Extract from a report written 14 April 1997 by an official to Seán Ó hUiginn, the Joint Secretary of the Anglo-Irish Secretariat in Belfast. It describes a conversation with David Ervine, a former Loyalist paramilitary and member of the Progressive Unionist Party.
Context notes
For most of the 1970s, 1980s and early 1990s Loyalist paramilitary organisations had been active in Northern Ireland. They attacked IRA activists, Sinn Féin politicians, other Republican activists but also many who were simply members of the Catholic or Nationalist communities. By the 1990s Loyalist paramilitaries were becoming more active than the Provisional IRA in terms of the number of attacks carried out. However, an important group within the Loyalist paramilitaries favoured an end to conflict by the early 1990s. One of the most important was Gusty Spence of the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF). Another was David Ervine, also a former paramilitary. Ervine met Spence in prison and was greatly influenced by him. He rejected violence and both Ervine and Spence became key figures in bringing about a Loyalist ceasefire in 1994. Leaders of the paramilitary groups the UVF, the Ulster Defence Association (UDA) and the Red Hand Commando formed an umbrella organisation called the Combined Loyalist Military Command (CLMC). This organisation co-ordinated the actions and statements of Loyalist organisations, although it was always a difficult job to control all of the factions within their respective organisations. Ervine himself went on to be a representative in the Northern Ireland government after the Agreement and was generally very well regarded by other politicians involved in the peace process.
Transcript
14 April 1997
No of pages including this one 3
To: HQ
For: Second Secretary O hUiginn
From: Belfast
From: Joint Secretary
Subj:
Conversation with David Ervine
- I had a conversation with David Ervine at a BIA reception last Friday evening.
- Ervine was deeply pessimistic about the future of the Loyalist ceasefire in the wake of the IRA’s shooting of Constable Alice Collins in Derry the previous day. It could be taken for granted, he said, that members of one or other of the CLMC’s constituent organisations would respond over the next few days, probably by carrying out another attack on a Sinn Féin member.
- Once again, this would be presented as a “measured response” to an IRA provocation. There would be no claim of responsibility and the CLMC ceasefire would remain technically intact. What concerned Ervine, however, was that the cumulative effect of the series of “measured responses” to date was to transfer the initiative increasingly away from the relatively moderate CLMC leadership and into the hands of a hard-line element who were demanding a full-scale return to paramilitary activity. It was only a matter of time, Ervine suggested, before the hard-liners would succeed in having the ceasefire brought explicitly to an end.
- Part of the difficulty, according to Ervine, arose from friction and competition between the CLMC’s three constituent groups. The rogue elements within each would claim that their particular organisation had been targetted in some recent IRA operation and that they were entitled, accordingly, to take retaliatory action. The greater the provocation from the IRA, the more these elements competed for the “honour” of responding to it – and the weaker the CLMC’s restraining influence became.
Questions
Content
- Why was Ervine pessimistic in May 1997?
- What were Ervine’s concerns about successive ‘measured responses’?
- What difficulty did Ervine identify for the CLMC?
Inferences from the content
- What can be inferred about the CLMC’s views and attitudes to the peace process?
- What can be inferred about the challenges facing the CLMC?
Inferences from the context
- Can anything be inferred from the fact that this conversation took place at all?
Lines of Argument
- Which historian could use this document as supporting evidence?