by Ed Moloney
At around this time the Progressive Unionist Party (PUP) was formed, initially as a cover for the UVF, which was still illegal, to meet the British government, or at least to communicate with it. The two founders, Hugh Smyth, who had won election to two local assemblies and Belfast City Council, and David Overend, a former Northern Ireland Labour Party activist, also began to develop a political programme for that brand of working-class Loyalism. The PUP’s predecessor, the Volunteer Political Party, had foundered in 1974, not just on account of its dismal electoral performance but because most activists believed the UVF’s only role was to kill Catholics. In the words of one VPP leader, ‘Politics was best left to the politicians.’42 Four or five years later, however, the mood in the UVF’s leadership had changed and Unionism’s politicians were seen in a more unfavourable light: craven, unreliable and unimaginative. One way in which this antagonism cum disillusionment expressed itself was in a growing paramilitary appetite for drawing up their own political programmes and schemes for settling the conflict. In these years some of them veered down the road of Ulster independence, briefly bringing a few in the Republican camp with them, but the PUP’s scheme was set firmly inside a British Northern Ireland. Called Sharing Responsibility, it was published in 1979 and advocated a devolved power-sharing government in Belfast made up of Unionists and Nationalists, the latter assumed to be of the SDLP variety. It was founded in the view that while most Protestants abhorred deals such as Sunningdale, which had a strong cross-border, Irish dimension, they could be persuaded to share power with non-violent Nationalists.
In the period of time before I joined the PUP the party presented Sharing Responsibility to the Secretary of State at the time, Jim Prior, and he told them that he was very interested in it but they were twenty years ahead of their time, and I think they were, absolutely. Every Unionist political party nowadays effectively advocates exactly the line that the Progressive Unionist Party, the UVF, if you like, was advocating in the mid-1970s, and I find it absolutely fascinating that those who had the time and space to evaluate and offer leadership chose not to do so, [while] those who very often are spurned … because of the paramilitary origins of their leadership, but maybe more because they were working class, were beavering away through a thought process by themselves but also in conjunction with prisoners in the jail. I think it was of some significance, in fairness, that the UDA, through the Ulster Political Research Group, had created their Common Sense* document, supposedly the brainchild of JohnMcMichael. I don’t know whether it was fully his brainchild but it certainly indicates a process of thinking in the paramilitary ranks of Loyalism far beyond that of the serried ranks of besuited politicians on the Unionist side. There’s no doubt in my mind about that, absolutely no doubt that had we waited for rational politics from Unionist constitutional politicians we’d have waited for ever.
For all that this was the product of Loyalist paramilitary disenchantment with their community’s elected politicians, the all-class alliance that had characterised the Unionism of 1912 and 1974 would be briefly revived again, in 1985, after the Anglo-Irish Agreement, and for some, including David Ervine, the experience served to deepen their disdain for the Unionist establishment and to confirm a determination to forge a separate route in the future.
The story began in the summer of 1981 with the deaths of ten Republican hunger strikers whose protest at being treated as common criminals and being denied their political status had escalated from 1976 onwards, first in their refusal to wear prison uniforms, then to smearing their cell walls with excreta and, finally, to the ultimate protest, the hunger strike. The first fast in 1980 had failed and a second was called three months later, structured in a way that ensured one of only two outcomes: death or victory. Like many Loyalists, Ervine’s sympathy was with the IRA prisoners.
