Voices from the Grave: Two Men's War in Ireland

by Ed Moloney

  By the time of ‘Bloody Friday’ my view was that my community is in difficulty, we need to do something about it and that would have culminated with my experience of ‘Bloody Friday’ and then the determination that maybe the best means of defence is attack. I could kid myself that I’m tracing a line from not wanting to be involved, and I think that’s genuine, to wanting to join the police to help with defence, to wanting to join the UVF for attack, but I had a sort of a growing intensity. I’d have had a basic understanding of paramilitary values, or at least what I perceived to be values. You knew who people were, but you maybe didn’t know exactly what happened when they were with each other apart from tittle-tattle, bar talk, that type of stuff, but it always struck me that the UVF were more concise and more effective than the UDA. They were the blunt instrument, whereas the UVF seemed to me to be the cutting edge, and that’s where I wanted to be. My own view was that we wouldn’t [need to] exist if the security forces would deal with the problem and there didn’t seem to be a will by government either.

  The day after ‘Bloody Friday’, on the Saturday, I made contact with someone who had previously talked to me about … joining. The understanding I had then, it may be a little covered by mystique, but the theory was that the UVF could be joined if you were invited, and that the UVF could be joined if you went and said, ‘I want to join’, and I made it known to a UVF guy I knew that I wanted to join, and I joined on the following day, on the Sunday, in a hall in East Belfast along with a number of others … You get a quare shock to your system when you join and you find that there were people there you knew all along and you didn’t know that they were in it. That was great news for me, that was a boost of confidence, that the sort of secrecy and cloak-and-dagger that the UVF seemed to offer was something I admired … You stand up, you’re sworn in and the trappings of swearing in are there, flags and weapons, but it was made very clear to me that … out of this you could lose your relationship with your family, you could lose your life, that this is deadly serious … nobody ever believes it’s going to happen to them, so I suppose I heard it all but I didn’t pay a whole lot of attention to it, but it was certainly told to me, it was not … like, ‘Come on in and join the Boy Scouts’; that was not the case. It was pointed out to me very clearly the risks, the dangers and the sacrifice that were not only a potential but possibly expected.

  Notes – 1

  1 http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/events/bfriday/events.htm

  2 Irish Times, 22 July 1972.

  3 Daily Telegraph, 21 July 2002.

  4 Irish Times, 26 July 1972.

  5 Irish Times, 29 July 1972.

  2

  To read David Ervine’s account of his family and upbringing in working-class East Belfast and of his journey into the UVF is to acknowledge the sheer force that communal pressure exerted in shaping people’s views and actions during the Troubles in Northern Ireland. In his case this pressure prevailed over the strong influence of his father, Walter Ervine, who held, for that time, unusually progressive, even left-wing, views, not least about Irish nationalism and Northern Ireland’s Catholics. Unlike most of his neighbours, Walter Ervine was sceptical about organised religion, scornful of sectarian politicians such as Ian Paisley, and was a man who had read hungrily all his life. Ervine’s older brother Brian recalled a father who had been disappointed in life, an intelligent man who could have achieved much but never had the education, a man who continually provoked his sons to think outside the box. His mother Elizabeth was different; deferential to authority and politically ‘to the right of Genghis Khan’, as Ervine himself put it, but it was his father who had the greater impact of the two. Yet David Ervine went on to join a group, the UVF, that would become a byword for savage, even psychopathic violence against Catholics – everything that his father was not and was seemingly opposed to. That he did so was because more powerful and ancient forces swept him along, the same forces that pulled Brendan Hughes into the IRA: the call to defend one’s own community against those who might overwhelm it. Still, his father planted seeds that many years later would sprout and grow.

  I was born [on 21 July 1953] and reared in East Belfast between the Albertbridge Road and Newtownards Road, in a very basic working-class community, close enough to be described as [being] in the shadow of the shipyard. I would imagine that a lot of the disposable income, not that there was much of it, was generated by people who worked in Queen’s Island, which was the site of the shipyard, and ancillary industries. I was the youngest of five children; [we were] almost like two families, a brother and two sisters and then my brother and me. I think the youngest of those three was eighteen when I was born; my mum [was] forty-two when she had me, forty when she had my brother. Things were done differently in those days, and I suppose for many different reasons the sophistication of family planning hadn’t yet arrived. But I was born into what, I suppose, was a happy enough home … I think my da was, in his own mind, an under-achiever, a very skilled tradesman but [he] missed the opportunity of an extended education and had to go out to work … with family requirements as a young lad.

  I think that his travels around the world as a naval officer, an engineer, probably gave him … a very parochial attitude towards Northern Ireland; intolerant almost of our intolerance, he would have been. I would have described him as very liberal man, and my mother would have been the opposite, [one] to the left of Joe Stalin and the other to the right of Genghis Khan. I [had] a happy upbringing, I think, in that I don’t ever remember being brutalised; I remember things in a very naive and genteel way, about playing in the street and my first experiences at school … I suppose up until about the age of about fourteen, [I had] a fairly basic little existence, you know, ran the streets, played football, get fed, get clothed and happy enough.

