Voices from the Grave: Two Men's War in Ireland

by Ed Moloney

  Well, we got a larger room, and a number of copies of the last draft and we went through it word by word, line by line, and I have to say that I probably played a fairly substantial role in this asking: ‘Well, what does that mean?’ ‘What do you think that means?’ ‘What do you think that paragraph means?’ ‘What is the effect of this or that paragraph?’ We talked about it all for quite a long time and then the draft was closed and we agreed that this was probably as good as it could get. We then had a long and interesting wait for the Ulster Unionists.

  Notes – 6

  50 Irish Times, 11 January 1988.

  51 Moloney, A Secret History, p. 400.

  52 First joint Hume–Adams statement, 24 April 1993.

  53 Moloney, A Secret History, Appendix 8.

  54 IRA statement on ceasefire, 31 August 1994.

  55 Guardian, 28 September 2002.

  56 Moloney, A Secret History, Appendix 8.

  * Former US Congressman and member of Americans for a New Irish Agenda.

  † A UVF leader and member of the PUP talks team who was shot by the UVF in November 1997 after he resigned from the organisation.

  ‡ Robb, who was convicted of gun-running in 1995, was stabbed to death in a Glasgow street in 2006.

  7

  On the face of it, the Good Friday Agreement seemed to be a good deal for the Unionists of Northern Ireland. Republicans had settled for something they had long condemned as an SDLP sell-out: a resolution that accepted the existence of Northern Ireland and the principle of consent. Sinn Fein and the IRA had actually gone farther than the SDLP had ever dared, facilitating the incorporation of the principle into the Irish constitution via a special amendment. The IRA’s war, while technically still in place, had effectively been ended since the political costs of resuming would now be enormous. The Unionists had a veto over decisions in the Assembly and in the new cross-border body and while so did Nationalists, the reality was that the Unionists could halt any perceived erosion of the link to Britain if and when they thought it necessary. And the arrangements for the new assembly and executive meant that while power would have to be shared with former enemies, a Unionist hand would invariably exert the heaviest pressure on the tiller of state. Compared to what might have happened at other times in the Troubles, Unionists were entitled to feel quite pleased with the result. They hadn’t won back the Northern Ireland of the 1960s but the union had arguably been placed on a sounder basis than ever. Even so, there were features of the deal that many Unionists found unsettling and disturbing and these made the outcome of the referendum held shortly afterwards anything but a certainty. Of all the aspects that worried Unionists, the release of paramilitary prisoners was probably the hardest to take, followed closely by the prospect of IRA leaders such as Martin McGuinness and Gerry Kelly exercising power as government ministers. And then there was still the IRA. Was it genuine or again playing tricks? There was no sign that the IRA was about to go away and its refusal to decommission, made plain during the referendum campaign, suggested that the IRA would stay in the game, its mere existence a threat, no matter what fine words the Good Friday Agreement used about the rejection of violence. As it was the result was actually a comfortable win for the ‘Yes’ campaign, its magnitude evidence that most Protestants and Unionists had decided to err on the side of peace. At the count in South Belfast, PUP and UVF jeers directed at Ian Paisley and the ‘No’ camp were the loudest and heartiest of the ‘Yes’ campaigners. At the same time nearly 250,000 had voted ‘No’. That and the many loose ends that still had to be tied, not least of them how and when the IRA would start decommissioning its weapons, meant that there was a lot of travelling still to do and many opportunities for the settlement to crash. The concerns were acutely felt within the UVF and the PUP after the deal had been agreed and these account for the UVF’s own gyrations, including feuds with the rival LVF which more than once would disqualify the UVF’s ceasefire of October 1994.

  I mean, who knew what value the ceasefires had? ‘Were the Provos genuine?’ ‘Was there a sell-out by the Brits even though we had worked bloody hard to be pretty certain there wasn’t?’ ‘Was there some dirty work afoot?’ You know, all of that. It was all playing on your mind, it was a whole series of mixed feelings. The most dominant feeling would have been a sense of euphoria that the thing that nobody believed could be done was done. I would argue that the vast majority of nightmares that came after the signing of the Good Friday Agreement came because governments were prepared to work with people outside the agreement rather than inside. But I don’t think any agreement you make could ever be perfect and wouldn’t need changes or adjustments to it, but in the main I was quite elated, elated and exhausted, as I imagine most others were.

  … there would have been quite a number in the PUP who were relatively happy but the shit had yet to hit the fan … in other words, what was it going to be like within our own community, what would the responses be? Would people think we were being too soft on the other side? You’ve got to remember there were a large number of people within the Unionist community who thought that talking to the enemy was tantamount to surrender, never mind making a deal with them, so you knew that the knives were being sharpened. We need to document an historic fact, that as far as I’m aware there were only two people who signed the Good Friday Agreement, one was the prime minister of the United Kingdom, the other was the prime minister of the Republic of Ireland. When we talk about signing the Agreement we mean, I suppose, signing up to or acknowledging its rightness. I think the UVF leadership would have been the most nervous of all because they had the hard work to do. It’s all very well going into a pub or a club or a church and somebody saying, ‘I don’t agree with your signing of that agreement’, but back at the ranch it’s a fundamentally different issue when you knock about with people that carry guns …

