Voices from the Grave: Two Men's War in Ireland (44 page)

In 1971, as his community pulled Ervine further away from his father and Northern Ireland moved closer to violence, he toyed with Orangeism but the flirtation was brief and unsatisfactory.

But his father had introduced him to another aspect of his Irish Protestant heritage.

David Ervine had just celebrated his sixteenth birthday when, in August 1969, British troops marched up the Falls Road, bayonets fixed, to take positions on an imaginary line that divided Nationalist, Catholic West Belfast from the Unionist, Protestant Shankill Road. Days of fierce rioting in Derry between the Bogsiders and the RUC had left the police exhausted, demoralised and, as far as the bulk of Catholics were concerned, discredited. The civil rights campaign had set out to reform and democratise the Northern Ireland state but instead had exposed tensions and fissures within Unionism and intensified sectarian friction between Nationalists and Unionists. Unionism was separating between those, like supporters of Prime Minister Captain Terence O’Neill, who recognised a need to accommodate Nationalist complaints and others, not a few in O’Neill’s own cabinet, for whom the idea was complete anathema. For them the clamour for Catholic civil rights was just a devious IRA plot to undo the union with Britain which must be put down with as much determination as if it was a dangerous military threat. Outside the confines of the ruling Unionist Party, a young firebrand preacher by the name of Ian Paisley was setting himself up as the bane of O’Neillism, and the man with the courage and foresight to expose the civil rights conspiracy on the streets of Ulster by blocking, hindering and hampering their marches and
protests. From January 1969 onwards, sectarian friction ramped up and confrontations between Nationalists and the RUC grew more frequent and violent. The Apprentice Boys’ parade in Derry that August was the spark for a wider conflagration, which spread further afield to other Nationalist towns and to Belfast where Protestant attempts to burn down chunks of Catholic West and North Belfast forced the government in London to intervene militarily. The troops dispatched to Belfast were seen instinctively in places such as David Ervine’s neighbourhood as the friends and protectors of Catholics, their presence evidence that the British had sided with Unionism’s enemies.

David Ervine’s route into the UVF was a classic example of how personal experience joined together with communal pressure to nudge and cajole people to join paramilitary groups in Northern Ireland. Much more than mother’s milk, an ideological fixation or words spoken on television, the anger-making experience of aggressive violence was by far the most compelling recruiting tool during the Troubles. The urge to hit back, to balance the scales, was a powerful, almost irresistible force, even though it might have been justified as an act of communal defence. It worked that way on the Falls Road, on the Shankill and in East Belfast. Except, in those early days, the Unionists were the bad guys in the eyes of most of the world, including Britain, while Nationalists were seen as the
victims, and a source of guilt for many in Britain and the Irish Republic. The Nationalist narrative was accepted almost without question while the Unionist version was, except in their own community, largely ignored or repudiated.

One iconic event during the early stages of the Troubles captured all of this perfectly. It was the so-called ‘Siege of St Matthew’s’, an event that entered Republican folklore, and most histories of the Troubles, as a watershed moment in the life of the infant Provisional IRA. It happened on one of the most tumultuous days yet in the Troubles, 27 June 1970, the last Saturday in June and traditionally the occasion for a mini-Twelfth of July parade in Belfast along a route that, at least back in 1970, took Orange lodges and their bands through many flashpoint areas of North and West Belfast up to the Whiterock Orange Lodge near Ballymurphy, in those days a mixed but increasingly Catholic housing estate. The parade that year was engulfed in major violence; clashes along the route spread to the interface in North Belfast between the Shankill and Catholic Ardoyne areas and soon the evening air was alive with the crackle of gunfire. The firing seemed to have come mostly from the Republican side, as evidenced by the fact that the three people killed that day were Protestants, all killed, it seemed, by the IRA snipers. From the ferocity of the violence it is hard to avoid the conclusion that, contrived or not, the events had presented the IRA with an ideal opportunity to give the Shankill Loyalists a bloody nose that day, and a warning that any attempt to repeat the burnings and mini-pogroms of August 1969 would provoke a ferocious response. The trouble moved to the East of the city that evening when local bands and lodges dispersed and the IRA had another chance to drive the point home.

The small Catholic area known as Short Strand is at the inner perimeter of East Belfast, situated near the River Lagan at the apex of two roads, the Newtownards and Albertbridge Roads, which lead to the main two bridges into the city centre from that part of town. David Ervine lived further up that apex, only a few streets away from the Short Strand. The area is surrounded by Loyalist streets on
all sides and has its back to the river. Historically, the Short Strand had been the scene of some of the most vicious sectarian violence in Belfast’s turbulent history, especially in the 1920s, and was regarded as the most vulnerable Catholic district in Belfast, a hostage to the good behaviour of Nationalists elsewhere in the city. That Saturday, a gun battle and rioting that lasted almost the entire night would dramatically change that calculation.

