Desmond Norman Orr Boal, unionist politician and barrister, is born on August 8, 1928, in St. Columb’s Court, Derry, County Londonderry, Northern Ireland.

Boal is the third of five children (and only son) of James Boal, cashier and bakery manager, and his wife Kathleen (nèe Walker). Brought up in the Church of Ireland, he is educated at First Derry Primary School, Cathedral Primary School (Derry), Foyle College (Derry), Portora Royal School In Enniskillen, County Fermanagh, and Trinity College Dublin (TCD), where he graduates BA and Bachelor of Laws (LLB).

During his studies Boal founds an Orange lodge at TCD. He is called to the bar in 1952 at the Inner Temple, London. He travels extensively during his summers, visiting Afghanistan, South America and even China during the Cultural Revolution.

Around 1956, Boal makes the acquaintance of Ian Paisley through friendships with ultra-protestant activists, and for the next half-century is one of Paisley’s closest friends and advisers. He has a legal career before he enters politics in 1960. He was the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) Member of the Parliament of Northern Ireland for the Belfast Shankill constituency between 1960 and 1972. He is very critical of the leadership under Captain Terence O’Neill, then Prime Minister of Northern Ireland. He opposes the manner, if not the substance, of O’Neill’s attempts at improving relations with both the Irish government and the Roman Catholic/Irish nationalist minority in Northern Ireland, along with many backbenchers.

Discontented with James Chichester-Clark and Brian Faulkner who come to government after O’Neill’s 1969 fall from power, Boal resigns from the UUP in 1971 and joins Ian Paisley in establishing the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) in order to provide dissident unionist opinion with a viable political alternative. He works as the first chairman and one of the first public representatives of the DUP and continues to sit in Stormont during the years of 1971–1972. He later resumes his practice as a barrister.

While Boal’s interest in federalism diminishes after the 1970s, the federalist Boal scheme of January 1974 is again put forward by liberal protestants such as John Robb as late as 2007. His friendship with Paisley finally breaks when the DUP agrees to enter government with Sinn Féin in 2007. He tells Paisley, who takes the breach very hard, that he had betrayed everything he ever advocated.

Boal dies at his home in Holywood, County Down, on April 23, 2015, aged 86. His funeral is held at Roselawn Crematorium in Belfast.