Ervine urges working class regeneration in NI
The British government was urged today to set up task forces to regenerate Protestant working-class communities in Northern Ireland.
Progressive Unionist leader David Ervine, whose party is linked to the Ulster Volunteer Force and Red Hand Commando, welcomed a meeting he will have later today at Stormont with Northern Ireland Secretary Paul Murphy about engaging loyalist communities in politics.
As he prepared for the talks, the East Belfast Assembly member said his party was going to tell Mr Murphy the best way to engage Protestant working-class communities was to set up task forces on education, health and the drug problem.
“We would like to see task forces working in the community which would be directly answerable to the Secretary of State but would also deal with issues on the ground,” Mr Ervine said.
“We are also advocating a zero tolerance policy on drugs in communities. The police would seem to be not as effective as they should be in dealing with drugs problems in communities and I think that is something we all need to address.”
Mr Ervine’s talks with the Northern Ireland Secretary follows hard on an appeal by the PUP leader at his party’s annual conference for a route map to help loyalists out of the jungle of paramilitarism.
The image of loyalists, Mr Ervine said in his leader’s speech last month, had been distorted by media coverage of criminality in the community.
Loyalists, he argued, wanted to tackle deprivation in their communities and needed to be empowered to do so.
Tomorrow Mr Murphy will also meet members of the Ulster Political Research Group which provides political analysis to the largest loyalist paramilitary group, the Ulster Defence Association/Ulster Freedom Fighters.
Mr Ervine said the PUP would press at today’s meeting for the replacement of the Parades Commission in Northern Ireland with a more effective body.
The East Belfast MLA said: “In our view the Parades Commission has been a failure and is not the way to do business.
“Instead of resolving tensions around marches, it has actually exacerbated them. We need some other mechanism to deal with the difficulty of two different cultures living cheek by jowl.”
