Voices from the Grave: Two Men's War in Ireland (63 page)

On 25 March 1998, George Mitchell set a deadline of two weeks for final agreement that was due to expire at midnight on Thursday, 9 April. The deal that was eventually agreed exceeded Mitchell’s deadline by eighteen hours, in the early evening of the next day, Good Friday – but few complained. As the UVF and PUP had intended, the principle of consent ran like a thread through the document and was reflected both in the Agreement’s opening statement of constitutional principles and in the commitment of the Irish government to redraft the claim to Northern Ireland, Articles 2 and 3, contained in the constitution, Bunreacht na hEireann, in such a way as to reflect this new reality. A power-sharing executive, drawn from a new assembly, would be chosen in proportion to major party strength; the assembly would have devolved legislative powers and would have to subject major decisions to the cross-community
principle, meaning they would require a majority of both Unionists and Nationalists for approval. And there would be a new North–South Ministerial Council to oversee cross-border matters. The UVF/PUP approach to this was also the one followed. The Council would be in the hands of politicians, not government bureaucrats, and all decisions needed the approval of the assembly and, courtesy of the cross-community rule, of a majority of Unionist members. Unionists thus effectively exercised a veto over the one mechanism in the Good Friday Agreement that could edge Northern Ireland towards Irish unity. The UVF/PUP approach to prisoner release was also adopted and paramilitary inmates would be freed by June 2000, two years later. So too was the joint UVF–IRA stance on decommissioning. Both groups favoured ‘rust’ as the ultimate answer and the Good Friday Agreement obligingly long-fingered the issue in a way acceptable to the major para militaries.

The Good Friday Agreement was in all these ways a triumph for the UVF and PUP and for David Ervine, by this stage the dominant spokesman for the Loyalist paramilitaries. They had got most of what they had sought out of the negotiations and by so doing vindicated the positive view they had taken in the early days of the peace process. The IRA and Sinn Fein had de facto accepted the consent principle, had agreed to disavow the use of violence and once the Good Friday Agreement was endorsed by referenda on both sides of the border, they could return to violence only in defiance of the wishes of all the Irish people, North and South. The UVF and PUP had helped diminish the power of Irish Republicanism in a most significant way. But the fudge on paramilitary disarming would doom the Agreement to years of delay and crisis, destroy the Ulster Unionist leader David Trimble and pave the way for a final outcome that David Ervine could never have foreseen and would surely have deplored. But as the PUP and UVF settled down in the final hours of the talks to consider the final drafts, there were no such thoughts.

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.

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 exceptions 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 …’
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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.