‘I’m getting married ... you’re both invited’: The former IRA man, UVF ex-prisoner and retired British soldier who became friends

Thirty years ago, Jim Potts wouldn’t have spoken to a Catholic.

“It was just the way I was brought up,” the loyalist ex-prisoner, from the Shankill Road in Belfast, admits.

“But now, my phone is half full of contacts of people from the Catholic community who I consider to be friends.”

Today, his face beams as he spots two men in the car park of a republican museum beside Conway Mill off the Falls Road.

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Ex-IRA prisoner Michael Culbert and former British Army soldier Lee Lavis are joining him to give a talk to a group of visiting English students as part of a long-running reconciliation project.

It’s been months since Potts last met the pair and he strolls over to greet them before sharing his news.

“I’m getting married ... you’re both invited,” he says.

Under the shadow of the beautifully restored 19th century linen mill which houses artists’ studios and small businesses – funded in part by “peace monies” – Culbert breaks into a broad smile and congratulates him.

“Delighted for you, mate,” Lavis, hugging a beaker of tea, adds.

Life has changed so dramatically here, so dramatically that sometimes you just have to stop and think of what it was like

—  Michael Culbert

Ushering them up the stairs of the Eileen Hickey Irish Republican History Museum to the Tar Anall offices for republican ex-prisoners, Culbert puts the kettle on and piles plates high with chocolate digestives.

As the 25th anniversary of the Belfast Agreement approaches, the 73-year-old has become one of the strongest advocates for the North’s peace process.

“Life has changed so dramatically here, so dramatically that sometimes you just have to stop and think of what it was like,” Culbert says.

“I am only giving it to you from my perspective, but we no longer have British military in the streets ... and there’s a broad, general acceptance of the absolute necessity for a policing service.”

Culbert joined the IRA in the early 1970s when, after Bloody Sunday in Derry, he “concluded that civil rights reform probably wouldn’t come”.

A former social worker – he also worked as a taxman for the Inland Revenue – he served 16 years of a life sentence.

Yet his family background, he says, was “pro-British”.

“My granny had two husbands and they were both former British soldiers. One of them – who I’m named after – never came back from the first World War.

“She was burnt out of Pope’s Row in Cupar Street in 1922, she was burnt out of Bombay Street in ‘69 and then an IRA bomb went off on the Springfield Road and blew her out of her third house.”

He quips she’d “no luck” but that she lived until she was 108 and was the oldest woman in Clonard.

“I hope I live as long.”

Released from prison on a Friday in 1993, Culbert began a master’s degree in peace studies the following Monday and returned to coaching St Gall’s Gaelic Athletic Club in west Belfast a week later.

“I was relatively intelligent, relatively well-off economically, my wife was a schoolteacher and I was out fighting the British.

“I’m still the guy I was but I’m much more confident I’m going to get what I want, but only nowadays through the electoral process.

“It’s written into the Good Friday Agreement the right to call a referendum [on a united Ireland] but the right lies with a British minister.

“As an Irish republican, I don’t see the referendum being held as the issue. To me, it’s the process before that’s the issue. What’s the health system going to be? What’s the education system going to be? What are the customs issues? What’s the rates of taxation, what’s VAT going to be?

“Every time I talk to a visiting group about this and Jim is there, I’m secretly talking to him and he knows it. Jim’s worked with us very closely and I would never insult him. I don’t want to be spooking him. I don’t want him to think negatively about it.”

Culbert is director of Coiste na nlarchimí, a group set up in 1998 to provide support to republican ex-prisoners and their families, and has been instrumental in driving the cross-community talks project for more than a decade.

It is delivered to local youth clubs as well as international visitors, who often engage and ask questions.

“It started with us doing tours. We quite literally saw tourists walking about west Belfast not knowing where to go,” he says.

“The tours took off and out of that people wanted talks so we started doing talks. But after a while we thought that other stories should be getting told, so I approached a good friend of mine who heads up a loyalist ex-prisoner group.

“When we give the talks there’s always that implicit acknowledgment that the other person’s view is their view. You don’t correct it.”

