Read Voices from the Grave: Two Men's War in Ireland Online
Authors: Ed Moloney
Although David Ervine was unwilling in his interviews with Boston College to speak in detail about his role and activity in the UVF, he dropped enough broad hints about his life in the organisation to suggest that his paramilitary speciality was the use of explosives. In particular, his arrest in November 1974 while driving a car with a bomb in the boot and the fact that he was able, when ordered by a British bomb-disposal officer, to make it safe enough to be defused, strongly suggests a close acquaintanceship with the manufacture and delivery of such devices. At the same time it is worth noting that there would have been very few in the UVF in the days when Ervine was active who were not involved in some way with that side of the organisation, as an analysis of UVF violence at that time demonstrates. Between September 1972, two months after Ervine joined up, and July 1974, three months before his arrest, the UVF killed fifty-four people, thirty-six of them in the Republic and eighteen in the North, the bulk of them in Belfast, and in only one killing was a bomb of some sort not used, either hidden in the boot of a car or tossed into a building.
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Planting bombs was undoubtedly the UVF’s forte, especially when the target was a bar or club where Nationalists drank or socialised. Fifteen of the eighteen Northern Ireland victims of the UVF during this period were killed in bar explosions, eleven bombings in all, and all but two of the victims were Catholics. The first to be killed during the Ervine years was Daniel McErlean, a forty-eight-year-old waiter at the Carrick Hill Social Club, patronised by Catholics from nearby Unity Flats, who died when a hundred-pound no-warning bomb exploded. The worst of the bombings came in May 1974 when the UVF threw a canister bomb into the Rose and Crown pub on the Ormeau Road in South Belfast, killing five men instantly and a sixth who died some days later. A seventy-five-year-old man lost a leg and another man an arm in the explosion.
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Whether any of these provoked cheers in bars from customers unaware that some of those drinking alongside them, such as David Ervine, were responsible, is a secret he took to the grave with him.
I was arrested on – I think it was a Saturday night – November 2nd
and I was transporting a vehicle and a bomb to Holywood, or
towards Holywood, County Down, when I was stopped … There
had been quite a lot of UVF activity and, I believe, and you don’t
know for sure, that a target had been picked [but] abandoned on
two occasions because of very serious police surveillance and activity
… it was a fortnight later that the attempt to move that device was
stymied, so there was quite a bit going on at that time. There was
something of a campaign being launched by the UVF in which the
group we were involved [in] were unable to take part because of
police activity. Now whether that meant that there was some kind
of information leaking to the police or whether it was just random
… it’s hard to tell; there are those with views on both of those possibilities.
I’ve always tried to avoid speculation because … if you were
to go down the line of looking for some intelligence reason, you could
torture yourself. I was lying in jail shortly thereafter, and from my
point of view I wasn’t going to be very helpful in assessing any of that
.
I’d left the Newtownards Road with a vehicle, a bomb in it, up
the Holywood Road heading for Holywood with no reason to believe
that I wouldn’t make it. I was in a vehicle on my own; there was a
car travelling behind me with five others, and when I was stopped
they just … drove past me, and I’m sure they wondered, ‘What will
he say, what will happen now?’ I was held at the scene because it
was deemed that the bomb needed to be defused; I was held at the
scene whilst the bomb-disposal officers had a look at the device and
then they asked me would I assist them in making it easier for them.
I didn’t have a problem with that; I mean at the end of the day I
wasn’t going anywhere … What I did was I went forward with a
rope tied round me and then tied round the ankle of the captain,
an ATO, Army Technical Officer, and he trained a pistol on me.
Frankly it would have been like Bonnie and Clyde had I have
thought of making any kind of dash, and I can remember just a few
hundred yards up the street there was a squad of young people and
they were all chanting, ‘Die, die, die, you Provo bastard’, and all
kinds of very disparaging comments on the assumption that of
course I was a Republican … To cut a long story short, the ATO
asked me to open the vehicle, the doors, bonnet, boot, in, in a very
specific sequence, the theory was if that you got the sequence wrong,
‘I’ll shoot you’, so my capacity to retain the sequence was OK. We
got the thing done. I lifted the device out and set it on the footpath
and they took it away eventually and disposed of it
.
Strangely enough the ATO, a Captain Walker, visited me after
they moved me. They arrested me and first took me to Mountpottinger
police station in East Belfast, where I was questioned and
they put me in a cell that was literally like a wet dank dungeon and
I presume that they thought, ‘Well, these aren’t very good conditions.’
It was a Saturday night, the earliest court hearing was
Monday morning, so they moved me to Holywood, County Down,
where they put me into a cell that was not a whole lot better but at
least it was dry. While I was in that cell Captain Walker arrived
and thanked me for my assistance, which is all a bit interesting. The
focus of attention was: where did I get the explosives; where did the
explosives come from? Now I didn’t know where the explosives came
from, but the police were quite fixated with that. I was encouraged
to talk to a couple of long-haired gentlemen who turned out to be
police officers, but not your typical police officer, Special Branch or
something like that, and they were absolutely obsessed with where I
had got the explosives. I think the theory must have been that they
were trying to trace the source, but since I had no receipt, I didn’t
receive the explosives until the vehicle was about to drive off, I
wasn’t able to help them at all
.