  I think essentially the constitutional question was the big issue. Something that has unnerved many Unionists is the determination that society can’t function without a weighted majority, and yet the determination of whether Northern Ireland shall remain part of the United Kingdom would be made on a basis of 50 per cent plus. So you had one methodology of deciding what you can do on a day–to-day basis where the barrier was set very, very high, to getting the most single important issue that will ever face anybody on the island of Ireland, it was 50 per cent plus one. That was very unnerving for the UVF and so was the suggestion of Irish culture and dance being held higher than … our culture. There were many arguments about to unfold within Unionism, those for and those against, and if a mistake was made by pro-Agreement Unionists including myself, it was that maybe we were too dismissive of those who were nervous …

  Maybe I come at this from a different angle. I’ve done a bit of time in jail, I’ve been arrested, I’ve seen my mates’ brains blown out, standing beside them on the pavement as the blood runs down the street; I’ve seen some horrific things, experienced some terrible circumstances, and maybe I look at things differently. There’s no such things as guarantees in life; the shell at the end has to be cracked before you can do very much with the egg, you know, and yeah, there was always a possibility that no matter how well you analysed or how many touchstones you visited, that there was cheating or shafting or whatever … all those things were possible. The question was, ‘Were they likely, were they going to happen?’ And I think the fruit is there for all to see. I mean, structured violence has ended …

  While David Ervine had felt elated by the Good Friday Agreement, the negotiations and their outcome also represented something of a personal triumph. He had emerged as an articulate if sometimes wordy spokesman for Loyalism, as far from the image the UVF normally conjured in the public mind as it was possible to be, and had earned a reputation as a shrewd and capable negotiator. For years Loyalism had served up a series of public faces to explain or justify its existence to the world, each one a case study in antediluvian Unionism or addiction to sectarian violence and hatred. There were exc
eptions to be sure, the UDA’s John McMichael being one, but David Ervine did the impossible: he managed to make the UVF’s view of the world sound reasonable and he was very good on television. It is often said that Unionism suffers from an inferiority complex in relation to Nationalism. The Catholics have brighter, more articulate and charismatic politicians than the Unionists and if that is true then Ervine was evidence that it didn’t always have to be that way. The reward came during the assembly elections held right after the Good Friday Agreement when Ervine was elected in East Belfast, reaching the quota, and his PUP colleague, Billy Hutchinson, won in North Belfast, the first time candidates with such explicit links to Loyalist paramilitarism had tasted success at such a level. In sharp contrast, the UDA’s political wing, the Ulster Democratic Party, fared miserably, coming well behind the Women’s Coalition, which wasn’t even a real party. Within three years the UDP had given up, choosing to dissolve rather than remain the political wing of an organisation that had moved against the Good Friday Agreement and was racked with conflict over criminality, violence and corruption. Hutchinson lost his seat in 2003 and the PUP’s vote more than halved, and while Ervine survived in East Belfast, the result was a bad one for the UVF – punished for being too moderate and a consequence of the rise of Sinn Fein and the accompanying surge in support for Ian Paisley’s DUP. By then Ervine had assumed the formal leadership of the PUP, and it is a comment on the profile he had that when he was elected leader in April 2002, the Belfast Telegraph reported it in this way: ‘David Ervine was today taking up the post that many people thought he has held all along …’57

  … what we’d seen was a cultural change within the Unionist community. The Unionist community did not elect people who were former paramilitarists, it had never happened before, and Billy Hutchinson and myself were both former paramilitarists and it was a bit of a mould-breaker, in that respect, I suppose. You got carried away with that because you were only as good as your last election and the mood has changed since. We don’t vote [in Northern Ireland] for what we want, we vote against what we don’t want, so the perceived political bulwark against that which you don’t want is the one that’s trawling in all the votes. That rather tells us that you can have all the agreements in the world but unless you’re very mindful of the needs of the broader public the broader public will rebel. The Sinn Fein rise in electoral terms is, you could argue, skilful work by Sinn Fein, but undoubtedly some of it, and I would argue quite a lot of it, is about: ‘Well, who winds up the Unionists most, the SDLP or Sinn Fein?’ ‘Well, Sinn Fein winds the Unionists up, so that’s what I like so.’ And similarly on the Unionist side, the DUP are seen as the great bulwark against Sinn Fein and that attracts Unionist votes … The mood music of hatred and bitterness still exists: don’t be soft on the other side, if you’re soft or if you’re perceived soft on the other side, there’s a price to pay for it, and we’ve seen that in, in recent elections …

  We and the UDP were structured in different ways with subtly different relationships between the paramilitary organisations to which we were close. It would seem that the UDP did not have any latitude. It went to the table virtually as a representative of the UDA and at every turn had to report back to and get permission from the UDA, at least that’s how it seemed. I think that was very damaging for the UDP, I mean, Gary McMichael and Davy Adams in particular, very talented people, very able people, but every time there was a wobble they had a nightmare from an organisation that was structured completely differently than the UVF. The UVF, like the IRA, like the British military system and like all military systems, is an elitist process; it’s not a democracy. Whereas the UDA was structured differently, in six regions within Northern Ireland and each regional leader as important as the others, so you had, if you like, a six-headed discussion process. You could argue … that, with the UVF, you were dealing with a one-headed discussion process and that made a fundamental difference. Also we were trusted or trusted more by the UVF than was the case in the UDA–UDP set-up …

