Voices from the Grave: Two Men's War in Ireland (64 page)

David Ervine did not live long enough to see the UVF decommission its guns but, in June 2009, it happened in much the same way as outlined in his interviews with Boston College, that it wouldn’t be possible until the IRA had finished destroying its arsenals and declared its war against Britain over. Nor did he live to see Sinn Fein and the DUP take office together in May 2007 although he was alive when the St Andrews Agreement, which made that possible, was reached. His last interview with Boston College took place in October 2004, just after inter-party talks at Leeds Castle when it first became apparent that Ian Paisley and the DUP could make a deal with Sinn Fein. The talks came to grief but the IRA’s robbery of the Northern Bank that December and the Sinn Fein cover-up of Robert McCartney’s murder in January 2005 set the scene for final IRA decommissioning and its declaration that its violence had ended, both of which heralded the DUP–Sinn Fein pact. Ervine’s optimism, while delayed, was finally fulfilled.

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By the end of 2006, David Ervine, now the sole PUP member of the Northern Ireland Assembly, had joined the Ulster Unionist Assembly group at the invitation of its new leader, Reg Empey. The move gave the UUP an extra ministerial post in the event of a power-sharing government at the expense of Sinn Fein but the ploy was controversial. The UVF’s ceasefire was still delisted by the two governments and for a large section of the UUP this liaison with a group responsible for some of the most horrid killings of the Troubles was a step too far. But in a way it was the circle completing a full turn. By Gusty Spence’s account the UVF had come into being at the initiative of members of that party’s ruling Ulster Council back in 1965 and many of the UVF’s early members had been active in Unionist constituency politics, especially in the Court ward on the Shankill. Like the UVF of 1912, the UVF of Gusty Spence and Bo McClelland had a credible claim to a distinct relationship with the Unionist Party and in a way David Ervine acknowledged this when he sought shelter under the UUP’s umbrella.

Whether the deal might have seen Ervine given a post in a future power-sharing government or was the first stage in the PUP’s absorption by the UUP was a piece of conjecture destined never to be tested. In the event the move was stopped by the Assembly speaker and when the UUP suffered dramatic reversals at the 2007 Assembly election any immediate gain from such an alliance evaporated. By that stage in his life, Ervine and his wife Jeanette had taken to retreating at weekends to a caravan in Groomsport, a popular Protestant resort on the shores of Belfast Lough, midway between Bangor and Donaghadee, and a welcome escape from the busy life of a constituency politician. On the first weekend of 2007, the caravan was being repaired so the couple
stayed at home in Braniel on the eastern fringes of the city, within sight of the Castlereagh hills, and on the Saturday Ervine went to watch his favourite football team, Glentoran, thump Armagh City eight goals to nil. That night the couple went for a walk. Jeanette Ervine took up the story: ‘It was quite hilly and David complained on the way back, “I haven’t the breath I was born with,” he said but everything seemed normal. We watched TV, shared a bottle of wine and then went to bed. He awoke and disturbed me, went to the bathroom and when he came back he sat at the edge of the bed. “I’m not feeling well,” he said. “I’m feeling very ill.” He complained of a burning sensation inside but when I touched him he was freezing and his colour was awful.’ Jeanette Ervine phoned for an ambulance and her husband was taken to Dundonald Hospital in East Belfast where at first he seemed to be making a recovery, chatting to the nurses and offering to raise their complaints about the Health Service in the Assembly. But later he deteriorated badly. His heart attack had triggered a stroke and he was transferred across Belfast to the Royal Victorial Hospital right in the heart of the Falls Road for specialist care. But the two blows had been fatal and on Monday, 8 January 2007, David Ervine died. He was just fifty-three.

David Ervine’s death and funeral happened at one of those frequent moments in the peace process when the entire enterprise balanced on a knife edge of failure or success. Previous crises had been weathered somehow but this one came with very few throws in the game left to play. If it faltered and failed this time, it might be very difficult to reconstruct it. The endless crises in the near decade-long process had acted like grit in a glacier, scratching away the surface of politics in Northern Ireland, with the IRA’s undecommissioned stockpiles of arms and explosives playing the role of the ice-embedded gravel. David Trimble, the Ulster Unionist leader, was a major casualty and so was the SDLP, the dominant voice of Northern Nationalism for so long. The DUP had destroyed Trimble and his party, skilfully exploiting Protestant suspicions about the Provos’ bona fides, while Sinn Fein had eclipsed the SDLP by playing on Catholic resentment at the Unionists’ reluctance to have Republicans in government. With the extremes triumphant in each community it seemed as if the Good
Friday Agreement was doomed. But both the DUP and Sinn Fein harboured ambitious leaderships. They had each plotted and schemed the downfall of their rivals, they had succeeded brilliantly and now they dominated their respective communities, seemingly beyond challenge. The IRA’s moves, completing the destruction of its weaponry and formally ending its war against Britain, changed the game for some in the DUP, offering its leader, Ian Paisley, an extraordinary way to end his life in politics, as first minister of Northern Ireland and the leader of Unionism. For Sinn Fein, sharing power with the DUP might be distasteful but there was a bigger picture to consider, the boost this could give to the party’s electoral fortunes in the South. It was not inconceivable the party could some day soon be in government in both jurisdictions.

