by Ed Moloney
When you talk to me about dissident Loyalism, these are the people who got stopped with drugs and no charges are proffered, these are the people who walk about like larger-than-life cardboard cut-out characters breaking every law known to man including murder and not being charged with them. These are the type of people who got found with police officers, sitting having private chats, one-to-one private chats. There’s a whole host of areas where you have to question the engine that was so-called Loyalist dissent. I have questioned the so-called leader of Loyalist dissent and accused him clearly and, by the way, before his death, of being an agent of the Crown. Of that I have absolutely no doubt …
The three or four years that followed Billy Wright’s death were violent, confusing ones for Loyalism. The UVF and the LVF, now in the hands of Billy Wright’s deputy, Mark Fulton, would feud bloodily in 2000. There would also be fighting between the UVF and the Shankill UDA, led by Johnny Adair, a muscled veteran gunman motivated, his critics would allege, by criminal greed as much as by politics, once described by an associate as having ‘a lethal combination of ego and adrenalin’.55 The UDA and the LVF, which called a ceasefire in 1998, resumed killing, sharing the cover names ‘Orange Volunteers’ and ‘Red Hand Defenders’ to hide responsibility for violence and to escape government sanctions. But each group would in turn be ‘delisted’ by the British government, their ceasefires officially declared over and their political wings obliged to forfeit the privileges and rights such a status brought, albeit briefly in most instances. By 2002, however, a calm of the sort brought by exhaustion was restored between the UDA and the UVF with the forced exile of Adair, although violence would again flare up between the UVF and Billy Wright’s group in 2005 after which the LVF formally ‘stood down’. Some twenty people were killed during this turbulent time, most of them rival Loyalists but some, like eighteen-year-old Bernadette Martin, a Catholic killed by the LVF in Lurgan, County Armagh, guilty merely of dating a Protestant boyfriend.
By the time Billy Wright was killed, the peace process had been put back on the rails. The IRA had renewed its ceasefire in July 1997, almost coinciding with the election of British and Irish governments that were more favourably disposed towards the peace process than their predecessors – one led by Tony Blair, the other by Bertie Ahern – and Sinn Fein was readmitted to the process. Political talks resumed at Stormont in mid-September with all the parties present except Ian Paisley’s DUP and Bob McCartney’s small UK Unionists who boycotted them in protest at Sinn Fein’s presence. The road to the Good Friday Agreement had been opened up.
The UVF and the UDA had been talking to the British on an ‘exploratory’ basis since December 1974 and attended meetings at Stormont as a joint delegation from the CLMC. Those were difficult days for David Ervine. He and Billy Hutchinson were part of a UVF/PUP team that included two allies of Billy Wright, then in the early stages of his revolt against the UVF leadership. One was Jackie Mahood, the North Belfast UVF leader whose presence at the talks forced Ervine to resign briefly from the PUP team. The other was Lindsay Robb,‡ from Lurgan, a member of Wright’s ‘Rat Pack’ in Mid-Ulster, who was suspected of leaking the PUP’s secrets to Ian Paisley’s DUP and helping to sow dissension in UVF ranks on behalf of Wright. Within a year, Robb was beginning a ten-year jail term for smuggling weapons from Scotland and eighteen months later Wright was back in jail. By late 1997, with Billy Wright safely dead, the UVF and the PUP were preparing their approach at the inter-party talks that, thanks to Sinn Fein’s return, were about to take a serious turn.
The structure and shape of the talks conformed broadly to the all-Ireland conference envisaged by Father Reid and Gerry Adams back in the late 1980s. Chaired by the former US Senate leader George Mitchell, the two governments and most of the North’s parties, even the tiny Women’s Coalition, were involved and committed, in theory at least, to reaching and abiding by an agreement that would determine ‘the future of Ireland’, as one of Father Reid’s documents put it.56 The agenda was split into three strands, one devoted to internal Northern Ireland arrangements, another dealing with North–South relations and a third, the least controversial, considered the East–West relationship as it was called, between the island of Ireland and Britain. The UVF and the PUP found themselves in a curious position, at one with the Ulster Unionists on the issues dear to both their hearts, such as the consent principle, but on the same side as their Republican enemies on the question of prisoner releases, which they both favoured, and paramilitary decommissioning, which they together opposed. Only on the conditions for prisoner releases did the UVF differ from the other two paramilitary groups, the UDA eager to swap guns for prisoners, Sinn Fein seeking a speedy release date and the UVF/PUP pushing for a deal that wouldn’t alarm mainstream Unionist opinion. The PUP, which brought the UVF and Red Hand Commando leaderships into the negotiating room, also held something of a sword over David Trimble’s head on issues such as North–South relations. If Ervine and his colleagues withheld their approval, Trimble could find himself dangerously isolated. With Ian Paisley and Bob McCartney roaring ‘traitor’ at Trimble from outside the conference rooms, that gave Ervine’s team not a little leverage.