The Republican version of what happened is simple: when the Orangemen returned from the Whiterock parade they stormed the local Catholic church, St Matthew’s, throwing petrol bombs and firing shots, while the British Army and the RUC stayed outside the area, seemingly on purpose. Had the Loyalists succeeded in destroying the church, Republicans said later, the heart would have been ripped from the community, which might then have been destroyed. But the IRA, under the command of Billy McKee, the Brigade Commander, came to the rescue and fought off the Loyalists, killing two of them. McKee was badly wounded and an IRA Volunteer, Henry McIlhone, shot dead. The narrative was crucial to the infant Provisional IRA because it made good the promise implicit in its raison d’être, to defend Catholic Belfast from Unionist extremism. There was another bonus. Having protected the Short Strand in such a violent way, the IRA was then at liberty to start bombing Belfast city centre and to attack British soldiers without fear of the consequences being visited on the Short Strand. Mostly though, the story fitted neatly into the larger narrative: Catholics were trapped in a hostile state, and were under siege from bigots. As a local Sinn Fein activist, Deborah Devenney, recently put it: ‘… we were under attack by Loyalist mobs assisted by the British government and the RUC. After Bombay Street there was writing on a wall in the Falls – IRA: I Ran Away. After the battle of St Matthew’s, no one could say that any more.’
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The Protestant version of the ‘Siege of St Matthew’s’ is very different and, interestingly, the most recent account
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from within that community draws its evidence in large measure from Nationalist accounts of the battle published over a quarter of a century later
when the passage of time had permitted greater candour. This rendering of events claims that East Belfast Protestants had fallen into a trap carefully laid by the IRA, one that had been set in order to create the circumstances that would allow the IRA to present itself to Catholics as their defenders. Their evidence comes in a description of preparations for the battle inside Short Strand compiled in 1997 by a Nationalist community body, the Ballymacarrett Research Group. The preparations suggest not a hurried defence of the area but something more organised and planned: ‘When the IRA formed up that night in Lowry Street just off Seaforde Street’, the Group’s account read, ‘it was the first time since the 1920s that the IRA had paraded before going into action. There were around thirty men that night which comprised of Brigade Staff Officers, local volunteers and volunteers from the Falls. Supporting them were Fianna who acted as runners ferrying ammunition and messages between the various positions taken up around Seaforde Street and the Church.’
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In other words IRA leaders and members from elsewhere in the city had been drafted in before the trouble started and the fact that they had time to form up for a parade suggests the gunfire had yet to begin. The violence erupted, both sides agree, when Nationalist youths began waving Irish Tricolours at the Orange marchers. Nationalists say shots were fired from within the crowd, which the IRA answered, while the Unionists say the only firing came from the grounds of St Matthew’s Church. According to the Unionist version of that night’s violence it was not until much later, long after the initial bursts of IRA gunfire, that the local Protestants were able to arm themselves – with two pistols, a .303 breech-loading rifle and a Mauser rifle that had been smuggled from Germany to Carson’s UVF in 1914 – and return fire. All the while the British Army and the RUC stood aside, unwilling or unable to come to their defence, while the IRA poured fire into the Loyalist streets.

So the version to which David Ervine would have been exposed was the mirror image of that believed by Nationalists. In his community, the IRA was the aggressor; in one local Protestant account
the violence is called ‘our Pearl Harbor’;
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whose immediate con sequence was ‘the formation of both the UDA and the UVF in East Belfast’.
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That account was published only in 2003, thirty years after the event, and evidence of how emotive the violence still is for Loyalists in the area. In a sense the truth of what happened on the night is secondary, since the competing mythologies are too firmly embedded in the group psyche to be dislodged. What is beyond doubt is that the violence in Short Strand set the tone for the Troubles that followed. It is worth noting, however, that one important part of the IRA’s version has now been exposed as a falsehood. The sole Catholic killed that night, Henry McIlhone, was not, in fact, a member of the IRA, even though Billy McKee and Gerry Adams among others have claimed he was, and nor was he shot dead by a Loyalist gunman. He was killed, it now seems, by his own side, very possibly by Britain’s IRA spy, Denis Donaldson, in a friendly-fire accident.
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So the question becomes: if the IRA lied about that part of the incident, did it lie about others?