by Ed Moloney
Although more secretive and much smaller in size than its often bitter rivals the UDA, the UVF was undoubtedly the most deadly Loyalist outfit in Northern Ireland. Between 1972 and 1977, the worst years for Loyalist bloodshed, the UVF outkilled the UDA by 3 to 2. Of the 1,050 deaths caused by Loyalist violence between 1966 and 1999, the UVF was responsible for 547, over half, while the UDA killed 408, or just under 40 per cent.21 It was this sort of track record that lured David Ervine into its ranks after ‘Bloody Friday’.
The UVF that David Ervine joined was, by his own description, somewhat more casual and laid back, even haphazard, than the IRA that Brendan Hughes became part of. While Hughes was sent to training camps across the border, the UVF gave Ervine ‘a bit’ of weapons training and ‘basic’ explosives training and was only beginning to put together a systematic training regime for new members when Ervine was arrested, over two years after he had joined the organisation. Hughes and his colleagues in D Company spent their days in call houses in the Lower Falls ready to launch attacks on the British Army or police at any moment. But in the UVF there was no daily routine; you turned up for active service when you were summoned by the local leadership, otherwise you could be idle ‘for long enough’. All this was ‘confusing’, Ervine admitted, especially when the UVF remained inactive during the greatest crisis for Unionism since 1912, when Protestants went on strike to bring down the Sunningdale power-sharing Agreement. Despite all this Ervine was an enthusiastic UVF man, eager to impress his superiors and most reluctant to jump off the ‘hamster wheel to hell’ that constituted life as a Loyalist paramilitary. But in one respect he and the IRA were inseparable and that was in their opposition to the Sunningdale Agreement of 1974. To the IRA it was an internal settlement that would copper-fasten partition; to Ervine and his colleagues the Council of Ireland created by Sunningdale had the potential to end the Union.
[The UVF] was broken up into what they described as units or teams and you would have only ever realistically known your own unit’s members, [but] of course, tittle-tattle again, a nod and a wink, you knew who others were in different teams. But in the main you kept to your own group, [and] they functioned and operated internal to themselves. Each unit had a Commander and they … liaised with a Battalion Commander who had … overall authority, but you wouldn’t have spent too much time in their company. I remember meeting in the back room of various bars, and there probably were no more, at any given time, than twenty of us. I was given a bit of weapons training and very basic explosives training, well, a fair bit of weapons training, mostly on pistols, so it was quite interesting. I actually think that just before I got arrested they were setting in train a whole programme of training, but I missed that.
I remember saying to the guy who was in charge of our wee group, ‘I won’t do armed robberies’, and he says, ‘You’ll do what you’re told’, but he never ever asked me to do an armed robbery; whether he ever asked others to do armed robberies I don’t know, because you wouldn’t have been told; it was a need-to-know basis. I think that some groups ran better than others, and some groups had a greater discipline than others, but essentially you were expected to do exactly what you were told, but in the main there would have been enough cognisance by those in authority that … said, ‘Well, horses for courses’, you know. On a day-today basis it was all a bit confusing in some respects. I remember going through the Ulster Workers’ Council strike, and never being asked to do anything, and I wondered, ‘What’s happening here?’ You could have been called upon to move weapons, and I was a few times. You could have been called to a meeting … at that time, it seemed to me there were eighty UVF people to about eight thousand UDA in East Belfast; there was always tension between them, and you could have been called together to be given information about UDA threats. I remember one time being called to a meeting where everybody was told to be very cautious, because they believed that we were about to be attacked. There were quite a number of UVF homes attacked that night in the Woodstock Road area, so the UVF must have had intelligence on the UDA. I lived in the Woodstock area and my house was one of the very few UVF houses that wasn’t actually attacked, which probably meant they didn’t know I lived there. But day-to-day stuff depended on what was going on, but in the main, you’d have been called on expressly for specific reasons, and you could have been doing nothing for long enough. That didn’t mean to say nobody else was doing anything. And then all of a sudden somebody could get in touch with you and say, ‘Be here at such and such a time’, or whatever, and that’s the way it worked. It wasn’t a case that you had a day-today routine or a day-today job. You were called on when required. Although, mind you, I think the issue of intelligence was something that you were always expected to be dealing with always … anything that was strange or anything that you stumbled across, you would have been expected to let somebody know right away. That would have been, I think, the only day-to-day thing that you would have been expected to be involved in.