Over the next two hours – against the backdrop of a hand-stitched quilt commemorating the 10 republican hunger strikers who died in 1981 – the men give an account of their experience in the conflict and why they chose to embrace peace.

I don’t walk into any bar on the Falls Road as there’s people there who may have been hurt and are not ready to meet someone from my background

—  Lee Lavis

Despite their differences, there is humour in the exchanges and references to their friendship.

Lavis even drinks in a local GAA club on the Falls Road.

“I’ll go and have a pint in St Gall’s on my own. I love Gaelic,” he says.

“If anyone says, ‘Who’s the English fella?’ You’ll hear them say, ‘Oh, that’s Mickey Culbert’s mate’. So that’s kinda how I’m known.

“But I don’t walk into any bar on the Falls Road as there’s people there who may have been hurt and are not ready to meet someone from my background.

“So I’m respectful.”

Last year Culbert, a former Antrim GAA senior football manager, went to Stormont to watch his first cricket match, when Ireland played New Zealand.

“I liked the social side of it but, Jesus Christ, it was boring,” Culbert jokes.

“I went because Lee asked me.”

Potts describes himself as someone who became a “hate figure for Catholics” during the Holy Cross School dispute in 2001, when hundreds of loyalists tried to block children as they walked to school, in a violent sectarian protest that made international headlines.

He became a spokesman for the loyalist community during the three-month dispute that led to riot police and British soldiers escorting schoolgirls and their families to class in the interface area.

“It was a bit of a baptismal fire,” he recalls, “and led to many death threats along the way.”

I’ve become very good friends with Michael; it’s a genuine friendship. We have different views but we need to make that work

—  Jim Potts

While welcoming the “enormous change” over the past 25 years, he’s also quick to highlight that “large parts of both sides are still happy to live within their own communities”.

“You’re never going to arrive at a utopia,” Potts adds.

“I’m talking about working-class communities, the conflict was about them. The Malone Road [one of Belfast’s most affluent areas], people didn’t care who lived next door to them.

“In some ways, I see Michael differently; he came from a middle-class background and sits outside what I perceive as an IRA man.

“I’ve become very good friends with Michael; it’s a genuine friendship. We have different views but we need to make that work.

“I respect the fact he’s an Irish republican and that’s the future he’s seeking but I’m also a British subject and proud to be so and wish to remain.

“So how do we resolve this? He wants one thing and I want another.

“People got annoyed a number of years ago when Peter Robinson [former DUP leader] said we’ve got to talk about the possibility of a united Ireland. I’m kinda in that category now.

“I’m not saying you’re going to buy me and win me over, I need to be convinced. But I’m willing to engage. I’m not going to dig my heels in.”

Potts joined loyalist paramilitary group the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) in 1981 shortly after his 18th birthday.

“It was just a daily diet of death that we became accustomed to, thinking it was normal. But it was anything but normal when you look back.”

He served three years in prison for UVF-related offences.

Following the Holy Cross controversy, he became involved in cross-community dialogue work – “at that time it was difficult, not a lot of people agreed with it but we carried on” – and got a degree in youth work.

All three men voted in favour of the landmark 1998 agreement which brought an end to the North’s Troubles.

For Lavis, Belfast became his adopted home, having quit the British army in 1996 after a life-changing weekend made him question “everything he believed in”.

A Saturday lad in a butcher’s shop, he grew up in an English coal mining area and volunteered to join the British Army at 17 after leaving school in 1988 with no qualifications (he now has a PhD) and doing a job he hated.

“I was essentially an economic recruit, like many of my friends. I had also watched too many John Wayne films and had this very heroic view of conflict,” Lavis says.

He served two tours of Northern Ireland, mainly along Border areas in south Armagh, Newry and Fermanagh.

“In terms of our mindset, we had almost no knowledge of Northern Ireland or its conflict. The army didn’t encourage us to learn much about the area we were being sent to beyond ‘we’re fighting the good fight and they’re bad people’.

