Loyalists badly treated, says Ervine

Glencree summer school: Progressive Unionist Party (PUP) leader David Ervine claimed yesterday that loyalists in the North were the victims of virtual racism. "I am accusing people in Northern Ireland of being virtually racist in their treatment of the loyalist community.

"We leave school with almost no qualifications. There is empirical evidence to suggest that our children of four years of age in Northern Ireland are imbued with the concept of difference," he said.

"Thankfully, the eleven plus has been abandoned. The national average pass rate was 27 per cent. The working class Catholic pass rate was 12 per cent, and this was not good enough. The working class Protestant pass rate was 3 per cent.

"Fewer than 2 per cent of the children of Protestant working class communities will go on to further higher education."

Addressing the the Glencree summer school on a "security solution to a security problem", Mr Ervine said that such children were leaving school with little hope, barely able to read and write.

They were observing the "role model wearing the gold bracelet, driving the fast car, and earning £250 for doing nothing except selling drugs at the street corner, rather than thinking about getting a job even if there was anybody who would employ them".

He said that the simplicity relating to "bad behaviour and loyalism" was unfair.

"Where are our children going to be, because they are not going to be in the police?

"They are certainly not going to be in the police in the numbers that we have in terms of the population."

Mr Ervine said he feared that the concept of violence might well be linked to the failure of earlier peaceful activism.

"We as a society have a responsibility to recognise that arguments for freedom and equality are delivered on.

"If we push people further down and down, there may well be only one way out for them. And that is the use of violence."

PSNI deputy chief constable Paul Leighton said it was necessary to accept that, in the perception of some, "we were part of the problem and that some badly-planned and executed security operations and policies either exacerbated, or perhaps caused minor parts of the problem". But they were not the major cause of what happened, he added.

He said that when internment was introduced in 1971, it led to the opposite to what was intended. "Far from crippling the IRA, as it was intended to do, it increased public sympathy for them as well as recruitment."

Mr Leighton said there had been a largely peaceful summer in the North because of dialogue and consultation.

Rite and Reason: page 14