Majorityrights Central > Category: Obituaries

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.

Today’s papers will be peppered with writings on the life and times of Edward Heath, British Prime Minister from 1970-74, who sailed Morning Cloud over the horizon yesterday, aged 89.  I am no obituarist, nor a historian.  So I won’t attempt to compete with those who are but, instead, mark the man’s passing with one or two of my memories from those four tumultuous years.

At the time I wasn’t long out of school.  I drove a delivery van, worked as a filing clerk and in a hospital laundry before getting a job as a trainee machine engineer and then moving into the company’s London offices as a lowly gofer.  That brought me to Bush House in the Aldwych.

One of my less tender memories of that time is of the student marches, a “megaphone obligatory” danced in moronic, slouching style by Socialist Workers –  who, of course, were not workers at all - on their way, yet again, to turf the Chancellor of the LSE out of his office.

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It was a long time ago.  If I had to rely purely on memory I couldn’t even be sure of the year now.  But, you know, I was young and didn’t worry for the world as I do today.  I didn’t understand the need to hold fast to the remembrance of such dispiriting realities.  I didn’t understand why it would matter if, so many years later, they should slip out of the public mind, and mine.

So it was rather easy to forget.  Perhaps, too, forgetting went with the grain of the wood.  Seventies Britain was a different place with quite different expectations.  Life seemed more providential, and perhaps was.  We raced between the lights.  We were freer and more risk-taking or, perhaps, just more subject to the cheapening, egalitarian law of accident.  Now we are all wrapped up in cotton wool.  Death seems an intolerable affront.  But I don’t know that it was then in quite the same way. 

I should also say that we were also immeasurably more naïve then than now.  For one thing, the foul-minded, shit-hearted non-soldiers of the Provisional IRA had not begun leaving their murderous gifts in mainland pubs.  We saw terrorism on the nightly news.  But it was mostly on the island of Ireland, as the shit-hearts liked to put it.  Or it was even further away and involved Middle Easterners and Israelis.  This type of terrorism came to us through the most basic moral filter.  It was a filter through which only one side of the story ever got told.  We didn’t question it then.  We hadn’t learned to question everything.  But anyway it was a true filter.

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