By NiallO’Dowd

David Ervine was the most articulate voice of Protestant Ulster that I ever met. Though he never won elections in the style of Ian Paisley, or lacked the anti-Catholic venom necessary for broad support, he nonetheless articulated a vision for his country that was truly unique.

I met him first in 1993 in a hotel in Belfast. I had traveled to Northern Ireland as part of a small Irish American delegation comprised of myself, businessmen Chuck Feeney and William Flynn, union leader Joe Jamison and politician Bruce Morrison.

Our job was to take the temperature in Belfast and report back to, among others, the new Clinton administration. Talk of a peace process was in the air and America was about to get involved.

Frankly we were not expecting much from our Loyalist meeting. My entirely one dimensional view was that the Loyalist groups in the main were straightforward paramilitary thugs with little interest in anything but sectarian bloodshed.

After meeting Ervine and other leaders such as Gusty Spence, the grand old man of Loyalism, that wet Belfast morning, I realized I had been completely wrong.

Ervine in particular blew me away at the meeting. I had never heard a rational case for their side from Unionist politicians, other than that in the end they had the majority and that was all that mattered.

Ervine instead took us on a trip inside the mind of the average Protestant man or woman from the ghettos. For the first time I realized that the deprivation we had just witnessed in West Belfast was also true of East Belfast and the Shankill Road.

Though there were far more than Catholic victims in all this, the voice of the Protestant working class was every bit as excluded.

Ervine took us through the frightening statistic that on the Shankill Road the previous year, only a handful of schoolchildren had graduated high school, that the sense of despair and a dead end life was rampant, and that drug use and suicide rates were far higher than in Nationalist areas.

He painted a portrait of a community that had been used as fodder by successive generations of Ulster unionist politicians, from Paisleyites to mainstream Unionist leaders. They were a handy tap to turn on and off when a threat of violence could achieve wonders. When the violence happened those same leaders were careful to step away.

Above all, Ervine gave the reasons why the working class Unionists and Nationalists had a lot more in common than what divided them. It was an old socialist message, gleaned at first from his father, who was a member of the old Northern Ireland Labor Party, one of the few parties that ever attempted to bridge the sectarian divide.

It was so powerfully delivered, however, that Ervine made a lasting impression. He was pretty much unknown back then, but every member of our delegation understood we had just heard a unique and clear new voice who was promising hope.

In the years that followed I met Ervine often. He was particularly close to Bill Flynn and Tom Moran of Mutual of America, who encouraged him to create an American presence and to visit our shores frequently.

He was the most articulate spokesman either side ever delivered. He had the rare gift of speaking bluntly, sometimes not in his own best interest.

At President Clinton’s economic forum on Northern Ireland in 1995 he delivered the best speech of the entire event despite the fact that presidents, prime ministers and leaders from all over were speakers too.

Afterwards I went with him to a party at Conor O’Clery’s house in a Washington suburb. O’Clery was the Irish Times correspondent at the time.

We spent most of the night telling every bad joke and singing every Republican Orange and American ballad we ever knew. It probably brought us closer together than any amount of detailed politicking could have done.

I last met David at the Re-Imagining Ireland conference in Virginia in 2003, and we talked about how far everything had come. It was fitting he was there. He had, I told him, re-imagined Ireland in a way that no one else every quite had. He was seeing the fruits of his labor at last.

I will always remember one of his lines to me that night, that he wanted all the people of the North to wake up some day in Northern Ireland, not worrying about the constitutional question, but whether they had a job to go to.

Thanks to men like Ervine that day is much closer now. The peace process will miss him.