Well, you’ve got to remember that, as a former prisoner, I was an advocate of special-category status. I believed it was a mammoth political mistake to replace the humane confinement [of the Long Kesh compounds] with the inhumane confinement [of the H-blocks] and the Provos rebelled about it and I admired them for it and was deeply sorry, as I know other prisoners were, that we couldn’t in our own way fight the battle that we should really have been fighting … Loyalists per se should have been battling for the fundamental rights that we as special-category prisoners had but were about to be removed for other prisoners. We took out advertisements in the newspapers, we did letter-writing, we did a lot of stuff to try and lobby for an understanding of our position, but our community didn’t want to know, our community had a very simplistic concept that: ‘We don’t challenge the British state because the British state is being challenged by our enemy and that you really can’t do what your enemy is doing because then that somehow or other bolsters the arguments of your enemy.’ Right is right and wrong is wrong and my argument would be that the introduction of criminalisation, whilst [people such as former Northern Ireland Secretary] Roy Mason may claim that it kept the lid on things in Northern Ireland, [actually] set the cause of peace back many, many years. Whilst one was conscious that your enemy was starving themselves to death, the cause upon which that enemy travelled, if you like, was a just one in terms of prison conditions, and the recognition that the problems in Northern Ireland are political … and that only by political means would they be resolved. [But our problem was] lack of support from the community, and I think that we had to measure our attitudes to what one could or would do on that basis.
The IRA hunger strikes transformed politics in Northern Ireland. The election as MP for Fermanagh–South Tyrone of Bobby Sands, the hunger strikers’ leader and the first to die, followed by two more wins for hunger-strike candidates in the Republic’s general election and Sands’s replacement by his election agent, Owen Carron, in a second Fermanagh–South Tyrone contest strengthened the forces in Sinn Fein seeking to launch the party into electoral politics. The party’s first outing as Sinn Fein was in 1982 when elections were held for an experimental assembly in Belfast and the result shocked Ireland’s political establishment, North and South. Sinn Fein won 10 per cent of the vote, the support of four out of every ten Catholics and five seats. A year later, Gerry Adams was elected MP for West Belfast and this result set alarm bells ringing in Dublin. Unless Sinn Fein was stopped there was a real chance that the SDLP’s domination of Northern Nationalism could be seriously challenged and the potential for instability arising from that deeply worried the Irish government. After some two years of frantic, and occasionally rollercoaster, diplomacy, the Irish Taoiseach, Garret Fitzgerald, persuaded Margaret Thatcher to sign up to the Anglo-Irish Agreement, known to Unionists as ‘the Hillsborough Deal’, which gave the Dublin government a physical presence in Belfast and direct access to the policy-makers in the Northern Ireland Office. A small group of Irish civil servants was stationed at Maryfield, an office complex in East Belfast and subsequently the focus for Loyalist marches and demonstrations. Although the deal came with solemn assurances from Dublin of respect for the consent principle, which said Irish reunification could happen only with the say-so of the Northern Ireland people, the deal looked like a Trojan horse to most Unionists and, as their forefathers had done before them, they banded together for greater protection and strength in the face of the threat.
In the angry days that followed the deal at least a hundred thousand Unionists gathered for a protest rally at Belfast City Hall, where Carson’s Covenant had been signed, and a further three hundred thousand signed a petition protesting the deal. All fifteen Unionist MPs at Westminster resigned so that the resulting by-elections could, referendum-like, measure the scale and solidity of Unionist opposition to Hillsborough, and government ministers were boycotted. The most contentious part of this ‘Ulster Says No!’ campaign, as it was called, was a plan for a one-day, UWC-style protest strike in March 1986 which, unlike the effort in 1977, gained support from across virtually the entire Unionist spectrum. Paisley’s deputy, Peter Robinson, had formed a strike co
mmittee called the ‘1986 Workers’ Committee’ and it looked as if he was moving towards a repeat of what happened in 1974. The Loyalist paramilitaries looked at Robinson and liked what they saw. They participated in his Workers’ Committee because Robinson seemed to be ‘made of different stuff ’ from Paisley, as one Loyalist put it, prepared to go over the top, unlike his chief.43 When the UVF and the UDA began intimidating RUC families out of Loyalist areas because of the force’s firm stand against Unionist protests, all of mainstream Unionism condemned them except Paisley’s deputy. Robinson’s potential seemed confirmed when the DUP formed its own paramilitary force, called ‘Ulster Resistance’, and along with the UVF and UDA put together an ambitious arms-smuggling plot involving South Africans and Israelis, which brought tonnes of modern weaponry into Northern Ireland. Thanks to well-placed Loyalist informers, most of the arsenal was captured by the RUC and then, in April 1989, the plot was publicly exposed. French police arrested several ‘Resistance’ members in a Paris hotel as they were meeting a South African diplomat and an American arms-dealer. Two of the ‘Resistance’ men were traced back to Paisley’s Free Presbyterian Church and Paisley promptly disowned them, to the disgust of David Ervine and other Loyalists.