Both parties had good reason to want to play. Some two years of delicate negotiations had produced a deal at St Andrews in Scotland in October 2006 which could see a new executive in power by mid-2007 with Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness holding down the top jobs. The sticking point hitherto had been Sinn Fein’s recognition of the new policing arrangements and the judicial system. Would the Republicans say yes to the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) before or only after power-sharing was up and running or should SF be kept on ice, as some hardliners in the DUP favoured, for months or even a year while its commitment to the PSNI was tested? St Andrews had been convened to resolve this issue but it had only partly succeeded. The deal set a date for elections to a new assembly and a deadline for the new executive to take office but as the New Year dawned there were signs of unrest in both parties’ grassroots. One opinion poll found less than half the DUP’s activists in favour of sharing power with Sinn Fein and in response Paisley was beginning to move away from the St Andrews commitments. Sinn Fein’s imminent acceptance of the police service was likewise unsettling for some in the ranks, especially in the IRA, and some key stalwarts had decided the time had finally come to leave, their departure boosting the ranks of dissident groups.

David Ervine’s death came just as this set of difficulties was gaining strength and not surprisingly his funeral became a metaphor for
Northern Ireland’s possible future, one in which Loyalist and Republican could sit down and share responsibility for governing their people. And so the plaudits for Ervine the UVF bomber turned peacemaker flowed in from across the spectrum. Irish prime minister Bertie Ahern called him ‘a courageous politician’; his British counterpart Tony Blair said he had ‘played a major part … in trying to bring peace to Ulster’; George Mitchell, the former US Senate leader who chaired the Good Friday talks, said Ervine’s legacy was that ‘he has led Loyalism out of the Dark Ages’ while the Ulster Unionist leader, Reg Empey, called him ‘a unique, charismatic and uncharacteristically spin-free politician’.

His funeral at the East Belfast Methodist Mission on the New-townards Road, not far from where he was born and reared, was as politically eclectic as it was possible to be in Northern Ireland. The British Secretary of State Peter Hain shared pews with former Taoiseach Albert Reynolds, the Republic’s Foreign Minister Dermot Ahern, the PSNI Chief Constable Sir Hugh Orde and a host of Unionist and Nationalist politicians, Catholic clerics and Protestant ministers and community workers from both sides of Belfast’s sectarian divide. The UVF turned out in force, as did the PUP. The UVF longtime Chief of Staff, John ‘Bunter’ Graham, the UVF’s Brigade Command staff and scores of UVF activists were there, as were Gusty Spence, Billy Hutchinson and other PUP leaders.

Just before the hearse was due to arrive, as the crowds of UVF veterans gathered outside the church to greet it, a car drew up and out stepped the Sinn Fein leader, Gerry Adams, accompanied by the former SF Mayor of Belfast, Alex Maskey. Some of those present remember it being an eerie moment, Adams walking into the church past men who a few years earlier would gladly have shot him or worse. After the service the cameras caught Adams giving Jeanette Ervine a comforting hug, as she stood at the door of the church thanking mourners. The photograph of the IRA leader commiserating with the widow of a UVF man seemed to symbolise the possibilities ahead.

‘It was no surprise that he came,’ she told the author. ‘Tom Hartley had been in touch and asked if he could come over. David had worked
in Belfast City Council and the Assembly with these people; he engaged with them. Tom Hartley had made a programme about the Battle of the Somme with David so he was welcome. Jim Gibney also asked to come over, so we had Tom Hartley and Gibney to the house, and there were UVF people there and that opened the way for Gerry Adams to come. I didn’t know he was coming but he was welcome. We talked briefly and later he actually rang me at home to express his condolences. I thought it was brave of Gerry Adams to come. I told him that and he said he had come out of respect for David.’
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