“And because we could only think in black and white terms, for us it became a simple equation: the IRA was almost exclusively drawn from the Irish nationalist community ergo the Irish nationalist community are the IRA – all of them. This means that you’re logically thinking of them all as murderers, terrorists, psychopaths, criminals, uncivilised and anti-democratic.”

In 1995, a year after the IRA and loyalist ceasefires, a Newry youth club invited Lavis’s regiment to send two soldiers on its yearly trip away to watch Celtic FC as a goodwill gesture.

He was chosen to go.

“Over that weekend, I mixed amongst people from a community that I had all these stereotypes about, and for the first time ever, I knew what it was [like] to be on the other side.

“Essentially, they became human, I couldn’t dehumanise them any more – and that was crucial to being a solider, the dehumanisation of another.”

I’ve been accused of ‘going native’. By choosing the course I’ve chosen, I’ve become ostracised from a lot of veterans

—  Lee Lavis

Within three days of his return, he handed in his notice to the army.

“That weekend had a profound impact and wouldn’t have happened without the ceasefire. It was the beginning of my journey to me being here today and beginning of my journey to voting ‘yes’ in the Good Friday Agreement.”

His decision to engage in reconciliation work with “former enemies” has created difficulties.

“I’ve been accused of ‘going native’,” he says.

“By choosing the course I’ve chosen, I’ve become ostracised from a lot of veterans.

“But, by the same token, there is a long tradition of veterans who do dissent, who start asking questions about the conflict and the rhetoric they were given.”

On the Monday afternoon we meet, an announcement on a new deal between the UK government and the European Union on the Northern Ireland protocol is expected.

Mid-interview, there is a ping on Potts’s phone: “A deal’s been done,” he says.

The North has had no functioning government for more than a year due to the DUP’s refusal to enter the power-sharing Executive until its concerns about post-Brexit trading arrangements are dealt with.

“My gut feeling is that they’ll go back in,” Potts says.

“My gut feeling is that they won’t,” adds Culbert.

Amid the political deadlock, the recent shooting of a senior police officer by dissident republicans and threats of loyalist attacks, the two men insist there is no support within their communities for a return to violence.

I don’t think you’ll get the same commitment from young people nowadays to say, ‘Well, I’ll go to jail for 15 years for what I believe’

—  Jim Potts

“The military conflict is over, it’s well over,” Culbert says, noting that the attack on detective chief inspector John Caldwell in Omagh in February was the first shooting of a police officer in over a decade.

Potts agrees: “I’ll tell you why it won’t happen: there’s no political support, there’s no community support, people don’t want it.”

But are the views of their generation supported by younger people with more hardline beliefs?

Potts responds by recalling the words of his father when he discovered he had joined the UVF.

“He said to me: ‘Well, son, you’re either going to end up in prison or you’re going to end up dead’.

“Like many others at that time, I was prepared to accept that as a consequence of my actions. But I don’t think you’ll get the same commitment from young people nowadays to say, ‘Well, I’ll go to jail for 15 years for what I believe’.

“I just don’t believe that’s present at the moment.”

The three men all have grown-up children.

Culbert says his two sons “haven’t inherited conflict” while Potts and Lavis agree that social and economic concerns are the priority for the next generation – as opposed to the constitutional question.

“My daughter is 26 and part of the ceasefire generation, born at the end of the conflict with no memory of it,” says Lavis.

“She is very much a child of the Good Friday Agreement where you can take either identity; that’s one of the things that’s respected in the agreement.

“But if you were to ask her about a united Ireland or remaining in the UK, she’s more interested in what a healthcare system is going to look like or what the economic plan is, what her rights are going to be like with regards to sexuality, vis-a-vis a united Ireland or remaining in the union.”

Potts also has two grown-up sons, who he says have no interest in loyalism or paramilitarism.

“They have a lot of Catholic friends. They keep me aware and we’ll sit over dinner and have debates – they have their own opinion of how life should be here.

“They’re not going to be led by the nose.

“It used to be you could have thrown the Union Jack flag over a donkey, walked it up the Shankill Road and it would have got a load of votes because people were just blinded.

“But now we’re in a different place, young people are more healthy in their thoughts and they want what’s good for everyone. That’s progress.”