David Ervine, 1953-2007

His contemporaries in Northern Ireland politics have praised him. The obit writers are now posting their copy. David Ervine, leader of the PUP, “passed away quietly with peace and dignity” according to a statement issued by his family today (Monday). Unionism in Northern Ireland will feel his loss.

Ervine was one of the many UVF prisoners whom, during the 1970s, Gusty Spence turned from violence to politics. He started appearing on our television screens as, essentially, the political voice of the UVF in the latter half of the 1980s, if my memory serves me correctly. Even then, and notwithstanding the difficulties of speaking for an appallingly violent organisation only nominally engaged in terrorist counter-activity against the Provisional IRA and quite prepared to murder Catholics at large, Ervine struck me as a highly articulate and sympathetic character. That he developed as he did in the period running up to and after the Good Friday Agreement into a passionate spokeman for peace was really rather remarkable. He was a man of genuine vision, and his vision was that of a progressive Unionism as the only practical guarantor of Ulster Protestants’ interests.

He did not carry his own organisation with him on his political and spiritual journey. The UVF remains armed and, in part or whole, criminally active. He endeavoured to merge his PUP party with the Ulster Unionists and failed. The times had not travelled so far or so fast as David Ervine. Now the man is gone, and his too brief life stands as an example for those that might yet follow.

Posted by Guessedworker on Monday, January 8, 2007 at 07:55 PM in Obituaries
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Posted by Matra on January 09, 2007, 11:11 AM | #

Ervine always had an uphill battle. Convincing the UVF to end its violent activities as he publicly defended them and tried to convince the general public that they were changing was quite a juggling act at times.

He was more comfortable talking to the foreign and British press about his progressivism and trying to place the unionist cause in that category. But the language used by progressives sounds suspiciously like that of our enemies to the Ulsterman’s ears.

Also, the sympathy he tried hard to gain for unionism outside Ulster didn’t interest his own people. Foreign reporters were astonished when David Trimble’s Nobel Peace Prize damaged him politically in the province. In such an environment it was difficult for Ervine’s efforts to change the reactionary image of Ulster Protestants to get much traction.

The anti-intellectualism of the working class didn’t help either. “Davey went to prison and swallowed a dictionary” was a common gripe from working class people who resented any of their own trying to improve themselves. Yet Ervine was himself a class warrior with undisguised bitterness towards middle and upper class Protestants and Ian Paisley’s religious DUP.

It was all just too much to overcome. Nevertheless his genuine conversion from violence and his anti-sectarianism gained him considerable respect from liberals, fed up unionists and perhaps more importantly, Catholics. He seemed to succeed in humanising the working class Protestant paramilitary to the RCs who had previously dismissed them all as irrational bigots. It might even be his legacy that he convinced a considerable proportion of RCs that working class Protestants had/have legitimate concerns that need to be addressed. That would be quite an accomplishment given the sectarian nature of Northern Ireland society with its zero-sum analysis of every issue.

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