The DUP MP for North Belfast tells me what he told them, that it is to do with geography; that you will find the same difficulties and same raw sectarianism elsewhere in Northern Ireland, but it explodes into violence on these particular streets because the warring factions are entrenched in such close proximity to one and other.

    “Within a few metres of each other,” he stresses, drawing an invisible “peace” wall in the air with his index finger, underlining just how transparently ineffective the bricks and mortar are at keeping the factions from each other’s throats.

    “It is fairly easy for things to explode in North Belfast,” Dodds admits.

    I have come to Stormont to talk to him about his days in Fermanagh, his politics, career and ambitions; if he would one day like to take over from the formidable Rev. Dr. Ian Paisley as leader of the DUP. But it is impossible to interview the MP for North Belfast without asking about Holy Cross. The dispute grabbed headlines around the world and the television pictures were watched in homes from Ardoyne to Addis Ababa. Viewers didn’t like what they saw, and neither did Dodds, but for a different reason.

    “There was a lot of attention on one side there,” he complains. “I think the television was only interested in one side and to some extent the suffering of the Protestants, and the pensioners that have been suffering intimidation and violence, was ignored.”

    He says he met with Fr. Aiden Troy, the Catholic parents, and community workers, but that early attempts to resolve the conflict were sabotaged by republicans.

    “It was quite clear the Provos were up to their necks in keeping everything going,” he claims.

    According to the Chief Constable of the PSNI, Sir Ronnie Flanagan, the UDA were the prime culprits but Dodds neglects to apportion any blame to the loyalist paramilitaries. He does, however, cite social and economic deprivation and poor housing as contributing factors.

    “We were reaping the whirlwind of neglect. It should have been sorted out many years before that,” he says.

    On one point he is adamant: “I made it clear that the abuse or exploitation of children on both sides was wrong and I made it clear children should not be dragged into any sectarian conflict.”

    Dodds was born in Londonderry’s Waterside in 1958, the son of Joe and Doreen Dodds. His father was a Customs officer, originally from Bessbrook in County Armagh. His mother, formerly McMahon, was from Colebrooke and still has a lot of family living there.

    In 1970, when he was 12, his father was transferred to duties in Fermanagh and the family came to live in Enniskillen. Dodds was enrolled as a pupil at Gloucester House, the then preparatory school for Portora.

    I don’t remember Dodds at Portora, although there is nothing remarkable about that; I remember very few of the boys in the year below me. There is just one vague, fleeting recollection of standing at the school gates waiting for a bus into Enniskillen and some boys calling him by an insulting nickname. There was an impression he was bullied, although he insists his days at Portora were the happiest of his life.

    “I have very, very fond memories of it; very happy memories, I must say,” he reflects.

    “It wasn’t an exam crammer; it didn’t go all out to push people through exams and that was it. It had a fairly progressive attitude. I enjoyed it immensely. I look back on it as some of the happiests time of my life.”

    It was there that he developed his interest in politics.

    “There was a lot of political discussion and debate at school; fairly intense, and that was where I got involved in politics. That is what got me thinking first of all about a political career,” he reveals.

    Although we were at Portora at the same time and grew up in the same town everything I know about Dodds is second hand. We meet as more or less strangers in the grand surroundings of Parliament Buildings at Stormont. I am late; he is later. He appears carrying two black, heavy looking brief cases. I joke that his wife has obviously made him a lot of sandwiches.

    “No,” he says, “one is for my constituency business, the other is for my ministerial business.”

    It is the first hint that he isn’t a bunch of laughs. Later he boasts of having spoken at every Northern Ireland Question Time since being elected to Westminster.

    “Whether you had anything worth saying or not,” I jest.

    Back came the straight-faced reply: “I think I always had something worth saying.”

    Whatever other qualities he may have, a sense of humour is not one of them.

    We have coffee and he gives me a quick guided tour, reflecting his enthusiasm for the job, before we adjourn to his office to get down to the serious business of life and politics. With Dodds everything is serious.