… once I crossed the Rubicon my job was to do something about it; whether I was effective or not, that is for others to judge, but I certainly wanted to be, and I was committed to it, there was no going back. There was never a moment when I said, ‘Have I done the right thing here?’ That never happened … My sense would have been that I had no regrets other than probably not being as effective as they needed me to be, or felt they needed me to be … It was a hamster wheel to hell, and, you could argue, well out of control. Once you’re on that hamster wheel, not only does there seem even with hindsight no way off, [but] I didn’t want to get off. I wanted to get on with it, and we were embroiled in a battle and the battle was getting ever bigger and ever more brutal, ever more deadly. I didn’t imagine that it could run for thirty years but, having said that, I don’t know that anybody ever knew how it was going to all end. We were just locked into it and that was why I call it the hamster wheel to hell; it just goes on and on and on. I don’t know that anybody in 1972 was thinking that this was sustainable for a very long time. But if you think back there was eventually an IRA ceasefire in 1974; there were negotiations between [the] government and the IRA around that time, and the UVF knew it and … went on a substantial bombing campaign to do one of two things, either stop the discussions between the government and the IRA or be part of them, so that rather indicates that there were people thinking, ‘When is this going to end?’ But it took a long, long time.
My view at the time [of the Sunningdale Agreement and the UWC strike] was that the Unionist community were being asked to sign up to something that was unfinished business, that had no bottom line. I don’t think the theory of power-sharing was totally alien to all Unionists, but the … Council of Ireland was, especially when it was ill defined, in fact not defined at all and not a settled issue. The Unionist community had the right to feel that the world and its dog had gone over their head, and even though in the pressure cooker of Sunningdale, the Unionist political leadership seemed to sign up to it; they were always on a hiding to nothing on the basis that there was unfinished business. The ill-defined nature of the Council of Ireland was the death knell for the Agreement. The Unionist community are an extremely literal people, how do you get a literal people to sign up to things that have no basic parameters, or when the parameters weren’t there?
I absolutely supported the anti-Sunningdale campaign and so did most Unionists … I lived in very Protestant working-class East Belfast, and I didn’t see the intimidation that is supposed to have taken place; it didn’t happen where I lived. People didn’t go to work because they didn’t think that they should go to work because … the withdrawal of their labour was as good an argument as any to say to the government, ‘Catch yourselves on.’ But the weird bit of this is that the UVF never used me during that period. I can remember that quite a number of fellas who were UVF with me weren’t used either, so if there had been a great campaign of paramilitary muscle-flexing [during the UWC strike], I think I would have been involved in it, but that wasn’
t the case. I don’t think that the UVF became expressly active, [although] in some areas there may have been more activity than others, but where I was – and I don’t know what was in their mind – it was a period of immense inactivity. I wasn’t asked to man barricades; I wasn’t asked to do anything. There were UDA people on the barricades, and I don’t remember seeing UVF people there. I never ever asked the leadership whether this was a deliberate decision, because I was arrested relatively soon afterwards and I never got the chance … but talking to other UVF people I discovered that I wasn’t the only one, quite a number weren’t used at all.
