Voices from the Grave: Two Men's War in Ireland (45 page)

David Ervine was present on the Newtownards Road that night when the gunfire erupted and it is clear that it was an important way point on his journey into the UVF.

The Ulster Unionist leader Jim Molyneaux once said that, for Northern Ireland Protestants, loyalty to Britain was a two-way street. It is rare indeed for a politician, especially one as ill at ease with words as Molyneaux was, to capture in such a pithy way the dominating, even defining, characteristic of his community’s political culture. But the ‘wee man’, as his colleagues fondly called him, put it well. He was setting forth in simpler terms what political scientists call ‘conditional loyalty’, which is the idea that citizens and the state are bound together by a contract in which the citizens agree to support and defend the state only as long as the state supports and defends them. It is almost impossible to understand the world of Ulster Loyalism, to grasp why Protestants take up arms and threaten to defy the government they claim as their own, or why someone like David Ervine would join the UVF, without recognising how fundamental the doctrine is to the culture of Northern Unionism.

The centrality of this contractual relationship to government in Northern Irish politics has its origins in the Plantation of Ulster in the early seventeenth century. The Plantation was an extraordinarily ambitious effort by the late Tudor and early Stuart monarchies to secure England’s western flank and subdue the most lawless and rebellious part of Ireland. The English fear of an enemy invasion through the back door of Catholic Ireland – by the Spanish, the French or the Germans – shaped the relationship between the two countries from the Reformation through to the Second World War, providing the strategic interest that invested Britain’s claim over the country. The idea of transplanting loyal, dependable Protestants from England and Scotland to Ulster took root in the final years of the reign of Elizabeth I, when fear of another Spanish
armada was still very real, and it was put into place by her Stuart successor, James VI of Scotland, when he ascended to the English throne in 1603. Not only did the presence of a trustworthy population in the part of Ireland that is nearest to England and Scotland offer a buffer to an invading foreign army, but granting the new inhabitants land once owned by the rebellious O’Neill and O’Donnell clans also helped deny the successors of these troublesome tribes the resources for new uprisings and mischief-making.

The Planters were supposed to be half English and half Scots but in practice the numbers who migrated from the Scottish lowlands exceeded by nearly sixfold those from England. Over the next century or so they brought with them the distinctive values of the Kirk, Scotland’s Calvinistic Presbyterianism, prime among which was the dogma of conditional loyalty. James VI, who was crowned James I in England, had conceded the principle in 1581 to the Scottish Kirk in the face of fear that Catholic plots originating in France and Spain could undo the Reformation and restore the Papacy to Scotland. In return for James’s promise to ‘maintain true religion’, his Scottish subjects pledged themselves to defend his person and his authority. In other words as long as he kept his word to keep Scotand Protestant the Kirk would be loyal to James but if he didn’t then the deal was off. This covenant was renewed in 1590 and again in 1638, during the rule of Charles I, when the monarch’s threats to impose his Catholic-sounding prayer book on the Scots put Scottish Presbyterianism again under threat.
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Prior to all this, it had been the practice of the Scots gentry and nobility to ‘band’ together for self-defence when their interests were under threat, a product of decades of weak central government, and that practice was absorbed and imitated by the Kirk and the Covenanters. It meant that if the monarch threatened to renege on his or her part of the deal then it was permissible to use force against the Crown for self-protection, as the Covenanters demonstrated to Charles I on the eve of the English Civil War. The doctrine of conditional loyalty failed to be assimilated into English political culture but it survived and thrived, along with banding, in the political climate of
Ulster and it provides a way to understand the Unionist paradox: Loyalists being disloyal. Both the UVF and the UDA owe their origin to the idea.

The turmoil caused by the impending English Civil War contributed to another abiding characteristic of Unionism, a deep, chronic sense of insecurity. The Irish Rebellion of 1641, which took place just months before hostilities began between Charles and Parliament, was sparked by fears among the Catholic gentry of an invasion by English Parliamentarians and Scottish Covenanters who suspected that, in Ireland, Charles I would raise an army that would first put down the rebellious Scots and then help him impose his will in England. What started as a rising turned into a Catholic onslaught against the Protestant Planters, motivated in no small measure by a desire to regain confiscated lands. Contemporary pamphleteers in England greatly exaggerated the subsequent killings, claiming that over two hundred thousand settlers had lost their lives; it is likely that the true figure was nearer to twelve thousand, who were either killed or died from starvation, disease or cold when they were expelled from their homes that winter. The most notorious incident took place in Portadown, County Armagh, in November 1641 when between a hundred and three hundred English Protestants were marched by Irish soldiers to the bridge over the River Bann, stripped and herded into the icy river, where they either drowned or died of exposure. The stories of Irish butchery, both the exaggerated versions and those closer to the truth, during the ‘massacre of 1641’ entered Ulster Protestant mythology and culture as evidence of the enduring threat they faced from those native Gaels whose ancient lands they now occupied.

