`TA me ag dul abhaile roimh i bhfad," said the leader of the Progressive Unionist Party, David Ervine, to Seosaimhin Ni Bheaglaoich, of Radio na Gaeltachta when they met at a lunch of the Association of European Journalists in Dublin last Friday. When she looked startled, he told her it was the first thing you learnt when you went to jail. Ervine was a most amusing and interesting speaker but he warned against the perception that he was a pussycat. Bob McCartney, he said, was the man who doled out punishment bleatings; lawyers were trained to deal with the past and to analyse but they had no true concept of the future. The peace process for him, he said, began in 1984 when he was part of the kitchen cabinet of the UVF and trying to end the war. "The only idea we had was to escalate the war and bring it to a head to make it stop. It was a bit perverse but it led us to understand what was going on in the republican movement. I even read Gerry Adams." Since then, he said, they had learned a lot, including the diplomacy of the Irish. Before the AEJ lunch, he posed for photographs with Colm Larkin and Jim O'Brien of the European Commission and Parliament offices respectively for the launching of the fourth annual all-Ireland European Journalism Awards. Prizes totalling £6,000 will be presented in November.