The Dublin and Monaghan bombs were harrowing, shocking, but [I had] no understanding that it was the work of the UVF, I didn’t know it was the UVF. No one was hinting to me, even within UVF circles, that it was the UVF. The UDA always seemed to silently take credit or should I say responsibility, depending on what side of the argument you’re looking at. It was only later in life that I became aware that it was expressly the UVF, although, mind you, if you were talking about explosives, the UVF were always more proficient and more likely to use explosives than the UDA, massively more so. So all the logic would have said most likely it was the UVF, but the UVF didn’t claim it, and there wasn’t a whole bucketload of UVF activity suggesting that it was them.
I think I probably would have been supportive of those bombings, not so much because of the massive loss of innocent life – that’s certainly not what I mean – but in terms of returning the serve, in terms of saying, ‘Here, do you know what it’s like?’ and in the inimitable words of one great Nationalist leader, ‘One bomb in London is worth a hundred in Belfast’ – well, maybe that applies to Dublin as well. I don’t doubt there was massive support for it in the Unionist community, massive support. Again not because of the individual loss of life and the horror and tragedy that goes along with all of that, no matter who you are. But there was a sense that yes, somebody was hitting back: ‘Now you know how we feel.’ [It was] really simplistic and really brutal, but I have to answer the question honestly; you’re asking me it, and I’m answering it: yes, I would have thought that massive numbers in my community felt that it was dead on. I’ve seen myself in circumstances where the police messages were on [the radio] in a pub and a bomb goes off, and I knew where the target was, and once the police message declared that the target was clearly a Nationalist target, the bar cheered; people who were never going to go out and do anything themselves, maybe voted DUP, UUP, maybe went to church on a Sunday, I don’t know, but they cheered, and little did they know that some of the people who’d been responsible for the [radio reports] were standing in the boozers along with them. You’ve got to remember, there’ll be arguments that communities refuse to have with themselves, that what you do may well be perceived to be wrong, but your simplistic response to that is: ‘Aye, but look at what they’re doing to us’, and that was very much the case, and that the Dublin–Monaghan bombs were very much about saying, ‘Well, now they know how we feel; this isn’t a one-way street, you know.’ What is it they say in a divided society: ‘Each action has an equal and opposite reaction’?
On the allegation of collusion [with the British in the Dublin and Monaghan bombs], there comes a point when the concept insults me, insomuch as that a Provo could lie in bed and with a crystal ball … could pick their targets but a Prod could only do the same if there was an SAS man driving the car. It is sheer unadulterated nonsense. I don’t dispute that there were probably kindred spirits in the security services, being from the same community, and there being individualistic degrees of collusion, but I am not aware, and I genuinely am shocked at the notion that at that time there was a clear and structured process of collusion. It wasn’t the fucking case. I do get insulted by it. One of the reasons why the Loyalists have probably not been perceived as [being as] effective as the Republicans was dead simple: they were too tolerant of the forces of law and order. If the Loyalists wanted to be equal to the Republicans they should have shot peelers dead; they should have put police families out of their communities and shut down the avenue of intelligence that saw hundreds of Loyalists go to jail. The Royal Ulster Constabulary arrested me on possession of explosives; now why did they do that if we lived in a process of collusion? When I went into jail there were 240 UVF men in three compounds, packed in like sardines, and the UVF were a relatively small organisation in comparison to some of the others, but they made up a hell of a percentage of that jail. Where’s collusion there? Is this a joke or what? And if there was all this massive collusion, why weren’t IRA men in greater numbers taken out by the roots? Like there’s a whole bucketload of questions that Republicans can’t answer … I don’t think there’s any doubt that Loyalists were capable; all the evidence was that they’d already detonated substantial numbers of bombs in Northern Ireland, so all they had to do was work out how you put one into a car and how you take it a hundred miles. If you can take it ten miles you can take it a hundred miles. To those who understand, no explanation is necessary; to those who cannot understand, no explanation is possible. If people choose to believe that then they’re living in cloud cuckoo land, and they also underestimate … their enemy, massively underestimate their enemy.
