Inside the UDA: Volunteers and Violence

Inside the UDA Volunteers and Violence

Colin Crawford Foreword by Marie Smyth

Pluto

P

Press

LONDON • DUBLIN • STERLING, VIRGINIA

First published 2003 by Pluto Press 345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA and 22883 Quicksilver Drive, Sterling, VA 20166–2012, USA Distributed in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland by Columba Mercier Distribution, 55A Spruce Avenue, Stillorgan Industrial Park, Blackrock, Co. Dublin, Ireland. Tel: + 353 1 294 2556. Fax: + 353 1 294 2564 www.plutobooks.com Copyright © Colin Crawford 2003 The right of Colin Crawford to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 0 7453 2107 0 hardback ISBN 0 7453 2106 2 paperback Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Crawford, Colin, 1948– Inside the UDA : volunteers and violence / Colin Crawford ; foreword by Marie Smyth. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0–7453–2107–0 (hardback) –– ISBN 0–7453–2106–2 (pbk.) 1. Ulster Defence Association––History. 2. Northern Ireland–– Politics and government. 3. Paramilitary forces––Northern Ireland––History––20th century. 4. Political violence––Northern Ireland––History––20th century. 5. Northern Ireland––History, Military. 6. Unionism (Irish politics) I. Title. DA990.U46C726 2003 941.60824––dc21 2003011541 10

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Designed and produced for Pluto Press by Chase Publishing Services, Sidmouth, EX10 9QG, England Typeset from disk by Stanford DTP Services, Towcester, England Printed and bound in the European Union by Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne, England

In memory of Cassie, 2003

Contents

Abbreviations Acknowledgements Foreword by Marie Smyth 1

ix x xi

Introduction to the Conflict in Northern Ireland 800 Years of Troubled History The Roles of the IRA and of the UDA/UFF in the Conflict Since 1969

1 1 5

2

Researching the UDA The Probation Service, Long Kesh and Political Prisoners Specific Methodology

10 10 16

3

The UDA/UFF: History, Organisation and Structure A Brief History of the UDA/UFF A Paramilitary Organisation? A Working-class Organisation? Strategy and Tactics: Selective Targeting versus Random Killing Infiltration by the Police and the Security Forces Collusion Between Elements of the British Security Forces and Members of the UDA/UFF From Paramilitaries to a Politicisation of the Conflict

20 20 24 30

42 46

Phase One: Beginnings – the UDA’s Chaotic Sectarian War of the 1970s Sam Duddy ‘Ken’ ‘Billy’ John White

51 51 63 76 89

Phase Two: The 1980s UDA/UFF – from Infiltration to Reorganisation ‘Terry’ ‘Jackie’

97 97 112

4

5

vii

32 39

viii

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Inside the UDA

Phase Three: The Mid-1980s UDA/UFF – Travelling Gunmen and the Selective Strategy ‘Gary’ Michael Stone

127 127 143

Phase Four: The 1990s – the Selective Strategy and Retaliatory Sectarian Murder ‘Tommy’ Johnny Adair ‘Gordon’ ‘Alan’

154 154 165 173 183

Phase Five: The UDA/UFF 1993 – the Shankill Bomb and the Greysteel Massacre Combatant A Combatant B Combatant C Combatant D

193 193 196 202 206

Conclusion Bibliography Index

210 218 221

Abbreviations

ASU CO DUP FRU INLA IRA IRB IRSP LVF

MI5 PUP RHC RIR RUC SAS SASU SDLP UDA

UDP UDR UFF UPRG UUP UVF

active service unit. Commanding Officer. Democratic Unionist Party. Forces Research Unit. A British Security Forces Unit drawing upon MI5, Army intelligence and Police (RUC) Special Branch. Irish National Liberation Army. A small republican terrorist group. Irish Republican Army. Irish Republican Brotherhood. Irish Republican Socialist Party. Loyalist Volunteer Force. A small but dangerous and fanatical group, considered to be ‘outside’ mainstream paramilitary loyalism. Military Intelligence, Section 5. Progressive Unionist Party. The party which represents the UVF/RHC politically. Red Hand Commando. Closely linked to the UVF, this is considered to be a small but elite loyalist paramilitary group. Royal Irish Regiment. Royal Ulster Constabulary (Police). Special Air Service. special active service unit. Social Democratic and Labour Party (of Northern Ireland). Ulster Defence Association. The largest of all the paramilitary groups in Northern Ireland, and possibly in the Western world. Ulster Democratic Party. The party which represented the UDA/UFF politically. Ulster Defence Regiment. Ulster Freedom Fighters. The more militant ‘military wing’ of the UDA. Ulster Political Research Group. Ulster Unionist Party. Ulster Volunteer Force. The second largest loyalist paramilitary organisation in Northern Ireland. ix

