David Ervine, Member of the Northern Ireland Assembly for the Loyalist area of east Belfast, died of a stroke and massive heart attack on January 8th.
Ervine recounted how as a young man on what came to be known as Bloody Friday he watched as the IRA carried out 22 bomb attacks in Belfast killing innocent people and ripping the commercial heart out of the city.
For him it was the final straw; he decided to join the protestant UVF then engaged in a sectarian war against innocent Catholics whom it regarded as the soft underbelly of the IRA. Ironically, Ervine was reacting to the other side of the same politico-religious stimuli that had created the material basis for the emergence and recruitment of the Provisional IRA in 1970. His ’war’ ended when he was caught ferrying a bomb and was sentenced to 15 years imprisonment.
David Ervine was a Shankill Road Protestant, inured to the poverty and sub-standard life that loyalists there shared with their Catholic class brethren on the nearby Falls Road. That the hatred that fuelled their bigotry and anger of one another was based on deliberately fabricated fictions was something he and many of his enemies learned in the long days of their imprisonment.
In his wry way, Ervine was to show the extent of his learning when a few years ago he said publicly that he looked forward to the day when he and Gerry Adams could have a pint together. It was a demonstration of just how far he had travelled.
A few evenings ago, in a club he frequented in east Belfast, some of those drinking there praised him as ‘a socialist’. That he wasn’t, but he was motivated by the same political honesty and concern for his class that motivates socialists; he had learnt to detest the political and economic realities of capitalism and we could have hoped that ultimately the courage that conquered his militant sectarianism would have brought him to an appreciation of the fact that the problems of his class, including the generation of division, were inevitable aspects of that system.
It is ironic, too, that while those on both sides of the internecine war have shown some willingness for peace and reconciliation, Paisley and his ilk, whose fascist style opposition to elementary democratic rights played midwife to the birth of the Provos hold rigidly to the historic dissension that is the sole muscle of their political strength.
Ervine recounted how as a young man on what came to be known as Bloody Friday he watched as the IRA carried out 22 bomb attacks in Belfast killing innocent people and ripping the commercial heart out of the city.
For him it was the final straw; he decided to join the protestant UVF then engaged in a sectarian war against innocent Catholics whom it regarded as the soft underbelly of the IRA. Ironically, Ervine was reacting to the other side of the same politico-religious stimuli that had created the material basis for the emergence and recruitment of the Provisional IRA in 1970. His ’war’ ended when he was caught ferrying a bomb and was sentenced to 15 years imprisonment.
David Ervine was a Shankill Road Protestant, inured to the poverty and sub-standard life that loyalists there shared with their Catholic class brethren on the nearby Falls Road. That the hatred that fuelled their bigotry and anger of one another was based on deliberately fabricated fictions was something he and many of his enemies learned in the long days of their imprisonment.
In his wry way, Ervine was to show the extent of his learning when a few years ago he said publicly that he looked forward to the day when he and Gerry Adams could have a pint together. It was a demonstration of just how far he had travelled.
A few evenings ago, in a club he frequented in east Belfast, some of those drinking there praised him as ‘a socialist’. That he wasn’t, but he was motivated by the same political honesty and concern for his class that motivates socialists; he had learnt to detest the political and economic realities of capitalism and we could have hoped that ultimately the courage that conquered his militant sectarianism would have brought him to an appreciation of the fact that the problems of his class, including the generation of division, were inevitable aspects of that system.
It is ironic, too, that while those on both sides of the internecine war have shown some willingness for peace and reconciliation, Paisley and his ilk, whose fascist style opposition to elementary democratic rights played midwife to the birth of the Provos hold rigidly to the historic dissension that is the sole muscle of their political strength.
RM
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