  Ervine went to Orangefield Secondary School off the Castlereagh Road, a state school that in the 1960s had a name for being progressive and liberal. It certainly produced an eclectic bunch of alumni. Van Morrison was a student there in the 1950s and, during the Ervine years, schoolmates included Brian Keenan, the teacher and writer who was kidnapped and held hostage in Beirut by Islamic Jihad; Gerald Dawe, the poet and writer, and Ronnie Bunting, the son of Ian Paisley’s former right-hand man, Major Bunting, who went on to become a leader of the violent Republican group the Irish National Liberation Army (INLA) and was the victim of a UDA assassination squad in 1980. David Ervine’s brother Brian had passed the Eleven Plus and went to Grosvenor Grammar and then on to Queen’s University, Belfast, where he graduated in theology. A career as schoolteacher, playwright and songwriter followed. David Ervine, by contrast, was no scholar and left Orangefield just before his fifteenth birthday to take up a series of unskilled jobs. When he joined the UVF he was working in a city-centre paint store.

  … I think I went through the nightmare of not knowing what school was about, just didn’t understand it; it was, you know, ‘somewhere where I have to go’. No, school was of no tremendous significance to me, [but] I got playing sport … the academic side was not a forte of mine anyway. My oldest brother, who was at least twenty years older than me, missed his opportunity for education much as my da missed his, but the brother nearest to my age went for it and I didn’t and I can’t understand why. In hindsight you could manufacture all kinds of reasons, but I’m not so sure that even now I understand why. It was a blur basically. It’s almost like the story of the young kid that plays in the cup final at seventeen and by the time he’s thirty or forty he can’t remember the details, yet it was a great and very interesting moment of his life.

  Our house was stuffed full of books, and my da was an absolutely avid reader, in fact, you know there used to be a bit of a giggle, my brother and I were chosen each week to go to the library and to get him three books. We would ask, ‘Well, what do you want?’ and he would answer, ‘Well, anything’, literally anything, and we brought those three books and my da read them and then the following week they were returned and another three books were
got. I remember we had a couple of suitcases under the bed which were packed with encyclopedias. Now the very fact that they were under the bed [showed] there were no shelves; the house couldn’t have held shelves, the walls were like paper. But, anyway, it’s rather an indication of my interest in encyclopedias, that I don’t ever remember taking them out of the suitcases.

  … my father professed socialism, and I can remember we lived in a street where there was a church at one end, and people would have paraded along the street in their Sunday best to go to church and a woman would have come and collected my mum’s church envelope and even though my mother and father didn’t go to church, my mother insisted that you have to fill the envelope each week for the church. Interestingly enough every three months the church produced a little magazine in which they named everybody who gave money, and not only that, they named people who didn’t, and I think that was probably a driving force for my ma. My da used to think that was disastrous … we would have certainly got a sense from our da that church was not necessarily all that it was built up to be. Which makes it quite interesting that my brother has gone on to be a Christian of long standing and is qualified as a minister but has never chosen to be ordained, and I could hardly say that I have gone in that direction.

  … the news was avidly watched by my da, and that would have been news on anything. I can remember that we got The Sunday Times every week … I don’t know whether we were the only people on the street to get The Sunday Times; it was a big long street, but there couldn’t have been many. We got this huge paper that it took my da till about Wednesday to read, and I remember it used to have a magazine which pleased me no end. I could look at the pictures in the magazine, but that was the sort of attitude that my da had; he wanted to know the news, he listened to the news and he would have talked about it. There used to be a guy came round to our house to sell clothes to my sister; he was from India, and he and my da became great friends. My da would have invited him in and they would sit and talk politics all day and all night and about Hinduism and Islam and Christianity. So I can remember in that respect my da was always fuelling discussion of some kind or other. I think that we were … slightly more political animals in some respects than … other households … but he was in truth sickened by politics in Northern Ireland. I remember [the Reverend Ian] Paisley campaigning in our street, and I don’t know who he was campaigning for, but he came up as my mother was out scrubbing the front, and you used to do a sort of semicircle of cleaning at the front step of the house and he said something like, ‘You keep these houses like little palaces’, and then my da, who was ill at the time, struggled up off the chair and … in what would have been language that was shocking to me, told Paisley to go away, I think the words he used were ‘Fuck off’, and it was harsh and agitated. I mean, we had electric points that hung off the wall; you couldn’t attach them to the wall, the wallpaper sagged, the ceilings fell and cockroaches were an infestation, and Paisley was patronising my ma and then my ma was of course standing there saying, ‘Ah yes, Mr Paisley, ah no, Mr Paisley.’ My da of course wasn’t for any of that.

