Andy Pollak
The Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), uniquely in the United Kingdom, is a political party founded on the basis of fear of an outside enemy and fanatical adherence to the Protestant religion. Its formation was announced in September 1971, on the night of one of the first major Provisional Irish Republican Army bombings in Belfast, by Ian Paisley, then known largely as a rabble-rousing ultra-Protestant preacher and scourge of any unionist government that contemplated even the slightest move towards liberalism in Northern Ireland. Early internal debates were over whether it should be called the Protestant Unionist or Democratic Unionist Party.