  It would take another eight years before the Good Friday Agreement would be fully implemented. The years between 1998 and 2007 saw an endless series of political crises, each one seemingly more bewilderingly complex than the one before and at several critical moments the Agreement was suspended until obstacles could be removed. At the start David Trimble and John Hume led Northern Ireland’s two major parties, Unionist and Nationalist, but at the end, in May 2007, Ian Paisley’s DUP and Sinn Fein had replaced them and formed the first, stable power-sharing government. If there was one issue responsible for that reversal, it was paramilitary decommissioning, the longest untied thread of the Good Friday Agreement. Ironically the PUP and UVF found themselves in the same camp as Sinn Fein and the IRA, arguing that forcing the issue could cause internal instability and wreck the peace. The IRA began decommissioning in 2001, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, but it did so grudgingly and with no transparency and this, along with excursions by the IRA that were regular and serious enough to cause Unionists to question its bona fides, fuelled the conflict between the Good Friday parties. It helped that there were voices in the Loyalist paramilitary world raising the same objection as the IRA.

  The UVF has a major difficulty over decommissioning, every paramilitary organisation has, because it’s your raison d’être being given away. But the UVF has a major problem in that its existence is about challenging violent Nationalism … if you don’t trust the other side and the other side hasn’t divested itself of the wherewithal to challenge the state militarily, then Loyalism is trapped, because its very existence is about challenging violent Nationalism. Now if violent Nationalism is clearly a partner in the democratic process, well, that changes the ballgame, but we’re not at that point yet, and that will be an issue that will confront the UVF when that time comes. I’ve always been an advocator of a four-letter word, and that was ‘rust’. I believed decommissioning was a red herring but has grown now into a cause célèbre and had to be addressed, [but] it was massively out of sequence. If you march people along a democratic path even though the weapons are still there, the more that you march people along that path the less relevant the weapons become. It takes on a totally different hue. That’s been my argument for a long time, it hasn’t really changed. However, the IRA have made a cross for their own back. The Progressive Unionist Party’s argument was: ‘Tell us the war’s over.’

  David Ervine did not live long enough to see the UVF decommission its guns but, in June 2009, it happened in much the same way as outlined in his interviews with Boston College, that it wouldn’t be possible until the IRA had finished destroying its arsenals and declared its war against Britain over. Nor did he live to see Sinn Fein and the DUP take office together in May 2007 although he was alive when the St Andrews Agreement, which made that possible, was reached. His last interview with Boston College took place in October 2004, just after inter-party talks at Leeds Castle when it first became apparent that Ian Paisley and the DUP could make a deal with Sinn Fein. The talks came to grief but the IRA’s robbery of the Northern Bank that December and the Sinn Fein cover-up of Robert McCartney’s murder in January 2005 set the scene for final IRA decommissioning and its declaration that its violence had ended, both of which heralded the DUP–Sinn Fein pact. Ervine’s optimism, while delayed, was finally fulfilled.

  … the Good Friday Agreement … merely creates the space within which one can explore the possibility of ending the hurt and the bitterness. It has been cackhandedly implemented, I think, or failed to be implemented in some cases. Rather than get upset about it I think we have to recognise that all of us are in uncharted waters, we’ve never been here before, nobody has got ever this close to putting stability, peace and the sanctity of life as high on the agenda as we have them today. It’s not been easy but then nobody told us it was going to be easy. We’ve had a suspension of our political institutions … But slowly and surely, incrementally, I think we’re getting to the, the narrowest part of the funnel. We�
��ve all been thrown in at the top and in some ways because of gravity and many other reasons we’re being pushed into the neck of the funnel and there’s nowhere else to go. It is now really down to intent. I fancy that as we speak the issue of intent is to be clarified on all sides, instead of suspension of the institutions continuing that we will have a restoration of them. I’d be extremely confident about what 2005 can deliver us in terms of stable government and the beginning of a process that will make the people believe that the war is over … and I would be extremely confident, extremely confident that the people of Northern Ireland will see peace.

  My sense is that, that the UVF will, or I hope will, graciously wither on the vine. The raison d’être hopefully will change for Loyalism, but the friendships won’t disappear, the camaraderie is not likely to go away and the sense of fellowship will remain. I would have thought that the UVF is quite capable of being positive to the changes that are taking place at the moment. It won’t be easy, but I believe … they will become something different. I think that they will go through a status change. I sincerely hope that many of them will traverse the relatively short journey from the UVF to the PUP. The Progressive Unionist Party is going through somewhat of a torrid time. It’s like the little welding company that knows there’s about to be a global upturn in the economy but has a serious and deep requirement to make sure its cash flow continues long enough for it to take advantage of the opportunity. The Progressive Unionist Party’s socialist philosophies might well be the process by which the needs of a deeply underprivileged people begin to be delivered …