  The street would probably have had about a hundred houses. I think there were four Catholic families that I’m aware of. One Catholic family had six children and the three boys were all Protestant and the three girls were all Catholic; it was a mixed marriage and … they were lovely people, great people, I’ve absolutely abiding affection for those people, and my dad – and my mum, in fairness – but more especially my da had a great relationship with that family.

  I don’t know that you were ever frightened of the Catholic you knew; you were frightened of the Catholic you didn’t know. My da’s argument was that ‘We are just all people’, you know, and as far as religion was concerned, he used to go to the debates in Clonard monastery, which was hardly the done thing.* I don’t think he was anti-Christian, or anti-deity per se; I think it was anti the manipulation and the sense of a false fellowship that he believed religion brought. But I did sense, and at the same time didn’t, that Catholics were always different; you knew they were different but I didn’t know why they were different … but you knew enough to know that they were different, and then I suppose there’s the moment when you hear the word ‘Catholic’ and ‘What does that mean?’ and you become au fait, if you like, and particularly in street language. I certainly would not have been in any way encouraged to believe in our superiority, even from my mother’s point of view.

  David Ervine was just fifteen or sixteen when the civil rights campaign began, triggering the events that would, a few years later, spiral into the Troubles and then change his life utterly. His father saw the campaign in a very different light from most Protestants of the time, a view that Ervine could recognise as being present in the peace process he helped to shape many years later.

  I think it only became evident to me [that Catholics could pose a threat] around the time of the civil rights movement … [and] the speculation that Republicanism or the IRA was infiltrating it. I think that my da would have been a fool not to have considered that, but I think in essence the basic argument he had was that … rights are for everybody; they’re human beings, you know. I remember one stunning comment which stuck with me for ever, when he said, ‘Now there’s an interesting one’, when a banner was being carried by a civil rights march that said on it, ‘British rights for British citizens’, and then we spoke about people wanting to keep them separate as opposed to them being Catholic British citizens. I’m not sure I fully understood it at the time, but for me that has grown to have a greater resonance with some of the attitudes that prevail even today.

  Well, the broader community view [of the civil rights campaign] seemed to be one of ‘This is an enemy.’ My da’s words were harping in the back of your head but I think that probably I was siding with the community view … that civil rights was a sinister plot. My da was saying, ‘Well, hold on a minute’, but certainly I probably would have fallen to the community view. They [Catholics] were simply bad people, and they were strategising around bad things; that was the community view, and I probably went with that view. I was in no position to theorise other than what would have been whispered in my ear and was sitting on my shoulder, which was the comments of my da. In some respects he took the sting out of that, but I would not have seen it as alien that the civil rights movement met opposition from people who considered it to be the enemy. When the disturbances in Derry moved to Belfast, my reaction was very simple: ‘You’re either one of them or you’re one of us’, and I was one of us … It was our community being attacked … it became something other than civil rights, it became a conflagration between our two communities.

  In 1971, as his community pulled Ervine further away from his father and Northern Ireland moved closer to violence, he toyed with Orangeism but the flirtation was brief and unsatisfactory.

  I would certainly have been very aware of the Battle of the Boyne, King Billy and all the rest of it. I didn’t understand it very well because it all came to us as cliché. But I was the only member of our family ever to join the Orange Order and I think I attended one meeting. My father wasn’t a fan, my brothers never joined the Orange Order, I was the only one ever and I didn’t last long, just a very short time. I was eighteen, and I think that from my point of view it was [because] something was happening in my community. I don’t know that I fully understood, it was all a cliché, a simplistic thing that was there and I did not understand it, I really genuinely did not understand it. [But] it was there, it was of us, not of them, and us and them has greater significance today than it seemed to have then … It didn’t for me mean anything other than: ‘There they are and this is of us and we wave and cheer and they wave back’, and, ‘They make noise and there’s music.’ For me as a young person, no, it didn’t mean anything other than that … I’d truly no concept of what it meant.

  But his father had introduced him to another aspect of his Irish Protestant heritage.

  I think I was
probably fifteen when my da gave me a book called Betsy Gray and the Hearts of Down. It was actually the story of Henry Joy McCracken† who was one of the leaders in the United Irishmen, and was hanged a mile and a half from my house and I didn’t know that. I don’t know why my da chose that moment or whether he’d just come into possession of the book. I doubt that. I think it was probably him … saying, ‘Well, you’d better understand some of these things.’ I didn’t know that the 16th and 10th Divisions fought in the Battle of the Somme, or that one of them fought at Gallipoli.‡ I didn’t know that Catholics were … fighting for Britain or [were] fighting in defence of small nations. I didn’t know that because nobody told me, and I think it was only through my da that I was starting to get some kind of alternative view of what we’d been told. For me it was a confusing enlightenment, but it was coming from him, it wasn’t coming in the classroom, it certainly wasn’t coming in the history books, it wasn’t coming from the street, it wasn’t coming from anywhere else other than hearing it in the house, and it confused me, I have to say, it very much confused me.