Voices from the Grave: Two Men's War in Ireland (54 page)

At around this time the Progressive Unionist Party (PUP) was formed, initially as a cover for the UVF, which was still illegal, to meet the British government, or at least to communicate with it. The two founders, Hugh Smyth, who had won election to two local assemblies and Belfast City Council, and David Overend, a former Northern Ireland Labour Party activist, also began to develop a political programme for that brand of working-class Loyalism. The PUP’s predecessor, the Volunteer Political Party, had foundered in 1974, not just on account of its dismal electoral performance but because most activists believed the UVF’s only role was to kill Catholics. In the words of one VPP leader, ‘Politics was best left to the politicians.’
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Four or five years later, however, the mood in the UVF’s leadership had changed and Unionism’s politicians were seen in a more unfavourable light: craven, unreliable and unimaginative. One way in which this antagonism cum disillusionment expressed itself was in a growing paramilitary appetite for drawing up their own political programmes and schemes for settling the conflict. In these years some of them veered down the road of Ulster independence, briefly bringing a few in the Republican camp with them, but the PUP’s scheme was set firmly inside a British Northern Ireland. Called
Sharing Responsibility
, it was published in 1979 and advocated a devolved power-sharing government in Belfast made up of Unionists and Nationalists, the latter assumed to be of the SDLP variety. It was founded in the view that while most Protestants abhorred deals such as Sunningdale, which had a strong cross-border, Irish dimension, they could be persuaded to share power with non-violent Nationalists.

For all that this was the product of Loyalist paramilitary disenchantment with their community’s elected politicians, the all-class alliance that had characterised the Unionism of 1912 and 1974 would be briefly revived again, in 1985, after the Anglo-Irish Agreement, and for some, including David Ervine, the experience served to deepen their disdain for the Unionist establishment and to confirm a determination to forge a separate route in the future.

The story began in the summer of 1981 with the deaths of ten Republican hunger strikers whose protest at being treated as common criminals and being denied their political status had escalated from 1976 onwards, first in their refusal to wear prison uniforms, then to smearing their cell walls with excreta and, finally, to the ultimate protest, the hunger strike. The first fast in 1980 had failed and
a second was called three months later, structured in a way that ensured one of only two outcomes: death or victory. Like many Loyalists, Ervine’s sympathy was with the IRA prisoners.

The IRA hunger strikes transformed politics in Northern Ireland. The election as MP for Fermanagh–South Tyrone of Bobby
Sands, the hunger strikers’ leader and the first to die, followed by two more wins for hunger-strike candidates in the Republic’s general election and Sands’s replacement by his election agent, Owen Carron, in a second Fermanagh–South Tyrone contest strengthened the forces in Sinn Fein seeking to launch the party into electoral politics. The party’s first outing as Sinn Fein was in 1982 when elections were held for an experimental assembly in Belfast and the result shocked Ireland’s political establishment, North and South. Sinn Fein won 10 per cent of the vote, the support of four out of every ten Catholics and five seats. A year later, Gerry Adams was elected MP for West Belfast and this result set alarm bells ringing in Dublin. Unless Sinn Fein was stopped there was a real chance that the SDLP’s domination of Northern Nationalism could be seriously challenged and the potential for instability arising from that deeply worried the Irish government. After some two years of frantic, and occasionally rollercoaster, diplomacy, the Irish Taoiseach, Garret Fitzgerald, persuaded Margaret Thatcher to sign up to the Anglo-Irish Agreement, known to Unionists as ‘the Hillsborough Deal’, which gave the Dublin government a physical presence in Belfast and direct access to the policy-makers in the Northern Ireland Office. A small group of Irish civil servants was stationed at Maryfield, an office complex in East Belfast and subsequently the focus for Loyalist marches and demonstrations. Although the deal came with solemn assurances from Dublin of respect for the consent principle, which said Irish reunification could happen only with the say-so of the Northern Ireland people, the deal looked like a Trojan horse to most Unionists and, as their forefathers had done before them, they banded together for greater protection and strength in the face of the threat.

In the angry days that followed the deal at least a hundred thousand Unionists gathered for a protest rally at Belfast City Hall, where Carson’s Covenant had been signed, and a further three hundred thousand signed a petition protesting the deal. All fifteen Unionist MPs at Westminster resigned so that the resulting by-elections could, referendum-like, measure the scale and solidity of
Unionist opposition to Hillsborough, and government ministers were boycotted. The most contentious part of this ‘Ulster Says No!’ campaign, as it was called, was a plan for a one-day, UWC-style protest strike in March 1986 which, unlike the effort in 1977, gained support from across virtually the entire Unionist spectrum. Paisley’s deputy, Peter Robinson, had formed a strike committee called the ‘1986 Workers’ Committee’ and it looked as if he was moving towards a repeat of what happened in 1974. The Loyalist paramilitaries looked at Robinson and liked what they saw. They participated in his Workers’ Committee because Robinson seemed to be ‘made of different stuff ’ from Paisley, as one Loyalist put it, prepared to go over the top, unlike his chief.
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When the UVF and the UDA began intimidating RUC families out of Loyalist areas because of the force’s firm stand against Unionist protests, all of mainstream Unionism condemned them except Paisley’s deputy. Robinson’s potential seemed confirmed when the DUP formed its own paramilitary force, called ‘Ulster Resistance’, and along with the UVF and UDA put together an ambitious arms-smuggling plot involving South Africans and Israelis, which brought tonnes of modern weaponry into Northern Ireland. Thanks to well-placed Loyalist informers, most of the arsenal was captured by the RUC and then, in April 1989, the plot was publicly exposed. French police arrested several ‘Resistance’ members in a Paris hotel as they were meeting a South African diplomat and an American arms-dealer. Two of the ‘Resistance’ men were traced back to Paisley’s Free Presbyterian Church and Paisley promptly disowned them, to the disgust of David Ervine and other Loyalists.

Robinson’s promise evaporated when he spurned the thorny crown of martyrdom, paying a fine to a Dublin court rather than enduring a prison term in a Southern jail, and losing his seat at West minster, for his part in a rowdy ‘Resistance’ invasion of the small County Monaghan town of Clontibret in August 1986. He and Ian Paisley had been cut from similar cloth after all.

The very fact of the Anglo-Irish Agreement was seen by Loyalists such as David Ervine as compelling evidence of the Unionist leader ship’s incompetence. Jim Molyneaux, the leader of the largest grouping, the Official Unionists, seemed to have won a great victory when, in May 1984, Margaret Thatcher rejected the Irish Forum Report, the product of a pan-Nationalist (except the Provos) conference in Dublin which outlined three constitutional possibilities to settle the Troubles, ranging from a Unitary all-Ireland state through to joint authority. Thatcher’s ‘Out! Out! Out!’ response to each plan at a press conference was regarded as Molyneaux’s finest hour and a tribute to the special relationship he seemed to have with the Iron Lady. But then Molyneaux took his eye off the ball and was as surprised and outraged as most Unionists when the deal was announced in November 1985. In the immediate aftermath, Molyneaux spoke of ‘the stench of hypocrisy, deceit and treachery’ surrounding the negotiations, and said he felt ‘universal cold fury’ at the Agreement such as he had not experienced in forty years in politics. But Ervine was scornful.