Robinson is the longest serving Member of Parliament for any Belfast constituency since the Act of Union in 1800. He was also elected to the consultative Northern Ireland Assembly of 1982-1986, topping the poll in East Belfast.
On August 7, 1986, in protest at the Anglo-Irish Agreement, Robinson led a group of 500 loyalists into the village of Clontibret, County Monaghan, in the Republic of Ireland. The loyalists entered the police station in the village and physically assaulted two officers, before holding a quasi-military drill in the square. Robinson was later arrested. He pleaded guilty to unlawful assembly and was fined £17,500 in a Drogheda court because of the incident. As a result, Robinson briefly resigned from the DUP deputy leadership [1].
In a subsequent court appearance in Dundalk he again led a large loyalist mob into the town which led to a riot [1]At his trial the judge described him as "a senior extremist politician." In November 1986, he spoke at the Ulster Hall rally which launched Ulster Resistance which collaborated with the Ulster Volunteer Force and the Ulster Defence Association to procure arms. Robinson was photographed wearing the loyalist paramilitary regalia of beret and military fatigues at a Ulster Resistance rally. In 1988 both he and his wife Iris were imprisoned at the same time.
He was elected to the Northern Ireland Forum of 1996 and again topped the poll in East Belfast in the 1998 Assembly Elections. He served as Regional Development Minister in the Northern Ireland Executive from November 21, 1999 but resigned on July 27, 2000, then served again from October 24, 2001, when the devolved institutions were restored, until resigning on October 11, 2002, shortly before the executive and the Assembly were suspended.
Robinson espouses a populist, statist form of Ulster loyalism. He is strongly in favour of capital punishment and opposed to European integration. Nonetheless, he is in favour of state intervention and socialist measures which are popular with his largely working-class constituents. While Regional Development Minister he introduced free public transport for senior citizens, probably his most astute political move. He also approved several vital road projects in the west of Northern Ireland.
Robinson is undoubtedly intelligent but often deeply controversial. While he has been Deputy Leader of the DUP behind Ian Paisley since 1980, he has a unique character and has an independent style. He is regarded as the leader of the urban, secular, working-class wing of the DUP (as opposed to Paisley's rural, religious fundamentalist base), and the architect of the DUP's development in recent years of a slick electoral and media machine. He is also seen as a leader of the realpolitik tendency within the Party which acknowledges that it must at some point come to an accommodation with Sinn Féin.
Robinson is in many ways the natural successor to Paisley, although having waited so long in the wings some feel he has missed his moment, or that an alternative candidate such as Nigel Dodds might be more acceptable to rural evangelicals within the Party.