[Paisley’s] denial was, I think, something that ordinary Loyalists expected and accepted; you know, here’s the grand doyens of moral guardianship who would … with the side of their hand have indicated, ‘Well, like, I have to say that, you know, I have to say that.’ Well, what followed next was not good news, and effectively the people in Paris were abandoned, and [there were] whispering campaigns against them in DUP ranks, so there was something not very nice going on. How widespread that would have been known is questionable, but certainly I was aware of it, and all it did was forever confirm in my mind that which I already knew: these people are not to be trusted, that their interest does not lie in Northern Ireland, their interest is self-interest.
Robinson’s promise evaporated when he spurned the thorny crown of martyrdom, paying a fine to a Dublin court rather than enduring a prison term in a Southern jail, and losing his seat at West minster, for his part in a rowdy ‘Resistance’ invasion of the small County Monaghan town of Clontibret in August 1986. He and Ian Paisley had been cut from similar cloth after all.
The very fact of the Anglo-Irish Agreement was seen by Loyalists such as David Ervine as compelling evidence of the Unionist leader ship’s incompetence. Jim Molyneaux, the leader of the largest grouping, the Official Unionists, seemed to have won a great victory when, in May 1984, Margaret Thatcher rejected the Irish Forum Report, the product of a pan-Nationalist (except the Provos) conference in Dublin which outlined three constitutional possibilities to settle the Troubles, ranging from a Unitary all-Ireland state through to joint authority. Thatcher’s ‘Out! Out! Out!’ response to each plan at a press conference was regarded as Molyneaux’s finest hour and a tribute to the special relationship he seemed to have with the Iron Lady. But then Molyneaux took his eye off the ball and was as surprised and outraged as most Unionists when the deal was announced in November 1985. In the immediate aftermath, Molyneaux spoke of ‘the stench of hypocrisy, deceit and treachery’ surrounding the negotiations, and said he felt ‘universal cold fury’ at the Agreement such as he had not experienced in forty years in politics. But Ervine was scornful.
I remember the day that the Anglo-Irish Agreement came out and I thought to myself, ‘Fuck me, these geezers are running about Westminster every day, there are 635 MPs and there’s not one of them would tell [Molyneaux or Paisley] what’s happening! There was just one person in the PUP believed the Brits wouldn’t do that to us, and I actually believed that there were a lot of the bedrock members of the two main parties who believed that as well, but I think their leaderships knew better. I think their leaderships were fucking cowards, I think that they knew, [and] particularly the Ulster Unionists knew. There’s [James] Molyneaux, who wins prizes for taciturnity, was the man who kept telling us he had a great relationship with the British government and the Queen and all the rest of it, and meanwhile back at the ranch, no indications from Molyneaux of the manifestation that turned out to be the Anglo-Irish Agreement.
… the UVF’s response at first to the Anglo-Irish Agreement was clear unadulterated anger and … street responses, but it didn’t last and they didn’t try to sustain it. They could have sustained it, it would have been relatively easy … [but] they didn’t try to sustain it, and I think that the UVF were listening, if not accepting 100 per cent, our [the PUP’s] analysis that the Unionist leaders ‘got us into this pile of shite and effectively they’ve a responsibility to get us out of it’.