… our agenda was simple: ‘Northern Ireland shall remain part of the United Kingdom for as long as it is the wish of the greater number of people so to do.’ It’s called the principle of consent, and again us Neanderthals, the scumbags, the gangsters as we’re called on a constant basis, were way ahead of the game. From our point of view the issue fundamentally was about adhering to democratic principles. Way back into the 1980s we issued papers like Sharing Responsibility in Northern Ireland, advocating proportional representation and positions in government as of right for both sections of our society … [but] the issue of Strand Two was the nightmare for us. It’s all very well having accountability within Northern Ireland, but … does your accountability collapse when you have a relationship with the Irish government? We were very conscious that all the soundings from the Republicans, the Irish government and the SDLP were: ‘Oh aye, more or less a road to a united Ireland and that’s the way it’s going to be and we’ll create these hawser wires to link Dublin to Belfast and meanwhile back at the ranch it’ll be a one millimetre piece of string between Belfast and London.’ Those were the issues that were very much on our mind, and again we attacked them only on the basis of the principle of consent, that the process of accountability had to be such that there was clear consent by the people of Northern Ireland. Some people have argued, including people in the UVF, that this was a weakness because ‘What happens if they outbreed us?’ Well, the difficulty with that of course is that you can’t be an à-la-carte democrat … There were a number of things that the UVF was interested in achieving. First and foremost was the principle of consent, and secondly was the absence of violence in that the threat from the Republican movement had to end, the war needed to be over … but again really it’s back to the principle of consent, and every single argument that we have relates back to that principle, including the Provos’ capacity to frighten our community … either democracy rules or it doesn’t. If democracy doesn’t rule you’ve got a war on your hands, it’s as simple as that, I think that’s still the UVF’s position …
There were a number of difficulties that we had, and one of them was our association with the Ulster Democratic Party [the UDA’s political wing]. Two members of the UDP were very capable people, one spectacularly capable. A number of others were more military connected than they were, and they were a nightmare. When for instance the British government wanted to play games with decommissioning, they were actually prepared to trade prisoners for weapons. That was unbelievable; we were shocked to our foundations at the notion that they would trade prisoners for weapons. ‘What would you trade next?’ This was not about prisoners and it wasn’t about weapons, it was about consolidating Northern Ireland’s position within the United Kingdom, and by this time of course the relationship between the UDP and the Progressiv
e Unionist Party, whilst never fully comfortable, was now fairly polluted. We were polite at best, and we didn’t know what games they were playing behind closed doors, and you could argue, in fairness to them, they didn’t know for sure what we were playing behind our closed doors, but the difference between us is that we were operating from a series of documents that had been created as far back as 1978, 1982, 1985, 1989, updated in 1992. We had a core political process and I think that we stuck to it as tight as we could. Prisoners weren’t part of the issue; prisoners were part of the issue in terms of the making of peace – there’s no question about that – but they certainly weren’t high on our agenda.
Another nightmare concerned the preferential treatent given to the Women’s Coalition. They were highly intelligent and capable people. I have a great admiration for them, which I didn’t think I’d ever have. I didn’t know them, but I learned to appreciate the talent that they had, no question about that, but I was finding that even though they had no paramilitary organisation to worry about, the Women’s Coalition were getting documents before we were. A document would be circulated inside this so-called equal negotiation process and we would only find out about it a day later. We went absolutely bonkers, we were angry, we were frustrated; we had to have a special meeting to decide whether to stay in the talks because of this treatment. When we voiced our anger, Gary McMichael, who was the leader of the Ulster Democratic Party, said, ‘Well, everything is all right with us.’
Cross-border relationships became the make-or-break issue for us. You’ve got to remember that Sinn Fein would not talk about Strand One, although they were doing so privately with the Irish government and the Irish government was probably building an understanding of how far they could go in that. A lot of this was done by proxy, the Irish government virtually dealing with the Unionists on behalf of Sinn Fein and the British government dealing with Sinn Fein on behalf of the Unionists in many respects, so there was a lot of it unseen and a lot of it unknown, and it was only when you had a formalised mass draft [of the Agreement] that you began to realise that shifts had taken place. The mechanisms for the election of ministers was something the Nationalists were hell bent on achieving. We had previously had arguments about whether you should have executive authority or whether should we operate in the form of committees but all that was kicked into touch, because clearly we couldn’t get agreement until you could close the gaps on the cross-border stuff. Even up until the last day, the mechanisms and the role that the cross-border secretariat would play vis-à-vis the Northern Ireland parliament was of major concern. Initially the creation of the secretariat was to be in the hands of Westminster and Dail Eireann. But … if our partner in this North–South stuff is going to be Dail Eireann then there had to be an equal partnership between Belfast and Dail Eireann and therefore Westminster would have to butt out. We needed as much control of that secretariat as the Irish, and there was also the dream by the Irish that they would create this massive and very proactive secretariat that would plan agendas; these would be civil servants, these wouldn’t be politicians. I remember having blazing rows with the Irish on the last day or, or the last evening, and I think it was [Bertie] Ahern who accepted and acknowledged that we would not go with what was suggested. Now we were a small party, and if we didn’t go, Trimble couldn’t go. It was as simple as that. If we’d have said no, Trimble would have had to have jumped back …
At times there was a way of ensuring that the UVF leadership were aware of what was going on inside Castle Buildings at Stormont. When we moved to an intensified period, effectively the last week we had two offices, and I can remember counting fifty-three people in the two offices. Let’s be open and honest with everybody because I don’t think there’s any point in telling lies. A substantial number of those people were members of the Ulster Volunteer Force, the Red Hand Commando, let’s not kid ourselves, because whilst the Progressive Unionist Party in fairness to the UVF had always been given a substantial degree of latitude in where it could go and how far it could go, as far as relating the understanding of the UVF’s position in relation to Northern Ireland’s constitution, it would be foolish to have left ourselves having to run back and forward to the UVF. So they were there, they sat round and read the documents just as much as we did, and we did it together, and I can remember people being dispatched from Castle Buildings in Stormont up to Long Kesh where a special visit was arranged at night to try and explain to the prisoners … what the position was and where the UVF leadership and the PUP leadership was on the issue of prisoners. The prisoners were more interested in the major deal, and that that explanation had to be given as well … there was a constancy of relationship that meant we virtually slept together, and that would be not putting it too dramatically.
