David Ervine

Loyalist leader widely praised for his journey from terrorism to peaceful politics
Chris Ryder Tuesday January 9, 2007
Guardian

David Ervine, who has died aged 54 following a heart attack, was leader of the Progressive Unionist party (PUP) and a member of the Northern Ireland Assembly. He earned widespread respect for putting his violent loyalist past behind him and working as a peacemaker.
Ervine was the fifth and youngest child of Walter and Elizabeth "Dolly" Ervine. His father was a former merchant seaman, who had become an iron turner in the Harland and Wolff shipyard, while his mother worked in a pram factory.

His political journey began on Bloody Friday in July 1972, when, at the peak of the troubles, the IRA set off a wave of 11 bombs without warning across Belfast, killing nine people and injuring 130. Ervine, then 19, knew one of the dead, a young man of the same age who lived three streets away from him in the staunchly Protestant area of east Belfast, where they had grown up.
Brimming with anger at this latest IRA outrage, the hotheaded Ervine joined the outlawed Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) to help strike back. Two years later, on November 2 1974, a police patrol surrounded a stolen car on the Holywood Road in Belfast, and Ervine, who was driving, admitted there was a bomb on board. A rope was tied around his waist, and he was made to defuse the 4.5lb device by an army bomb disposal unit. In May 1975, at Belfast city commission, Lord Justice Jones sentenced him to 11 years' imprisonment for possessing the bomb with intent. A relative who shouted at the judge, "You will make a terrorist of him," ended up in the cells for the rest of the day.

Prison had a profound effect on Ervine, and he blossomed. Under the tutelage of the veteran loyalist Gusty Spence - serving life for a sectarian murder in 1966 - he picked up the pieces of the education he had abandoned at 14 after a confrontational relationship with teachers at Orangefield boys' secondary school. "David will be led, but he will not be driven," his mother had told them. Ervine quickly achieved his O-levels and commenced an arts and social sciences degree, which he completed after his release from the Maze prison in 1980 - although it was "Spence University" rather than the Open University which formed his views about the futility of politically motivated terrorism and nourished both his peace-making instincts and political ambitions.

Free again, Ervine earned his living as a milkman and newsagent, while slowly carving out a role for himself as a loyalist political activist and spokesman for the PUP, which had emerged as a political front for the terrorist UVF. He failed to win a seat on Belfast city council in 1985 but in 1994, when the loyalist ceasefire he helped to broker was called, the pipe-smoking Ervine, by now articulate and media-wise, emerged as an influential advocate for constructive and peaceful loyalism.

He was widely mocked by monosyllabic contemporaries for his rhetorical flourishes - some said he had swallowed a dictionary in prison - but he showed considerable courage by consistently condemning sectarian violence, drug dealing, racketeering, racism and other excesses of the paramilitary legacy.

Ervine was soon elected to the Northern Ireland Forum and in 1997 won a seat on Belfast city council. By then, as a member of the PUP negotiating team, he was immersed in the cross-community and inter-government negotiations which resulted in the 1998 Good Friday Agreement. After the all-Ireland referendums endorsing the deal, he won a seat in the Stormont assembly, from where he campaigned for the terms of the agreement to be fully implemented. In 2002 he became party leader, but more recently was relegated to a fringe role as the rival power-play was dominated by Sinn Féin and Ian Paisley's Democratic Unionists.

Although he remained opposed to a united Ireland, Ervine's political pilgrimage still put him at risk of assassination - from extremists on both sides - and he was forced to move home several times. But the threats failed to curb his outspokenness. In a recent intervention in the Assembly he broke ranks with the unionist opposition to new regulations outlawing discrimination based on sexual orientation: "Equality is equality is equality," he said. "If we refuse any human being the entitlement to equality, we deny ourselves proper equality. It is either for everyone or for no one."

Ervine is survived by his wife, Jeanette, and two sons.

· David Ervine, politician, born July 21 1953; died January 8 2007

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2007

Former US senator George Mitchell has led tributes to Progressive Unionist leader David Ervine who died on Monday.
Mr Ervine, 53, died in hospital after suffering a heart attack and later a stroke and a brain haemorrhage.
A former UVF prisoner, he was a key figure in brokering the loyalist paramilitary ceasefire of 1994.
Tributes have been paid to him from a wide political spectrum. Mr Mitchell said Mr Ervine had played a critical role in the peace process.

BBC News:


I hope they pay them the respects he deserves, he really did more for Northern Ireland than George Best.