The ‘Ulster Says No!’ campaign was just three or so months old when the Loyalist paramilitaries received an object lesson from mainstream Unionism about their perceived role in life and place at the bottom of the food chain. The Unionist political leaders, Jim Molyneaux and Ian Paisley, had put away their differences and joined forces to oppose the Hillsborough Deal. On the eve of the one-day strike they journeyed to Downing Street, having agreed with their parties to put a take-it-or-leave-it offer to Margaret Thatcher: agree to suspend the Agreement and hold talks on its replacement or face mounting Unionist protest action and even a general strike. But, with Molyneaux nervous about the impact the strike would have, the pair reneged on their pledge. Instead they proposed an all-party conference that would take place ‘unconditionally’; that is the Anglo-Irish Agreement would be functioning as it met, a de facto acquiescence in Britain’s ‘deceit and treachery’. Thatcher eagerly accepted the offer but the two men arrived back in Belfast to face a rebellion from their second-tier leaderships and rank and file who were privately accusing them of selling out. Later that night Molyneaux and Paisley performed U-turns, rejected the deal worked out earlier with Thatcher and backed the impending one-day strike. The hard men of Loyalism were drafted in to give them the necessary cover.
The 1986 experience was fundamental. Paisley and Molyneaux were at Downing Street, and I heard in the lunchtime broadcasts that there was a potential deal between Paisley, Molyneaux and Thatcher. Paisley and Molyneaux spoke on the radio live, I heard it, and there was an indication of a deal all right. So we were all summoned as part of the 1986 Committee to a meeting in the DUP’s headquarters in the Albertbridge Road. How did we get the invitation, did they not know who Billy Elliot [UDA’s East Belfast Brigadier] was representing that night, not know who I was representing that night? Of course they did. Strangely enough Sammy Wilson and Peter Robinson came into the room, no Paisley or Molyneaux – they’d been delayed – but what we got from them was ‘We put backbone into them’, and I’m listening to Robinson and Wilson talk about how ‘they put backbone’ into that great charismatic figure, Ian Paisley, who in the view of the Unionist community is all backbone. Then the next thing, they announced that the meeting would have to be in Glengall Street [the Official Unionist headquarters] that there had been a change of plan, so we were all dispatched to the Europa [hotel] to be summoned over to Glengall Street. We eventually got into Glengall Street and —— was coming down the stairs, and he says, ‘Put a bit of backbone into them’, and we were shown into a room where we sat for a while and —— left and then down came Paisley and Molyneaux and they said they would support the strike, and the people from the ’86 Committee asked, ‘Well, let’s make it very clear. Is this a joint call for a strike, Mr Molyneaux?’ Because it was clear that Paisley was never getting a strike on his own, and Molyneaux said, ‘Yes.’ The interesting thing is that it was supposed to be a private meeting, some would say a secret meeting, and when the door of Glengall Street opened and we were leaving, we were met by banks of cameras, and the headlines in the News Letter the next morning was ‘Hard men change minds’, and it was a total fucking fabrication to … give the impression that our politicians were trying to do a deal with Mrs Thatcher but look, these hard men wouldn’t let them. It was absolutely shameful, totally designed and orchestrated by the Democratic
Unionist Party and the Ulster Unionist Party.
I wish I had a pound for the number of times Ulster Unionists would say, ‘Oh, watch for the Protestant backlash. Oh, I don’t know how we’re going to sell this to the hard men.’ Meanwhile, back at the ranch … us hard men were the people who had the policies that were twenty years ahead of their own. I mean, it was incredible, it was cynical, manipulative and dishonest …
I can only speak in relation to my understanding of the UVF’s attitude and really for the first time it started to listen very carefully to the idea that we needed to learn how to speak for ourselves, we really did need to force our way into the political arena, and that began for sure in 1986 … I can never forgive the Unionist leaders because the way they behaved was not for the good of this community, it was not for the good of our people, it was for themselves, it was about their own fortunes, it wasn’t about anybody else, it was about frightening the British government or the Catholic community, and they haven’t tried it since, haven’t quite tried it since, maybe they’ve realised the game was up.