The prisoners issue was a piece of the required material for an agreement, so let’s not kid ourselves that we believed that without prisoners you could get nothing. That’s not true. You could have gotten things without prisoners, but we believed prisoners needed to be part of it. Clearly the Republicans did, and I remember … we’d talked to the British and they thought that three years was probably the best that they could come up with, that over a period of three years all the political prisoners would be released, and we felt that was too long. The British government acknowledged that they understood that and the very best they could move to was two years. Gerry Kelly came and rapped the PUP’s door, much to the chagrin of the assembled Ulster Volunteer Force members, and I went outside and spoke to him. He said, ‘Look, we’ve got the Brits on the run here, we can get the prisoners down to a year’, and my answer very simply was: ‘A year, no. This has to be a sellable deal, two years is as short as it needs to be.’ Now some prisoners would probably say, ‘Davy Ervine could have got a better deal for us’, but it wasn’t about prisoners; you also had to have a sellable commodity, and I can remember coming back into the room and the attitude among the UVF was the same: ‘It was as good as you could go for; it was as good as it dared be.’ Having given my initial response to Kelly, I then went looking for him and I found Adams instead, and I related what was clearly by that time the expressed view of the assembled PUP, UVF and Red Hand, and made it clear that the Progressive Unionist Party was happy to go for two years because we felt that any more was to push the boat out.
On 25 March 1998, George Mitchell set a deadline of two weeks for final agreement that was due to expire at midnight on Thursday, 9 April. The deal that was eventually agreed exceeded Mitchell’s deadline by eighteen hours, in the early evening of the next day, Good Friday – but few complained. As the UVF and PUP had intended, the principle of consent ran like a thread through the document and was reflected both in the Agreement’s opening statement of constitutional principles and in the commitment of the Irish government to redraft the claim to Northern Ireland, Articles 2 and 3, contained in the constitution, Bunreacht na hEireann, in such a way as to reflect this new reality. A power-sharing executive, drawn from a new assembly, would be chosen in proportion to major party strength; the assembly would have devolved legislative powers and would have to subject major decisions to the cross-community principle, meaning they would require a majority of both Unionists and Nationalists for approval. And there would be a new North–South Ministerial Council to oversee cross-border matters. The UVF/PUP approach to this was also the one followed. The Council would be in the hands of politicians, not government bureaucrats, and all decisions needed the approval of the assembly and, courtesy of the cross-community rule, of a majority of Unionist members. Unionists thus effectively exercised a veto over the one mechanism in the Good Friday Agreement that could edge Northern Ireland towards Irish unity. The UVF/PUP approach to prisoner release was also adopted and paramilitary inmates would be freed by June 2000, two years later. So too was the joint UVF–IRA stance on decommissioning. Both groups favoured ‘rust’ as the ultimate answer and the Good Friday Agreement obligingly long-fingered the issue in a way acceptable to the major para militaries
.
The Good Friday Agreement was in all these ways a triumph for the UVF and PUP and for David Ervine, by this stage the dominant spokesman for the Loyalist paramilitaries. They had got most of what they had sought out of the negotiations and by so doing vindicated the positive view they had taken in the early days of the peace process. The IRA and Sinn Fein had de facto accepted the consent principle, had agreed to disavow the use of violence and once the Good Friday Agreement was endorsed by referenda on both sides of the border, they could return to violence only in defiance of the wishes of all the Irish people, North and South. The UVF and PUP had helped diminish the power of Irish Republicanism in a most significant way. But the fudge on paramilitary disarming would doom the Agreement to years of delay and crisis, destroy the Ulster Unionist leader David Trimble and pave the way for a final outcome that David Ervine could never have foreseen and would surely have deplored. But as the PUP and UVF settled down in the final hours of the talks to consider the final drafts, there were no such thoughts.
