February 16, 2011
By Staff Reporter
Progressive Unionist Party leader David Ervine said that Reynolds’s account of meetings he had with leading loyalists in the run-up to the IRA ceasefire were inaccurate. He also denied Reynolds’s claim that the two men had met on Belfast’s Shankill Road.
“The first time that anyone from loyalism met with Albert Reynolds was after the ceasefire and that was me and [former UVF leader] Gusty Spence in Dublin’s Berkley Court hotel,” Ervine said. “The notion that Reynolds somehow had a loyalist ceasefire in the bag is somewhat insulting given that the people vying to secure one still weren’t be sure of getting it only days beforehand.”
Reynolds said in a TV interview broadcast last month that he had secured prior agreement with the Combined Loyalist Military Command to a complete loyalist ceasefire six weeks before it actually happened. He said that he had held meetings on the staunchly loyalist Shankill Road in Belfast in order to advance plans for a cessation of violence.
Ervine said that as far as he was concerned, Reynolds had never met with loyalists in the area. “No one I have spoken to can remember him ever being on the Shankill,” he said.
Ervine praised Reynolds’s contribution to the peace process, but said he had simply got his story wrong.
When contacted, Reynolds would only say that the ceasefires had “saved many, many lives.”