Acknowledgements

I should wish to thank the officers and men of the Ulster Defence Association, the Ulster Freedom Fighters, the Ulster Democratic Party and the Ulster Political Research Group for their help and for contributions to this work. I was afforded a very special access to the organisation which was greatly appreciated. I hope that this work meets the expectations which were placed upon it, in recording a history of the UDA. Thanks also to my wife Gillian for her patience in giving me the time and space to write and to finish this work. Most of all, however, I should wish to thank my colleague and friend Marie Smyth, of the Institute for Conflict Research. This work may have remained unpublished had it not been for her academic guidance, and more particularly her connections within the literary and publishing world. Also to Julie Stoll in Pluto Press whose French flair assisted greatly in the coherency of the book. Finally, I should wish to thank all those many people, loyalist and republican, whose political vision and courage are helping to bring peace to our shared country.

x

Foreword Marie Smyth

In the context of a growing global interest in non-state military actors, this book sets out to provide an account of the Ulster Defence Association (UDA) and it more militant wing, the Ulster Freedom Fighters (UFF), and their role in Northern Ireland’s troubles. It is produced in the global context of George Bush’s war against terrorism, and growing interest in understanding the origins, modus operandi and motivations of such organisations. Some seek this understanding in order to overcome such organisations militarily. Others seek to understand the political and social circumstances that give rise to the formation and proliferation of violent non-state intervention. In the local context of Northern Ireland, the book appears at a particularly challenging time for loyalist politics in general, and for the UDA in particular. In the wake of the Good Friday Agreement, unionism and loyalism have faced the challenges involved in the transformation of Northern Ireland politics, from direct rule to a locally devolved assembly. This has required substantial changes in unionist/loyalist and nationalist/republican political behaviour. For Loyalists it has meant moving from a position where they shunned republicans, refusing even to be in the same room as them, to one where they sat together with them in government. For those within the ranks of the paramilitaries, it has meant the transition – albeit imperfect – from militarism to democratic politics. For the UDA, the subject of this book, this transition has not been easy, for a number of reasons. Perhaps most importantly, the organisation has enjoyed a very limited amount of success in electoral politics. It has been observed that unionist constituents do not readily vote for parties with paramilitary links. Both political parties associated with loyalist paramilitaries, the Ulster Democratic Party (UDP), which is associated with the UDA, as well as the Progressive Unionist Party (PUP) associated with the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), have struggled to become electorally viable. The PUP, however, has met with more success than the UDP, winning two assembly seats whereas the UDP won none. The UDP eventually folded as a political party and was xi

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replaced with an interim organisation, the Ulster Political Research Group (UPRG), whose task it was to reform, unify and revitalise the political operation of the UDA and its political associates. However, the disputes within the UDA, the UDP and latterly the UPRG mirror the wider pattern of dissention and division with unionism and loyalism in the post-Agreement period. Splits and vitriolic disputes within the mainstream Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) were marked from the early days of the Agreement by Jeffrey Donaldson’s walkout at the time of the signing of the Agreement. This was followed by the outbreak of a series of loyalist feuds, within and between loyalist paramilitaries, the most serious of which was between the UVF and the UDA from 2000 onwards. The result of these disputes was the internal segregation of some loyalist workingclass communities, separating UVF and UDA supporters from each other. Nor was life within the Ulster Defence Association unmarked by division. (In September 2002, they expelled Johnny Adair, the Commander of C Company in the Lower Shankill, and his associate, John White, who appears in this volume.) There are three kinds of substantive causes of these disputes: the tension between militarism and politics; the tension between those for and those against the Belfast Agreement; and the tension between those motivated by personal gain and involved in crime, racketeering and drug trafficking. MILITARISM VERSUS POLITICS The first tension, between militarism and politics, is between those who espouse militaristic solutions to political problems, in opposition to those who tend to choose the political path. There has been much debate in Northern Ireland among paramilitaries in general and their supporters about the effectiveness of politics, compared with that of violence. Some argue that violence works, that Sinn Fein would not have had two ministers in the Northern Ireland Assembly had not the Irish Republican Army (IRA) bombed and shot its way into the political arena. There are other examples. One referred to by Mo Mowlam in her account of her time as Secretary of State for Northern Ireland was the infamous ‘lesser of two evils’ decision at Drumcree (Mowlam, 2002: 97). Orangemen were allowed to march through a Catholic estate at Drumcree in 1999, because the Chief Constable argued that, if they were prevented, the violence that resulted would