    I begin by relating the story of how I once interviewed a teacher who was about to leave our old school, Portora. I asked the teacher if he had any regrets, expecting a reply along the lines of a polite “no” or philosophical “life’s too short.” What I got surprised me. The teacher confided that he had once taught a boy who was a master of European history. He could analyse and understand every situation. But ask him about Irish politics and it became apparent that the boy was a prisoner of prejudice and blind to reality. His name? Nigel Dodds.

    Dodds seems taken aback, but, a qualified barrister, he quickly rallies to his own defence.

    “My analysis of the Troubles would have been in accordance with the vast majority of the people of Northern Ireland. Not everyone would have agreed with that,” he says.

    “I am pretty determined and stubborn when it comes to my political beliefs. I have stuck to them and haven’t been deflected from them. It is something I’m proud of,” he adds.

    As for his critic: “I thought he was a brilliant teacher. Perhaps he wouldn’t have seen eye-to-eye with my views. If I have to plead guilty to being undeviating in my political beliefs then I plead guilty to that quite proudly.”

    He certainly was a brilliant teacher, and to my mind an unbiased and disinterested observer with no political axe to grind. He seemed genuinely disappointed that an otherwise brilliant scholar was cursed by his own prejudices.

    Dodds also finds himself cursed by his former classmates. One of them, the writer and journalist Leo McKinstry, referred to him in an article in “The Spectator” as a “noisy, bullet-headed Protestant.” Comments from other old boys are unprintable.

    Perhaps they are embarrassed to be associated with him, even in this most tenuous of ways, but I suspect that some at least resent the fact that here was the smartest cookie in the jar, the boy that was always top of the class; had brains to burn. In the intelligence stakes he left them for Neanderthals, yet from their point of view it was a wasted talent, and he’s an unreasonable bigot.

    Dodds strenuously denies the charge.

    “I think as a lawyer part of your work is being able to see both sides of the argument. If you can only see one side of the argument you cannot be a good barrister,” he states.

    Is there room for give and take?

    “I think compromise is part of everyday politics,” he agrees. “There are decisions I make as a Minister and MP where you try to get the best deal you possibly can. The difficulty is trying to work out the best way to make progress while sticking to your principles.

    “At the end of the day there is a certain set of core beliefs and principals that you have to stick to and if you don’t you will lose your way. I think people have abandoned that, and many of the people they led feel abandoned in turn,” he maintains.

    It is the first of many barely disguised attacks on the Ulster Unionists, over whom he scents victory at the coming Assembly election, due in May of next year.

    “I think the Westminster election showed a big turning. I think by any analysis 60 per cent of the unionist people support our view. I think the Assembly elections will be a crucial election,” he says.

    Dodds is confident that at those polls the DUP will win the mandate of the majority of unionists. That will enable him and his party colleagues to go to the Government and tell it: “We are the people you are dealing with now.”

    There is no doubting the man’s ability. Those three grade As he secured at Portora, in A-level history, French and English literature, took him to Cambridge University where he achieved a double first in law.

    In 1980 he returned to Northern Ireland to continue his legal studies at Queens University. It was at a time when the Hunger Strikes were raising political tensions to new extremes, Dodds joined the DUP.

    “I believed a lot in what the DUP was doing at grass-roots level and on the day-to-day, bread and butter issues,” he explains.

    He also saw the party as taking a “much more robust and consistent line” than the Ulster Unionists.

    Dodds became a barrister and practised law for 18 months but one day he got a call. It was Dr. Paisley. The party leader wanted the talented young lawyer to become his assistant at the European Parliament.

    “Which meant I really had to put the legal profession on the back burner,” says Dodds. “Even today my mother would say: ‘You should have gone on and become a solicitor or barrister and not become involved in politics.’ But if you are a political animal and feel it as a conviction, an opportunity like that doesn’t come along every day.”

    He accepted, “always thinking that I could go back to it(law), but 20 years later, here I am. But no regrets. I have enjoyed my political career. I think I made the right decision.”

    For the next 13 years he was Paisley’s right hand man in Strasbourg and Brussels, watching the DUP leader breeze through two European elections, topping the poll, as the man himself is always keen to remind us.

