Voices from the Grave: Two Men's War in Ireland (53 page)

Nearly eight years after he had been arrested ferrying a bomb for the UVF in East Belfast, David Ervine was freed from prison.

By the time David Ervine was released from jail, the UVF had become a shadow of the group that had struck terror into Catholic Belfast in the mid-1970s. But they weren’t alone. All the para military groups, Republican as well as Loyalist, had quickly felt the impact of the British government’s new ‘criminalisation’ strategy and, by the end of 1977, the general level of violence was on a downward curve. Some 116 souls lost their lives in the first full year of the new security policy, 1977, the lowest count since 1970. By the time David Ervine walked out of Long Kesh, the death toll had settled at around the hundred-a-year mark, nearly a third of the average of the most violent years of the Troubles. All the paramilitary groups killed fewer people in 1977 but the UVF’s rate of decline was the sharpest. The Provisional IRA killed 68 people, around half of the year before; the UDA killed 12, a third of its 1976 toll, while the number whose lives were ended by the UVF was 14, only 20 per cent of the previous year’s total.
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The success of RUC detectives in extracting confessions from suspects held in the new holding centres, in Belfast and later in Armagh and Derry, was evident by the summer of 1977. The number of terrorist-type charges levelled was up by 20 per cent on the previous twelve months while murder charges rose over 40 per cent.
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In the UVF’s case, the RUC was rounding up its most active units. The South-East Antrim UVF had been decimated in 1976 when one of its members turned informer; the Shankill Butchers had been put out of action thanks to some inspired police work and there were other successes, less high profile but nonetheless significant. In November 1977, for instance, Belfast City Commission was told that in Ballymena, County Antrim, a Loyalist hotbed and political base of the Reverend Ian Paisley, the UVF cell had
been rounded up more than a year earlier and since then there had been no UVF violence at all in the town. Sentencing the UVF’s Ballymena unit of twelve men for a range of offences, Justice Basil Kelly praised the RUC’s ‘good police work’.
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There can be little doubt either that the fall-off in Provisional IRA violence had a knock-on effect. Since the Loyalist paramilitaries would often step up their killings in tandem with Republican violence, there was now less reason to strike back. The years after Roy Mason came to Belfast to implement the policy were also politically fallow ones. After the setback of 1974 and the failure of an experimental constitutional convention set up shortly afterwards whose principal achievement was to reaffirm the existence of an unbridgeable gap between Unionism and Nationalism, the British effectively abandoned the business of deal-making, and that settled Unionist nerves, including those of the paramilitaries. But there was another reason why the UVF, along with the UDA, was on the back foot in these years and they had Ian Paisley to thank for that. In 1977, Paisley and a number of political allies from other fringe parties managed to persuade the UDA and the UVF to launch another Northern Ireland-wide strike, like that in 1974, this time as a protest against one unexpected but potent side-effect of Roy Mason’s tough security policy.

The sweeping away of political status, the decision to criminalise paramilitaries and the centrality of police-acquired confession evidence in the judicial system were known collectively by the British as the ‘Normalisation’ policy but others called it ‘Ulsterisation’ because of another feature of the strategy, the greater street role played by local forces, the RUC, the police reserve and the Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR), compared to the British Army. Just like the similarly named US strategy of ‘Vietnamisation’, the British aim was to reduce the exposure of their troops to violence and as in Vietnam the consequence was that local forces began to bear the brunt of casualties. The figures bear this out. In 1975, 14 British soldiers were killed and 18 locals, that is members of the RUC, the RUC reserve and the UDR. The following year it was 15
British to 40 locals. UDR fatalities alone more than doubled, from 7 to 16. The impact in Protestant Ulster was significant; it is at this time, for instance, that Unionists began alleging that the IRA was ethnically cleansing along the border, shooting UDR members to force their families to flee their farms and homes so that Catholics could acquire them. Unionists demanded action from the British and when it did not come they went back to what they did best. In May 1977 the Paisley-insired, UVF/UDA-supported Loyalist strike started with the public goal of forcing a crackdown on the IRA and a more secret agenda, which some believed amounted to an attempted
coup d’état
. But there was a key difference between the 1977 action and the 1974 UWC strike and that was that Unionism was divided about the wisdom of such an extreme step. Significant sections of mainstream Unionism, the Official Unionist Party and the Orange Order in particular, refused to have anything to do with Paisley’s strike and it collapsed after ten days, fatally weakened by Unionist divisions.