Although David Ervine was unwilling in his interviews with Boston College to speak in detail about his role and activity in the UVF, he dropped enough broad hints about his life in the organisation to suggest that his paramilitary speciality was the use of explosives. In particular, his arrest in November 1974 while driving a car with a bomb in the boot and the fact that he was able, when ordered by a British bomb-disposal officer, to make it safe enough to be defused, strongly suggests a close acquaintanceship with the manufacture and delivery of such devices. At the same time it is worth noting that there would have been very few in the UVF in the days when Ervine was active who were not involved in some way with that side of the organisation, as an analysis of UVF violence at that time demonstrates. Between September 1972, two months after Ervine joined up, and July 1974, three months before his arrest, the UVF killed fifty-four people, thirty-six of them in the Republic and eighteen in the North, the bulk of them in Belfast, and in only one killing was a bomb of some sort not used, either hidden in the boot of a car or tossed into a building.22 Planting bombs was undoubtedly the UVF’s forte, especially when the target was a bar or club where Nationalists drank or socialised. Fifteen of the eighteen Northern Ireland victims of the UVF during this period were killed in bar explosions, eleven bombings in all, and all but two of the victims were Catholics. The first to be killed during the Ervine years was Daniel McErlean, a forty-eight-year-old waiter at the Carrick Hill Social Club, patronised by Catholics from nearby Unity Flats, who died when a hundred-pound no-warning bomb exploded. The worst of the bombings came in May 1974 when the UVF threw a canister bomb into the Rose and Crown pub on the Ormeau Road in South Belfast, killing five men instantly and a sixth who died some days later. A seventy-five-year-old man lost a leg and another man an arm in the explosion.23 Whether any of these provoked cheers in bars from customers unaware that some of those drinking alongside them, such as David Ervine, were responsible, is a secret he took to the grave with him.
I was arrested on – I think it was a Saturday night – November 2nd and I was transporting a vehicle and a bomb to Holywood, or towards Holywood, County Down, when I was stopped … There had been quite a lot of UVF activity and, I believe, and you don’t know for sure, that a target had been picked [but] abandoned on two occasions because of very serious police surveillance and activity … it was a fortnight later that the attempt to move that device was stymied, so there was quite a bit going on at that time. There was something of a campaign being launched by the UVF in which the group we were involved [in] were unable to take part because of police activity. Now whether that meant that there was some kind of information leaking to the police or whether it was just random … it’s hard to tell; there are those with views on both of those possibilities. I’ve always t
ried to avoid speculation because … if you were to go down the line of looking for some intelligence reason, you could torture yourself. I was lying in jail shortly thereafter, and from my point of view I wasn’t going to be very helpful in assessing any of that.
I’d left the Newtownards Road with a vehicle, a bomb in it, up the Holywood Road heading for Holywood with no reason to believe that I wouldn’t make it. I was in a vehicle on my own; there was a car travelling behind me with five others, and when I was stopped they just … drove past me, and I’m sure they wondered, ‘What will he say, what will happen now?’ I was held at the scene because it was deemed that the bomb needed to be defused; I was held at the scene whilst the bomb-disposal officers had a look at the device and then they asked me would I assist them in making it easier for them. I didn’t have a problem with that; I mean at the end of the day I wasn’t going anywhere … What I did was I went forward with a rope tied round me and then tied round the ankle of the captain, an ATO, Army Technical Officer, and he trained a pistol on me. Frankly it would have been like Bonnie and Clyde had I have thought of making any kind of dash, and I can remember just a few hundred yards up the street there was a squad of young people and they were all chanting, ‘Die, die, die, you Provo bastard’, and all kinds of very disparaging comments on the assumption that of course I was a Republican … To cut a long story short, the ATO asked me to open the vehicle, the doors, bonnet, boot, in, in a very specific sequence, the theory was if that you got the sequence wrong, ‘I’ll shoot you’, so my capacity to retain the sequence was OK. We got the thing done. I lifted the device out and set it on the footpath and they took it away eventually and disposed of it.