International Herald Tribune
Associated Press
January 12, 2007
BELFAST, Northern Ireland: Leaders from all sides of Northern Ireland’s conflict united Friday at the funeral of David Ervine, a one-time Protestant extremist who became a leading voice for reason and compromise.
Ervine, who died Monday at age 53 after suffering a heart attack and brain hemorrhage, persuaded his outlawed Protestant paramilitary group, the Ulster Volunteer Force, or UVF, to declare a cease-fire and pursue politics.
While Ervine’s legal Progressive Unionist Party won few votes, he became an exceptionally popular figure because of his rare ability to communicate both to his British Protestant base and across the divide to the province’s Irish Catholic minority.
His funeral inside a packed Methodist mission attracted an unprecedented array of mourners for Belfast — a city where high walls of brick, steel and barbed wire still divide rival communities, and Protestants and Catholics usually are buried in different cemeteries.
Most remarkably, the guest list included Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams, whose Irish Republican Army-linked party represents most Catholics — and who was shot and wounded a decade before the Protestant side’s cease-fire.
Ervine’s older brother, Brian, welcomed Adams and another senior Sinn Fein official, Alex Maskey, to the church. Later in his eulogy, nodding to the benches containing Adams and other Catholic leaders, Brian Ervine said he could see “so many people that, 10 years ago, we would have classed as our traditional enemies.”
“It’s wonderful to see you here,” he said to applause, and not a whisper of dissent, from the 800 mourners inside.
Adams sat directly behind Peter Robinson, deputy leader of the Democratic Unionists, the major Protestant-backed party. The two did not speak — reflecting the Democratic Unionists’ refusal to open normal relations with Sinn Fein.
Nonetheless, speaker after speaker noted what a broad church it was Friday.
“Who else could have attracted such a breadth of attendance as David has today?” Hain told the mourners. “He earned huge respect because he knew that you couldn’t rewrite history — and he didn’t try. He knew you could shape the future, and in that he played a central role.”
Outside, thousands lined Newtownards Road, the major throughfare of Protestant east Belfast, where the ceremony was broadcast on loudspeakers. They applauded, and some shouted their goodbyes, as Ervine’s coffin passed by.
But in a sign of the hatreds and fears that still bedevil Northern Ireland, UVF veterans told camera crews not to film their faces as they helped carry the casket down the road.
Adams, a reputed IRA commander for three decades, said he “obviously had concerns about security,” but felt he needed to stress his sympathies to Protestant paramilitary circles “at a time when they have lost their most articulate leader.”
As a member of the outlawed UVF in the 1970s, Ervine was committed to killing Catholics in retaliation for IRA attacks on his own community. He was caught in 1974 trying to drive a car bomb into Catholic west Belfast and spent six years in prison.
Like many of Sinn Fein’s future leaders, prison time gave Ervine education and political sophistication. In 1994, while still a reputed UVF commander, Ervine helped to deliver a cease-fire by the UVF and another outlawed Protestant group, the Ulster Defense Association, or UDA.
Ervine led his fledgling party into 22 months of negotiations that produced the Good Friday peace accord of 1998. But power-sharing collapsed in 2002 amid chronic conflicts between Protestant leaders and Sinn Fein.
Unlike Sinn Fein leaders with an IRA past, Ervine could be jaw-droppingly open about his violent youth — and denounce his side’s anti-Catholic bloodshed as both morally wrong and politically disastrous.
“He knew he screwed up. He wanted to repent and make it right,” said the Rev. Gary Mason, the Methodist minister who oversaw the funeral service. “As a Christian minister, that kind of honesty is so important. … If only more of our leaders could be so honest.”
Britain is leading a new diplomatic push to revive a Catholic-Protestant coalition by March that would be led jointly by the Democratic Unionists and Sinn Fein. The UVF’s Progressive Unionists would have no role because Ervine was their only representative in the 108-member Northern Ireland Assembly, the bedrock for power-sharing.