While David Ervine might be right, that there was no intimidation of factory and office workers in 1974, the same could not be said about the 1977 strike. Showing a distinct lack of enthusiasm for the action, most workers paid no heed to Paisley’s call and so the paramilitaries deployed fear and intimidation to force them to stay home. At one stage a joint statement said that neither the UVF nor the UDA could be held responsible for the safety of workers on the streets. The power workers came under huge pressure, but they forced Paisley into a corner. They would support the strike, they said, but would close the power plant down in one fell swoop, rather than the gradual slow-down the strike organisers wanted. Knowing that doing this could permanently cripple the plant and cause lasting damage to the economy, Paisley retreated and the strike was over. The UVF and the UDA had a disastrous strike. Not only had they alienated their own people by threatening and intimidating in Loyalist neighbourhoods, but they had both killed Protestants during the strike as they sought to enforce it. One was a bus driver shot dead by the UDA and the other a part-time soldier
in the UDR, the son of one of the strike leaders as it turned out, killed by a UVF bomb set in a petrol station that stayed open during the strike. Afterwards both groups were in bad odour with their own communities and all the more vulnerable to police action.

Although the UVF and the UDA came out of the strike weakened, not so Ian Paisley – and that it ended this way was as perfect a metaphor for the relationship between paramilitary and political Unionism as could be found. While both Loyalist groups hunkered down for the security assault, Paisley found his political fortunes immensely transformed for the better, even though he had been humiliated during the strike. In council-wide elections held ten days afterwards, Paisley’s DUP doubled the number of its councillors and won control of its first council, Ballymena. Paisley hailed it as evidence that Protestants had backed him but the truth was that the DUP, sensing the strike’s defeat, had switched its resources to the election campaign in the last week, abandoning its political and paramilitary allies. The election ended with all the smaller Loyalist political parties swallowed up by the DUP, leaving only Paisley’s party and the Official Unionists vying for the top-dog position in Unionism. For many in the UVF and UDA, this outcome encapsulated their unequal relationship with the mainstream. In a crisis they would be asked, and would happily carry out, the dirty work while respectable Unionists condemned them and afterwards they would be abandoned and denied a share of the political rewards while the politicians prospered.

The paramilitaries had urged Paisley to call the power workers’ bluff over their threat to close their plant down but that Paisley wouldn’t take up the challenge provided another lesson: the DUP leader made a great noise during crises but invariably fell short on delivery. It was after this that both the UVF and the UDA took to calling Paisley ‘The Grand Old Duke of York’, willing to march up the hill but never able to summon the courage or commitment to go over it. The 1977 strike was the last occasion that the UVF or the UDA would dance to Paisley’s tune, although they would continue to work alongside some of his better regarded and more trustworthy
colleagues. Four years later, in November 1981, when Paisley tried to revive street politics in the wake of the IRA’s murder of South Belfast Unionist MP Robert Bradford, both the UVF and the UDA shunned him. A few weeks later, a Shankill Road UDA prisoner jailed in Dublin for a firebomb attack on the city, Freddie Parkinson, echoed a general Loyalist view in a statement issued to the press: ‘I remember vividly the Parliamentarian megalomaniacs of the late 1960s and early 1970s who beckoned us to follow them but later left us abandoned to be scorned as common criminals. To my countrymen … I offer this sincere appeal: Do not allow yourselves to be used by the politicians who have created the conflict in which we live.’ On Paisley in particular, he added, ‘He uses words to create violent situations, but never follows the violence through himself.’
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Many years later, the UVF’s former South-East Antrim Commander, Billy Mitchell, identified another defect in modern political Unionism: ‘Unlike the Ulster Unionist leaders of 1912 and 1920, and even 1965, who were prepared to go outside the law and give leadership to the UVF, the leaders of Unionism during the past thirty years have only been prepared to incite men and women to organise; they have never put themselves forward as either Officers or Volunteers.’
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As David Ervine noted, sympathy for Paisley’s approach to politics was thin on the ground in the UVF compounds of Long Kesh/The Maze.

In retrospect, the abortive 1977 strike was something of a watershed in the relationship between the Loyalist paramilitaries and, if not with all Unionist politicians, then at least with the most boisterous and provocative of their number. The Loyalists were more inclined thereafter to plough their own furrows, more careful about associating with mainstream political leaders and more willing to embrace previously heretical ideas, such as power-sharing, which the mainstream Unionists were still too timid to touch. In 1979, for instance, the UDA’s embryonic political wing advocated sharing power with Nationalists in the context of an Independent Ulster – the idea being to remove the vexed constitutional issue from any settlement – and later embraced it without that precondition. Signs that some in the UVF were ready to stray down a similar path came much earlier, within a few weeks of the strike ending, when Gusty Spence issued the first of several statements outlining his own change of heart. Spence’s words were not liked by many in the UVF, or elsewhere in the Loyalist world, but his public utterances were, in hindsight, the beginning of a process that ensured that when the peace process arrived, the hardest of the hard men – or at least their leaders – were ready to deal. Without that, the process might well have failed.

