enough to break your heart and turn your soul inside out. Impossible not to think of their bright, beautiful, smiling faces. Impossible not to think of your own children and your children’s friends. Impossible not to imagine what you would feel if this unspeakable, abominable act had been done to them. Impossible not to break down and cry at the sheer, appalling, wanton, criminal, terror of it.

Richard and Mark and Jason Quinn – burned alive.

You had the gall then to go and see the Quinn family in Ballymoney. You had the even worse gall, later, to lie about the people you had visited, heaping calumny upon hypocrisy by suggesting that the murder of the three children was not sectarian, and hinting that it had been because of drugs. Even an RUC representative was prompted to describe your weasel words as the worst piece of black propaganda he had ever come across.

Of course you were not alone in fomenting the hatred and the violence that led to the murder of the Quinn boys. Joel Patton, David Jones, Harold Gracey, David McNarry and the rest of their Orange brethren played a part. Even David Trimble could be accused of incitement to violence for describing the ban on the Drumcree march as a “massive assault on the civil rights of an important sector of the Northern Ireland community.”

But you and William McCrea, and Peter Robinson and Paul Berry stayed longest and shouted loudest, rubbing shoulders with the kind of thugs, equipped with balaclavas and gas masks, who had brought the submachine gun, cross-bows and other weapons to the scene of the Drumcree standoff – and watching as they flung petrol bombs at the RUC.

It is impossible to say for sure that the murder of Richard and Mark and Jason Quinn would not have taken place without your poisonous influence – but certainly you contributed directly and substantially to a climate in which the sectarian gang which carried out the firebombing felt justified in what they did.

Wake up, Ian Paisley. It’s the middle of the night. Walk across the landing to the bathroom. Now look at yourself in the mirror. There’s three children’s faces there. Tight cropped hair. Grins from ear to ear. Eyes twinkling. Mad lovely children of the kind that’d break your heart as you watched them grow, with all their mischief and boldness and beauty. Look there in the mirror, Dr. Ian Paisley. Three mad lovely children looking back at you.

Dead.

• Niall Stokes

Editor