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be worse than the violence emanating from the Catholic community. Therefore, on that basis, the Orangemen were allowed to march. In a militarised society, evidence is plentiful to support the argument that it is might not right that often prevails. Within loyalism, then, to argue for the adoption of an exclusively political path is to face the accusation of having ‘sold out’ unionism and loyalism by abandoning the battle against the IRA. Support for a military engagement has a wider currency within unionism. Both the UUP and Paisley’s Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), while eschewing paramilitary activity themselves, have argued that the IRA should to be defeated militarily by the use of the security forces. Both parties would see themselves having special links with the security forces, many police and RIR members are DUP or UUP supporters, and both parties have argued against the reforms of the police proposed by the Patten report. So even within parties that have no paramilitary link, military solutions are favoured for the problems of Northern Ireland. Yet the argument that ‘terrorists’ should be defeated by military means is not without its contradictions. The first contradiction, British military or loyalist paramilitary action directed, in this case, against republicans has arguably provided and maintained a context in which the IRA has been easily able to continue to recruit those who wish to defend their community against such patent threats. For example, the IRA was inundated with recruits after Bloody Sunday, when the British Paratroop regiment killed 14 Catholic civilians on a civil rights march in 1972. So, military strategy may be counterproductive, in that it can serve to escalate, not end, conflict. The second, the pursuit of a physical force solution may be difficult to present and justify in the political domain, and may risk the loss of the moral high ground. This is inevitably politically dangerous, and in the post-conflict period has been played out within paramilitary groups as the tension between gangsterism on the one hand and bona fide politics on the other. This second contradiction is particularly pertinent to this book. Within these pages, those who have pursued strategies such as the use of sectarian assassination of Catholics articulate their feelings and thoughts about their past actions. Were these actions morally justifiable or were the individual actors criminals or psychopaths? Were they dupes of the state, used and discarded when their usefulness was over? Were they heroes, taking up arms for a political cause and in defence of their communities and political heritage? Or were they victims of circum-

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stances, the accident of birth into a loyalist community? Would we, the readers, have done likewise if we had been similarly born and reared? It is a topic that Crawford addresses, but one on which it is difficult to reach independent conclusions without reverting to default sectarian positions. The physical force argument has been taken up with some gusto by the Bush administration in the United States in the wake of the al-Qaeda attack of 11 September 2001, and thus been provided with a new global currency. It is one thing, however, when a state government declares war on terrorism, and quite another when nonstate actors takes the law into their own hands, deciding to prosecute their own war, albeit on the side of the state, on their own terms. This, in essence, is what the UDA did. Indeed, the evidence now points to collusion and cooperation between the state and the UDA. The UDA were fighting for the state, not against it. Yet those who take up arms in order to defend the state, but operate outside that state’s law, paint themselves into a peculiar political and moral corner. This dilemma is more than a matter of historical interest. It is a contemporary political struggle for those who now wish to pursue a political rather than paramilitary path, and who now must explain their own past to themselves and to their electorate. PRO- VERSUS ANTI-AGREEMENT The other context for disputes within and between loyalist organisations has been the shifting attitude of the unionist community as a whole to the Agreement. Unionists and loyalists have become increasingly divided in their attitude from the late 1990s onwards. Whereas at the time of the referendum on the Good Friday Agreement, it was estimated that half of unionists supported the Agreement, support has subsequently steadily declined. This is partly due to a perception among some loyalists that the Good Friday Agreement is a bad deal for loyalists and represents a shortcut to a united Ireland. Some also allege that those who sit in political negotiations in local government or in the Assembly, with republicans in particular but also with other rival loyalists, are betraying the cause for which loyalists have fought and died. The UDP’s failure to win a seat in the Assembly elections of 1998, and their general lack of much electoral success, has fuelled this tension. It has been assumed by Mo Mowlam and others that inclusion in dialogue and the political process is an effective prophylactic against a return to violence. The