But I wasn’t in a frame of mind to help them anyway, no. I had a
very simple view of it. I pleaded not guilty all along. I was arrested
in a vehicle, a stolen vehicle with a bomb in the car. Now there
wasn’t much hope of beating that charge but I fought it because my
view was that the state’s got me and if it wants to keep me, it’ll have
to do the work, I’m not going to do the work for them, very simple,
total denial. I was charged with possession of explosives with intent
to endanger life. I’ll never forget one night there was a police officer
… a guy called Frank Savage, a Shankill Road man, who said to
me, ‘What are you going to do when the wife’s got a lodger?’ and I
replied, ‘If you say that to me again I’ll pull your fucking head off’,
and he never said it to me again … That type of sleazy sick politics
in the police room is frankly foolish and detrimental to the concept
of justice and law. Anyway, I was then taken to the magistrates’
court in Townhall Street and remanded in custody for a week, and
I had always been told not to take long remand periods, that you
want to appear every week, and I did appear every week for seven
months in that courtroom. I would be brought out in a little
blacked-out transit van which, when we were going through Carlisle
Circus on the roundabout, we would try to overturn it. You’d maybe
a dozen prisoners in the back and the theory was that in the mayhem
maybe you’d just get away. It was highly unlikely; we’d probably all
end up butchered in the back of the bloody thing, but that was the
type of thing that we got up to. I was held in Crumlin Road jail for
about seven months which seemed long enough but then I know
others who were there two years on remand
.
When I arrived at the jail, first of all I was taken into what’s
called the annexe base which is like a reception area. [They] have a
look at you and process you, and then you’re put into what’s called
the annexe base, B Wing, into a pretty sparse basic cell, on the
ground floor, with a courtyard behind it between B Wing and
C Wing. You’d have been lying in your bed and then the next thing
you’d hear people out in the courtyard, prisoners from C Wing
exercising, which was the Loyalist wing. They’d ask, ‘Who are you,
what are you in for?’ I knew some of them and they shouted over,
‘It’ll not be long till you’re over here’, and literally a day later I was
moved from the isolation of the annexe base into a collective jail
regime. You were unlocked in the mornings; you got out for breakfast,
if you wanted breakfast; I don’t think I got up once for breakfast
in the whole seven months, for a bowl of cornflakes, and a bit of
sausage or potato bread floating about in gallons of grease. It was
not what you wanted. Then you would have been locked up again
after breakfast, for a relatively short time. We’d have got quite a bit
of association when the wing was open, when the cells were open
,
then you’d maybe four or five hours of discussion and conversation,
you’d maybe play a game of table tennis and you just got your day
in. I did a lot of reading, and eventually after a while you would
have got a radio in. A radio in many ways was your only company,
until the jail started to fill up, and it filled up massively at that time,
particularly with UVF people. I can remember being three to a cell,
although I had started off on my own but then ended up three to
a cell. It was a large influx of UVF people. It seemed to me that the
UVF at that time outnumbered the UDA and the UDA were considered
to be a much larger organisation on the outside … and
when I was remanded instead to Long Kesh, the UVF outnumbered
the UDA in there as well. Then I was brought back to the Crumlin
Road for two weeks to await trial which might have been May in
1975. I was sentenced to eleven years for possession of explosives with
intent to endanger life. I had some very strange experiences in jail,
[for instance] I found out that my security clearance or my security
level was the highest that you could get. We used to call such people
‘red-
book men’. ‘Red-
book men’ meant that you were considered
very dangerous. I don’t know why they considered me desperately
dangerous, but I was a ‘red-
book man’, and I thought, ‘Why?’
Usually that was reserved for murderers, maybe multiple murderers
… and that carried with me the whole way through jail including
Long Kesh. If I needed to go to the doctor, I had to have a prison
officer all on my own, whereas prison officers could escort other prisoners
who weren’t ‘red-
book men’ in twos … If I wanted to go to the
study hut, for instance, it became a bit of a nuisance as I had to wait
for a screw to be available. If there were, say, five of us going to the
study hut, well that meant three screws, one each for a pair of
prisoners and one for me. I wasn’t the only one, there were a
number of people, but I just never came to terms why
.
In Crumlin Road the UVF command structure was very clear
and very defined, but probably not as confident as the command
structures in Long Kesh because they were long-term structures,
whereas remand is a constant flow of people, it was a transitory jail
process. In Crumlin Road you just had to take it on face value
because the outside organisation said, ‘Here is the way the world
works’, and that’s the way the world worked. We had people in
charge of floors, we had people in charge of landings, and then we
had [someone in] overall control. The first time I was in [the O/C]
was Tommy McAllister from Donegall Pass and when I was back for
my trial it was Billy Hutchinson. The whole time I was awaiting
trial we were locked up twenty-three hours a day, and it was three to
a cell, and when you needed a crap in the middle of the night, and
there’s two other fellas in the cell, you may not feel too good about it.
But it’s easier to stand the smell of your own crap than it is for
somebody else to stand the smell of yours. They were not good conditions,
cockroach infested, parts of the jail were mouse infested, it
wasn’t good, but it was home, and actually quite interesting. I saw
and learned a lot about people in that period of time. Young working-
class Protestant people – and this is of course a generalisation –
seemed to me to need alcohol to laugh, but in the jail we learned to
laugh without it … for some it was character-building, for others it
was destruction; there were those who just couldn’t cope, there was
those who grew in stature in jail, it’s amazing. And of course that
was carried on then in Long Kesh where the atmosphere was fundamentally
different, where UVF had express and unshared control
and processes of discipline that were substantially superior to those
in Crumlin Road jail. It was interesting
.