Those three elements which made up the Ulster Protestant political persona – conditional loyalty, banding and insecurity – all found expression in the Home Rule crisis of 1912, out of which emerged the military force whose name and methods would be co-opted sixty years later by David Ervine and his colleagues. Throughout the latter part of the nineteenth century, the British Liberal Party had become the champions of limited self-government
for Ireland. The party’s leader and four-time prime minister, William Gladstone, had first tried, and failed, to steer a measure granting Irish Home Rule through parliament in 1886 and then again with the same result in 1893, when the House of Lords vetoed his Bill. A third effort was made by Gladstone’s successor, Lord Asquith, in 1912, a course he was persuaded to follow after John Redmond’s Irish Parliamentary Party had secured the balance of power in the House of Commons. This time the auguries seemed good for Irish Nationalism. The House of Lords had by this point lost its veto power and the Liberal–Irish Parliamentary majority in the House of Commons was sufficiently large to ensure the measure’s safe passage through Westminster. As the Edwardian age faded into the past, Ireland confidently looked forward to managing its own affairs.

At this point Dublin barrister Edward Carson and the Ulster Unionists entered the story, leading the opposition of Northern Ireland Protestants to Home Rule and bringing them to the edge of insurrection. Carson won the support of the British Conservative Party and set out on a whirlwind campaign throughout Ulster mobilising grassroots Loyalists to the cause. His efforts culminated in the signing of the Ulster Covenant at Belfast City Hall in September 1912 by over half a million men and women, some using their own blood for ink. Declaring that Irish Home Rule would be ‘subversive of our civil and religious freedom’, signatories of the Covenant pledged themselves to use ‘all means which may be found necessary to defeat the present conspiracy’.

The phrase ‘all means’ captured the essence of conditional loyalty, signalling that if the British parliament reneged on its bargain with them, then Ulster Protestants were entitled to take their defiance to the point of using violence. What those ‘all means’ meant in practice was apparent long before the Covenant was signed. By the spring of 1912, Carson was reviewing columns of marching men, members of an armed force of some hundred thousand men he had helped raise, led by a former Indian Army general, equipped with 35,000 rifles and 3 million rounds of
ammunition smuggled from Germany to the port of Larne on the Antrim coast. Their intent was clear. If Home Rule went ahead and efforts were made to impose it on Ulster, then there would be resistance, led by Carson’s Army, by now called the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), and with all this came the distinct possibility that Ulster would secede from the Union and organise her own government. It was a classic example of banding together for self-protection, as the Scottish Covenanters of old had done, and its success encouraged Irish Nationalists to do something very similar.

Some, but not all, of the volunteers raised by Irish Nationalists did go to war against Britain – in Easter 1916 and again in 1919 – but not the UVF. The outbreak of hostilities with Germany in 1914 put Home Rule on ice and the UVF volunteered virtually en masse to fight for Kitchener’s Army in the trenches of France and Belgium. The slaughter of the 36th (Ulster) Division on the Somme in July 1916 was an act of sacrifice by the UVF which, in Ulster Protestant eyes, both deepened Britain’s contractual obligation to their cause and would serve to legitimise the grievance that any future betrayal coming from London would represent. Irish self-rule was not revisited until 1920 when the Government of Ireland Act, sometimes called the Fourth Home Rule Act, was passed, creating two states in Ireland and granting both a measure of self-rule. The Southern part was de facto amended by the terms of the 1921 Treaty, but the Northern part remained untouched, thus creating the Northern Ireland that exploded in violence in August 1969.

