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Michael Copeland
He’s the man known in his heartland of East Belfast as ‘The People’s Politician’.
He’s Michael Copeland, who served six years in the Ulster Defence Regiment in Border Bandit Country during the nadir of The Troubles, and put his life on the line countless times.
But yesterday, he confessed to the Sunday World: “I’ve tried to take my life in recent days – not once, but twice.”
And the 60-year-old who says he has served his own Ulster community in different ways – for six years in the UDR, and twelve years as a Councillor and Stormont Assemblyman (which he still is), rising to become his Ulster Unionist Party’s spokesman on Social Services – confessed to us:
“For the last nine weeks I have had to take myself out of public life, and public service.
“I have been subjected to a ruthless dirty tricks campaign.
“The poison pens have been out in politics.
“And the whispering political perpetrators of the smears have driven me to attempt suicide, not once, but twice.”
The Sunday World can reveal today, with MLA Mr Copeland’s permission, that what he calls those ‘poisonous and venomous innuendos and rumours’ revolve around an inappropriate sexual relationship.
In an hour-long face-to-face interview in the Sunday World office last night – agreed to by Michael Copeland after a week of phone calls – the MLA defiantly stated: “I have had no inappropriate relationship with anyone.
Emphatically
“I simply wanted to give a person a chance – and then the political world becomes full of rumour and innuendo.”
The Sunday World understands the ‘rumour and innuendo’ arise from Mr Copeland giving work to someone in his Stormont office.
We were told that a complaint had been made to police.
Yesterday, Michael Copeland, now living out of the family home, emphatically stated: “I have not been contacted by the PSNI and I have no knowledge of any such allegation.
“I have had no so-called ‘inappropriate relationship’ – in other words, sex – with anyone.
“I have never stepped outside my marriage pledge of fidelity within marriage.”
Mr Copeland pulled the trigger on politicians – not excluding some within his own Ulster Unionist Party – who may have been gunning for him over the ‘inappropriate’ sex slur.
In a damning indictment of some Stormont politicians he bluntly told us: “If you ever probe the origin of the word ‘politics’, the ‘poli’ stands for ‘many’, the ‘tics’ stand for parasites who feed off other people. That’s what’s happening to me.”
He said he had been subjected to the ‘dirty tricks, whispering’ campaign for the past 10 weeks – the time he has reclused himself from public life and is now living in a County Down seaside village, far from his political and personal powerbase in East Belfast, where, not so long ago, he was the UUP’s official spokesperson on Health and Social Services at Stormont.
He tells of the toll the rising tide of ‘dirty tricks’ has taken upon him. To be fair, he wants no mention of his family, who he fights compassionately, but aggressively, to protect.
“My problems are my own,” he says, adding: “Look, I have always tried to help people who have had nothing. All I have ever wanted to do was take some broken human life and try to make it better.
“And in doing that, and in my innocence, I believed no one would set out to harm me.”
And then he hammered the ‘fantasists’ at Stormont, both, he claims, within his own party and the DUP, who, he alleges, ‘have made things up’.
He stated: “There are f*****s in there who don’t understand the plight of the ordinary people, and who don’t know, or want, to help them.
“They live and work up there in a plastic bubble.”
And he said of the woman who, he admits, worked in his Stormont office at one stage: “She is doomed because of the place where she was born.
“But there was no inappropriate relationship with her. And there was no inappropriate relationship with anyone else.”
Michael Copeland was adamant yesterday that no formal complaint of any ‘inappropriate’ sexual behaviour has been notified to the PSNI – or him.
We checked. As far as we could ascertain, none has.
But the veteran politician of a dozen years is still unsure of his future – and his life.
He told us: “I’ve tried to take my own life twice because of this campaign of vilification.
“I was thinking about it again at 2.00a.m. this morning. I phoned for help. There was none.”
And when we asked him if he was going to quit politics after a dozen years of public service as the self-styled ‘People’s Politician’, he frankly informed us: “It may not be just about clocking out of politics…it may be clocking out of life. My life is still hanging on a thread.
“I just hope bringing this out in the open in the Sunday World helps.”
Finally, asked what has driven him into the depths of such despair – as well as the ‘dirty tricks’ he alleges – he replies in two words.
They are: “Compassion fatigue”.