    It was also at Queens that Dodds encountered the other great love in his life, his wife Diane, a history student. They married in 1985 and have two sons, Mark (14) and Robyn (5). Another son, Andrew, was born with spina bifida and hydrocephalus. During his short life he was plagued with medical problems but his father remembers him as “a great wee lad” who was full of life and never complained.

    Andrew died at the age of eight, having just enjoyed the best couple of years of his life.

    “It was a big loss,” his father confirms. “It is extremely difficult and painful for anybody that has lost a child.”

    A Free Presbyterian he adds: “Your Christian faith sustains you at times like that. At the end of the day you know that in all of Andrew’s life and his passing there is a greater purpose.”

    It was while he was visiting Andrew at the Royal Victoria Children’s Hospital in Belfast on December 20, 1996, that IRA gunmen attempted to murder Dodds. He and his wife were in the ward with their son when their police bodyguards in the corridor outside challenged two men dressed in doctor’s coats. The men produced guns and opened fire, wounding one of the police officers in the foot.

    “Even to this day it beggars belief that those people did this. They have never apologised for this,” he complains.

    “I understand and share the feelings of frustration that many victims feel because they’re forgotten and the perpetrators are glorified,” he adds.

    In 1985 he was elected to represent North Belfast on Belfast City Council. Three years later, at the age of 29, he became the city’s youngest Lord Mayor, a position he was re-elected to for a second term in 1991.

    But why North Belfast? Was it not a poisoned chalice?

    Dodds explains that it was while working for Dr. Paisley that he was first introduced to the area. When it came to local government election time he was asked to stand, and went on to win a seat at City Hall.

    “I have been associated with North Belfast ever since,” he says.

    He was elected to represent the area at the Northern Ireland Forum in 1996, at the Assembly in 1998, and at Westminster in June last year.

    “And at each one my vote and the DUP vote has increased so we must be doing something right,” he suggests.

    He believes that success is built on the work the party does on the ground. But North Belfast?

    “I regard it as a great challenge,” he admits. “A lot of the problems in North Belfast arise out of the fact that the place was neglected.”

    He accuses his Ulster Unionist predecessor, Cecil Walker, of doing “little or nothing” for the people of the area. Dodds seems to devote as much time, if not more, to attacking his fellow unionists as he does republicans. But then he doesn’t even speak to republicans.

    “In 16 years on the City Council I haven’t spoken to Sinn Fein once,” he proudly boasts.

    Yet Dodds claims hundreds of Catholics approach him every month for help on ordinary day-to-day issues. He acknowledges that many of them have political aspirations that are at complete odds with his own.

    “I’m not so arrogant as to think that I speak for everyone in North Belfast,” he says.

    In 1999 Dodds became the Minister for Social Development. At his offices in Stormont he deals with housing, social security, pensions, the community and voluntary sectors, and urban regeneration. He resigned in July 2000 as a political protest but has been back at his desk since October of last year.

    Politics makes huge demands on his time.

    “I never get home,” he says. “If I’m home by eight or nine at night it’s a fairly good night.”

    It is something, he says, you have to accept.

    “Spare time I spend at home with the children and the family. I try to keep the weekend free. I enjoy sport but the only thing I do now is watch it late at night on TV, if I can. I don’t get too much time to participate in it,” he says. In their own perverse way those IRA gunmen who attempted to murder Dodds as he visited his critically ill son in hospital were demonstrating the “esteem” in which they held him. To them he was a more than capable adversary, a man to worry about, a foe to kill.

    If Dodds’ colleagues in the DUP were to hold him in the same high regard as those terrorists then he might one day step into the “Big Man’s” shoes and become party leader.

    But no-one within the party, least of all Dodds, has the temerity to start writing Paisley’s epitaph just yet. At 76 “the doctor” is no longer the verbal terrorist nor the intimidating combatant he once was but he still strikes fear into his minions.

    Dodds says it is too frightening to contemplate the DUP without its charismatic leader. He gives the impression that to think of such things is tantamount to heresy.