Read Voices from the Grave: Two Men's War in Ireland Online
Authors: Ed Moloney
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To read David Ervine’s account of his family and upbringing in working-class East Belfast and of his journey into the UVF is to acknowledge the sheer force that communal pressure exerted in shaping people’s views and actions during the Troubles in Northern Ireland. In his case this pressure prevailed over the strong influence of his father, Walter Ervine, who held, for that time, unusually progressive, even left-wing, views, not least about Irish nationalism and Northern Ireland’s Catholics. Unlike most of his neighbours, Walter Ervine was sceptical about organised religion, scornful of sectarian politicians such as Ian Paisley, and was a man who had read hungrily all his life. Ervine’s older brother Brian recalled a father who had been disappointed in life, an intelligent man who could have achieved much but never had the education, a man who continually provoked his sons to think outside the box. His mother Elizabeth was different; deferential to authority and politically ‘to the right of Genghis Khan’, as Ervine himself put it, but it was his father who had the greater impact of the two. Yet David Ervine went on to join a group, the UVF, that would become a byword for savage, even psychopathic violence against Catholics – everything that his father was not and was seemingly opposed to. That he did so was because more powerful and ancient forces swept him along, the same forces that pulled Brendan Hughes into the IRA: the call to defend one’s own community against those who might overwhelm it. Still, his father planted seeds that many years later would sprout and grow.
I was born [on 21 July 1953] and reared in East Belfast between the
Albertbridge Road and Newtownards Road, in a very basic working-
class community, close enough to be described as [being] in the
shadow of the shipyard. I would imagine that a lot of the disposable
income, not that there was much of it, was generated by people who
worked in Queen’s Island, which was the site of the shipyard, and
ancillary industries. I was the youngest of five children; [we were]
almost like two families, a brother and two sisters and then my
brother and me. I think the youngest of those three was eighteen
when I was born; my mum [was] forty-two when she had me, forty
when she had my brother. Things were done differently in those
days, and I suppose for many different reasons the sophistication
of family planning hadn’t yet arrived. But I was born into what,
I suppose, was a happy enough home … I think my da was, in his
own mind, an under-achiever, a very skilled tradesman but [he]
missed the opportunity of an extended education and had to go out
to work … with family requirements as a young lad.
I think that his travels around the world as a naval officer, an
engineer, probably gave him … a very parochial attitude towards
Northern Ireland; intolerant almost of our intolerance, he would
have been. I would have described him as very liberal man, and my
mother would have been the opposite, [one] to the left of Joe Stalin
and the other to the right of Genghis Khan. I [had] a happy
upbringing, I think, in that I don’t ever remember being brutalised;
I remember things in a very naive and genteel way, about playing
in the street and my first experiences at school … I suppose up until
about the age of about fourteen, [I had] a fairly basic little existence,
you know, ran the streets, played football, get fed, get clothed and
happy enough
.
Ervine went to Orangefield Secondary School off the Castlereagh Road, a state school that in the 1960s had a name for being progressive and liberal. It certainly produced an eclectic bunch of alumni. Van Morrison was a student there in the 1950s and, during the Ervine years, schoolmates included Brian Keenan, the teacher and writer who was kidnapped and held hostage in Beirut by Islamic Jihad; Gerald Dawe, the poet and writer, and Ronnie Bunting, the son of Ian Paisley’s former right-hand man, Major
Bunting, who went on to become a leader of the violent Republican group the Irish National Liberation Army (INLA) and was the victim of a UDA assassination squad in 1980. David Ervine’s brother Brian had passed the Eleven Plus and went to Grosvenor Grammar and then on to Queen’s University, Belfast, where he graduated in theology. A career as schoolteacher, playwright and songwriter followed. David Ervine, by contrast, was no scholar and left Orangefield just before his fifteenth birthday to take up a series of unskilled jobs. When he joined the UVF he was working in a city-centre paint store.
…
I think I went through the nightmare of not knowing what
school was about, just didn’t understand it; it was, you know,
‘somewhere where I have to go’. No, school was of no tremendous
significance to me, [but] I got playing sport … the academic side
was not a forte of mine anyway. My oldest brother, who was at least
twenty years older than me, missed his opportunity for education
much as my da missed his, but the brother nearest to my age went
for it and I didn’t and I can’t understand why. In hindsight you
could manufacture all kinds of reasons, but I’m not so sure that
even now I understand why. It was a blur basically. It’s almost like
the story of the young kid that plays in the cup final at seventeen
and by the time he’s thirty or forty he can’t remember the details,
yet it was a great and very interesting moment of his life
.
Our house was stuffed full of books, and my da was an absolutely
avid reader, in fact, you know there used to be a bit of a giggle, my
brother and I were chosen each week to go to the library and to get
him three books. We would ask, ‘Well, what do you want?’ and he
would answer, ‘Well, anything’, literally anything, and we brought
those three books and my da read them and then the following week
they were returned and another three books were got. I remember
we had a couple of suitcases under the bed which were packed with
encyclopedias. Now the very fact that they were under the bed
[showed] there were no shelves; the house couldn’t have held shelves,
the walls were like paper. But, anyway, it’s rather an indication of
my interest in encyclopedias, that I don’t ever remember taking
them out of the suitcases
.
