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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.

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

1. I had a conversation with David Ervine at a BIA reception last Friday evening.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.

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