The creation of the new Northern Ireland state, the preservation of the link to Britain and escaping absorption into an Irish and predominantly Catholic state did little to reduce the Unionists’ real or imagined sense of insecurity. A large section of the population, at least around a third, was Catholic, and Nationalists in outlying parts of Armagh, Fermanagh and Tyrone especially resented their separation from the rest of the island. The rest accepted their fate sullenly, a stance reflected in the posture of Nationalist MPs at Stormont, who boycotted the parliament during its early years. With a large slice of the population antipathetic to the new state’s existence,
a panoply of coercive laws was drawn up, designed to curb Nationalist or Republican threats. In addition to the new Royal Ulster Constabulary, the Unionist government led by James Craig raised a large part-time police reserve, the Ulster Special Constabulary, to enforce them. The ‘Specials’ or ‘B’ men, were substantially composed of elements of the UVF who had survived the trenches at the Somme. This was such a defining part of their identity that Scottish historian Michael Hopkinson said that the force, which was widely involved in reprisal attacks on Catholics in the North during the 1919–21 period, ‘amounted to an officially approved UVF’.
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It was one of these Specials who shot Brendan Hughes’s great-uncle dead in a tram in York Street in 1922. When the modern UVF appeared in the mid-1960s and began targeting Catholics, Unionist politicians, not least of them Prime Minister Captain Terence O’Neill, were at pains to contrast the imitation with the original, as if the old UVF had never been involved in such killing. Far from having ‘misappropriated’ the UVF name, as O’Neill asserted, it is arguable that the new UVF had much in common with its predecessor.

The new UVF of the 1960s appeared on the scene, not by coincidence, with the first signs that the inflexible politics of Unionism might be softening and in this regard it is impossible to separate the arrival of Ian Paisley and the resurrection of Carson’s Army from one another. By the 1960s, Northern Ireland’s traditional industries – shipbuilding and linen in particular – were in serious decline or at risk of extinction. It was evident that to survive and replace the lost jobs, Northern Ireland had to tempt new foreign investment to set up shop and a fresh, friendlier image was required, one that suggested stability and peace rather than division and conflict. The Northern Ireland prime minister since 1963, an affable but shy former Irish Guards officer called Captain Terence O’Neill, who could trace his lineage back to the Chichester family, the pioneers of the Plantation, began reaching out slowly and cautiously to the Catholic community, visiting schools and shaking hands with nuns, sending condolences to the Catholic
primate on the death of Pope John XXIII, and the like. O’Neill’s ecumenism was hardly earth-shattering but in contrast to his entrenched predecessors, Lords Brookeborough and Craig, it was dramatic, seismic stuff. Economic pragmatism dictated the next tectonic shift, when O’Neill invited Sean Lemass, an IRA veteran and successor to Eamon de Valera as the Fianna Fail Taoiseach of the Irish Republic, to Belfast for talks, mostly about economic co-operation. That O’Neill failed to inform his cabinet beforehand, and in the eyes of many Unionist MPs at Stormont had broken his word to them never to talk to Dublin, only fanned the flames of discontent.

Opposition to O’Neill built up within the Unionist Party and outside, where the raucous Ian Paisley, the latest in a long line of fire-breathing, political preachers in Northern Ireland, mobilised discontent to first build his church, the Free Presbyterians, and then his political machine, the Protestant Unionists. The rise of O’Neillism coincided with a worldwide surge in ecumenical friendship between the Catholic Church and mainstream Protestant denominations, a rapprochement that was as alarming to many Northern Ireland Protestants as O’Neill’s inclusive politics. It all helped to fuel Paisley’s rise.

Easter 1966 marked the fiftieth anniversary of the Rising in Dublin and many Unionists expected that the IRA would use the occasion to launch a new campaign in the North. The IRA’s last military crusade against the Northern Ireland state had been launched in 1956 but had petered out within a year. It had failed to attract significant Catholic support and was formally ended in 1962. What followed was a peace that was often uneasy, thanks not least to Ian Paisley. In 1964, threats by him to invade the Falls Road to remove a Tricolour displayed in the window of a Republican election office sparked several days of rioting between Nationalists and the RUC, who pre-empted Paisley but outraged Nationalists by breaking into the office to carry away the offending flag. The incident reinforced the view that the police were the servants of Unionist extremists. Despite its military collapse and failure to win
Catholic backing, Unionists found it difficult not to regard the IRA as anything but a permanent and tireless threat and so, by the spring and summer of 1966, tension and apprehension had grown noticeably.