Spence, in his eleventh year of imprisonment and now forty-four years old, chose the holiest day in the Orange calendar, 12 July, for his first statement, made to UVF prisoners in Long Kesh in what was described as ‘a personal capacity’. Launching a verbal assault on Paisley, without actually naming him, Spence called for talks between the Provisional IRA and the Loyalist paramilitaries. Attacking the politicians, he said, ‘We can do without the politically immature, emotionally unstable and bigoted element within Loyalist circles. As a political leadership they are a sick joke; a mixture of inane hacks and power-hungry clerics who could not
recognise the truth if it kicked them in the face. These are the men who have cunningly and purposefully fused religion with politics and fostered fear among the Loyalist community for their own designs and to retain power. They have adroitly manipulated the Orange Institution and other working-class organisations to serve such ends, hinting that when the time came for action they would not be found wanting.’ Spence’s speech conflicted radically with official UVF policy, outlined in a 1974 mission statement, which set out an uncompromising stance towards the Provos: ‘The UVF recognises the Provisional IRA and Provisional Sinn Fein as the No. 1 short-term enemy of Ulster. The Provisionals can only be defeated by military means and any form of “détente” with them is out of the question.’
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Four months later Spence made another appeal for peace, saying that further violence would be useless and counter-productive because the aim of Loyalists – self-determination – had been achieved with the 1974 strike: ‘There is a need for reconciliation with our neighbours whose aspirations differ from ours,’ he said. ‘Negotiation and dialogue can fill the vacuum of violence.’
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Then the Peace People entered the story with unfortunate results for Gusty Spence. The Peace People had come into being as a result of one of the most pitiful incidents of the Troubles, the death of the three Maguire youngsters in August 1976. The children, aged six weeks, two-and-a-half years and eight-and-a-half years, had been killed in Andersonstown, West Belfast, when a car driven by a fleeing IRA man ploughed into them, as their mother, Anne Maguire, walked them home. The driver had been shot dead from a pursuing British Army Land-Rover and lost control of the vehicle. Anne Maguire’s sister Mairead and a neighbour, Betty Williams, became the figureheads for a spontaneous anti-violence street movement that developed in the following days and they were joined by Ciaran McKeown, a journalist with the Dublin-based
Irish Press
newspaper, who would become something of a guru to the movement. By November 1977, much of the steam had gone out of the Peace People but they were still newsworthy. When
McKeown went into the jail to speak to Gusty Spence, the event was widely covered in the local media. He came out of Long Kesh/The Maze bubbling with enthusiasm for the UVF founder and full of stories about him, not all of which would do him much good in the UVF compounds but which did little harm among those who decide prison-release dates. Spence had become a fluent Irish speaker and had taught the language to some hundred fellow inmates, McKeown claimed. His interest in the language had been stimulated by a Catholic missionary nun, Sister Joseph, who had exchanged letters with him from Africa and he had developed a keen interest in Irish history. McKeown said that Spence’s conversion to peace was genuine, and not done simply to gain remission. ‘The judgement I came away with and retain’, he said, ‘is that Gusty Spence is an extraordinary man. I would love to see that amazing potential tested in the positive environment outside the prison compound.’ Within three weeks Spence confirmed what many had suspected, that his Damascene trek hadn’t gone down well in his own backyard. Rumours that a number of UVF prisoners had been transferred at their request to the UDA compounds were true, he admitted, but he denied suggestions that some prisoners were refusing to obey his orders. He also corrected some of McKeown’s more embarrassing revelations. Only five UVF prisoners had learned Irish, not a hundred, he said, and even then just so they could better understand what Provisional IRA prisoners were saying to each other. The nun was actually an old neighbour of Spence’s from the Grosvenor Road area whose pre-convent name was Molly Meenan. She had made contact again when Spence was sent to Long Kesh. And his interest in Irish history was of long standing, pre-dating his reunion with the nun. In March 1978, Spence announced his resignation as Camp Commander, although the given reasons were less than convincing: ‘… my health is not what it once was and I have a deep obligation to my courageous wife and children to devote more time to them.’ How he was to do this from inside jail was not explained. The UVF still say to this day that he was not pushed but jumped in an effort to win early release,
his abandonment of UVF leadership in the prison something that would be received positively by the authorities. If true then the encounter with Ciaran McKeown might also have been staged deliberately for the same purpose.