…
my father professed socialism, and I can remember we lived in
a street where there was a church at one end, and people would have
paraded along the street in their Sunday best to go to church and a
woman would have come and collected my mum’s church envelope
and even though my mother and father didn’t go to church, my
mother insisted that you have to fill the envelope each week for the
church. Interestingly enough every three months the church produced
a little magazine in which they named everybody who gave
money, and not only that, they named people who didn’t, and I
think that was probably a driving force for my ma. My da used to
think that was disastrous … we would have certainly got a sense
from our da that church was not necessarily all that it was built up
to be. Which makes it quite interesting that my brother has gone on
to be a Christian of long standing and is qualified as a minister but
has never chosen to be ordained, and I could hardly say that I have
gone in that direction
.
…
the news was avidly watched by my da, and that would have
been news on anything. I can remember that we got The Sunday
Times every week … I don’t know whether we were the only people
on the street to get The Sunday Times; it was a big long street, but
there couldn’t have been many. We got this huge paper that it took
my da till about Wednesday to read, and I remember it used to have
a magazine which pleased me no end. I could look at the pictures in
the magazine, but that was the sort of attitude that my da had; he
wanted to know the news, he listened to the news and he would have
talked about it. There used to be a guy came round to our house to
sell clothes to my sister; he was from India, and he and my da
became great friends. My da would have invited him in and they
would sit and talk politics all day and all night and about Hinduism
and Islam and Christianity. So I can remember in that respect my
da was always fuelling discussion of some kind or other. I think that
we were … slightly more political animals in some respects than …
other households … but he was in truth sickened by politics in
Northern Ireland. I remember [the Reverend Ian] Paisley campaigning
in our street, and I don’t know who he was campaigning
for, but he came up as my mother was out scrubbing the front, and
you used to do a sort of semicircle of cleaning at the front step of the
house and he said something like, ‘You keep these houses like little
palaces’, and then my da, who was ill at the time, struggled up off
the chair and … in what would have been language that was shocking
to me, told Paisley to go away, I think the words he used were
‘Fuck off’, and it was harsh and agitated. I mean, we had electric
points that hung off the wall; you couldn’t attach them to the wall,
the wallpaper sagged, the ceilings fell and cockroaches were an infestation,
and Paisley was patronising my ma and then my ma was of
course standing there saying, ‘Ah yes, Mr Paisley, ah no, Mr Paisley.’
My da of course wasn’t for any of that
.
The street would probably have had about a hundred houses.
I think there were four Catholic families that I’m aware of. One
Catholic family had six children and the three boys were all Protestant
and the three girls were all Catholic; it was a mixed marriage
and … they were lovely people, great people, I’ve absolutely abiding
affection for those people, and my dad – and my mum, in fairness –
but more especially my da had a great relationship with that family
.
I don’t know that you were ever frightened of the Catholic you
knew; you were frightened of the Catholic you didn’t know. My
da’s argument was that ‘We are just all people’, you know, and as far
as religion was concerned, he used to go to the debates in Clonard
monastery, which was hardly the done thing.
*
I don’t think he was
anti-Christian, or anti-deity per se; I think it was anti the manipulation
and the sense of a false fellowship that he believed religion
brought. But I did sense, and at the same time didn’t, that Catholics
were always different; you knew they were different but I didn’t
know why they were different … but you knew enough to know
that they were different, and then I suppose there’s the moment
when you hear the word ‘Catholic’ and ‘What does that mean?’
and you become au fait, if you like, and particularly in street language.
I certainly would not have been in any way encouraged to
believe in our superiority, even from my mother’s point of view
.
David Ervine was just fifteen or sixteen when the civil rights campaign began, triggering the events that would, a few years later, spiral into the Troubles and then change his life utterly. His father saw the campaign in a very different light from most Protestants of the time, a view that Ervine could recognise as being present in the peace process he helped to shape many years later.
I think it only became evident to me [that Catholics could pose a
threat] around the time of the civil rights movement … [and] the
speculation that Republicanism or the IRA was infiltrating it. I
think that my da would have been a fool not to have considered
that, but I think in essence the basic argument he had was that …
rights are for everybody; they’re human beings, you know. I remember
one stunning comment which stuck with me for ever, when he
said, ‘Now there’s an interesting one’, when a banner was being
carried by a civil rights march that said on it, ‘British rights for
British citizens’, and then we spoke about people wanting to keep
them separate as opposed to them being Catholic British citizens.
I’m not sure I fully understood it at the time, but for me that has
grown to have a greater resonance with some of the attitudes that
prevail even today
.
Well, the broader community view [of the civil rights campaign]
seemed to be one of ‘This is an enemy.’ My da’s words were harping
in the back of your head but I think that probably I was siding with
the community view … that civil rights was a sinister plot. My da
was saying, ‘Well, hold on a minute’, but certainly I probably would
have fallen to the community view. They [Catholics] were simply
bad people, and they were strategising around bad things; that was
the community view, and I probably went with that view. I was in
no position to theorise other than what would have been whispered
in my ear and was sitting on my shoulder, which was the comments
of my da. In some respects he took the sting out of that, but I would
not have seen it as alien that the civil rights movement met opposition
from people who considered it to be the enemy. When the disturbances
in Derry moved to Belfast, my reaction was very simple:
‘You’re either one of them or you’re one of us’, and I was one of us …
It was our community being attacked … it became something other
than civil rights, it became a conflagration between our two communities
.