The Protestant Unionist Party (PUP) was a unionist political party operating in Northern Ireland from 1966 to 1971. It was set up by Ian Paisley, and was the forerunner of the modern Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) and emerged from the Ulster Protestant Action (UPA) movement.
The UPA had two councillors elected, and in 1967 both were re-elected as PUP candidates. They stood six candidates against the more moderate Ulster Unionist Party members of the Stormont parliament in the 1969 election and polled over 20,000 votes.
When Terence O'Neill (the then Northern Irish Prime Minister) stood down from Stormont in 1970 along with one of his colleagues, the PUP nominated candidates for the two vacant seats (Ian Paisley and William Beattie, PUP leader and deputy respectively). Both were elected to Stormont and in that year's general election, Paisley was elected to represent Antrim North in Westminster.
The PUP campaigned for the retention of the Union, preferential treatment for Protestants in employment, and for total freedom for Orange parades. The PUP was wound up in 1971 and re-emerged as the DUP in October of that year.
Later in the 1987 general election, George Seawright, a Scottish-born former DUP candidate who was later assassinated by the Irish People's Liberation Organisation (IPLO), defied an official pact between the Unionist parties and revived the Protestant Unionist label for his candidature.
Famous quotes containing the words protestant and/or party:
“I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish Church, by the Roman Church, by the Greek Church, by the Turkish Church, by the Protestant Church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church.”
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“The party of God and the party of Literature have more in common than either will admit; their texts may conflict, but their bigotries coincide. Both insist on being the sole custodians of the true word and its only interpreters.”
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