Interesting on Ervine. I always thought that, despite his associations with dangerous nutters (and the Unionist paramilitaries always had a greater proportion of dangerous nutters than the Republicans, on the grounds that relatively sane people wanting to defend the Protestant community went into the RUC or UDR, whilst relatively sane people wanting to fight for the Catholic community had no-one apart from the IRA and splinters), he was often the voice of Protestant reason. It was he who said "we're very good in Ulster at asking for what we know we can't have and then complaining when we don't get it," which sums up a lot of the Unionist attitude to the peace process.
A shame he hasn't got any sort of decommissioning out of the UVF, but then the UUP were never that bothered about Protestants bringing guns to the table. (To be fair, one of the few admirable qualities about Paisley, at least when the DUP were a minority group, was that he was equally condemnatory of Unionist paramilitaries' failure to disarm as of Republicans - if one overlooks the earlier slightly dodgy links between the DUP and the UVF.)
A shame he hasn't got any sort of decommissioning out of the UVF, but then the UUP were never that bothered about Protestants bringing guns to the table. (To be fair, one of the few admirable qualities about Paisley, at least when the DUP were a minority group, was that he was equally condemnatory of Unionist paramilitaries' failure to disarm as of Republicans - if one overlooks the earlier slightly dodgy links between the DUP and the UVF.)
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