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exclusion – albeit democratic – of the UDP from the Assembly is perhaps one factor in their continuing volatility and internal division. CRIME VERSUS POLITICAL IDEALS The final tension within and between loyalist paramilitaries is related to their involvement in gangsterism, racketeering and drug trafficking. Although those close to the UVF would contest that that organisation is heavily involved in these activities, few who know the UDA would argue that there has been heavy involvement by UDA members in a range of illegal activities, and much of that activity has been for personal, not political gain. Turf wars over territory are related to racketeering and drug trafficking, and latterly, competitive recruitment of young people by the two main loyalist groups has made unaligned loyalist young people the subject of another form of turf war. John White, among others, has called for an end to racketeering and illegal activity and a return to politics. However, the presence of competing financial interests within the organisation makes it volatile and liable to internal disputes. This book is a privileged account of the UDA and the UFF, and their role in Northern Ireland’s troubles. The author gained the trust of his informants, themselves members and former members of these organisations, during his time as a probation officer in the jails. It is written with their consent, knowledge and cooperation, and this has shaped the kind of access that Colin Crawford has had in the preparation of this book. The production of this book has been judged by some of the members of these organisations, if not the organisations themselves, to be an important contribution to the documentation of the history of the organisation, and thereby to its understanding of itself and its own history and dynamics. Yet this very support and cooperation raises issues about the work itself, its objectivity as well as the ethical propriety of publishing it. Does it advance the cause of terrorists? Does it glorify the deeds it recounts? Does writing and publishing such a book serve any legitimate historical or political purpose? One concern about this kind of account is that it gives comfort to those who deserve none, and that those who produce such work are apologists for terrorists. The combatants interviewed in this book are presented inter alia as victims of circumstance. Their family backgrounds, their own losses or anger at losses in the Protestant community provide the context for the choices they made to take up

xvi

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arms and in some instances to kill or to attempt to do so. Unfortunately, suffering and victim status has often been used in Northern Ireland in order to justify acts of violence or damage done to those associated with the victimiser. Subjective perceptions of victimisation provide a context for the motivation to take up arms in some of these accounts. Yet this fails to explain why others in similar positions do not do take up arms or harm others. A more robust analysis of the motivation of those represented in this work must take into account factors such as age, gender, educational level and social class. These are all males who became involved as adolescents or young men. All of them came from working-class backgrounds and none was bound for third-level education. The inclusion of their perceptions of their own suffering does, however, attempt to engage the sympathy of the reader, and no doubt engaged the sympathy of Crawford himself. As a probation officer, he was professionally tasked with helping these men with their personal and intimate problems, and with helping to rehabilitate them. Crawford himself has struggled with his role in relation to both loyalist and republican prisoners. As a result of his work in the prisons, and his subsequent research for an earlier book, he formed personal relationships with some of the loyalist informants in this volume. Robbens (1995, in Sluka, 2000) whose work involved an ethnography of Argentinian generals who had perpetrated dreadful acts of violence, describes what he calls his ‘ethnographic seduction’, where he began to like these men after they became his hosts. Any sympathetic portrayal of these men will be repugnant to many. Some such as Abu-Lughod (1993) argue that a humanistic approach, which includes, for example, the family background data, should only be used in circumstances where the aim is to broaden support for a particular group. The inclusion of personal details challenges the reader to see those portrayed here as similar to the rest of us, with families, uncertainties, unresolved issues, in short as human beings. Bornstein, in his analysis of his own study of the Intifada argues that: For those not immediately threatened by violence … commitments are often shaped by emotions of fear or empathy largely in response to narratives of suffering of others. Because of the empathetic power of suffering, different groups will actively seek to make it useful in different ways. Victims might speak to bring order to their psychic disorders, social workers quantify and classify

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suffering to move their own agenda, politicians invoke the victimized to bolster their legitimate rule, later generations act in the name of honouring those long dead and academics and intellectuals speak or write of violence to give important relevance to their work. (Bornstein, 2001: 550–1) Kleinman and Kleinman describe stories of trauma as ‘the currency, the symbolic capital, with which [victims] enter exchanges for physical resources’ (Kleinman and Kleinman, 1997: 10). This book, while perhaps useful as an accumulation of the Kleinmans’ ‘symbolic capital’, is not simply a bid for sympathy. It simultaneously presents the suffering of the informants alongside their acts of violence, their killings and attempts at killing. It is, at one and the same time, an insider account written empathically, and an account written with one eye on the perception of this group of loyalists by outsiders, perhaps even by republicans. It appears contradictory and uncomfortable at times, perhaps for this reason, and one other. Those inside the UDA and UFF are, indeed, human beings, with insecurities, feelings, blind spots, and have more in common with the rest of us than is, perhaps, comfortable to admit. Such accounting is politically important. The setting out of these contradictions affords a better understanding of these men, and facilitates the development of a deeper and more robust analysis of their organisation and politics. This book appears at a time when interest in the process of postconflict truth recovery has been awakened in Northern Ireland. A group calling itself Healing Through Remembering published a report in June 2002 pointing to the value of personal accounts and storytelling as a method of constructing a diverse and inclusive history of the conflict. The truth that is recovered by such processes is not singular, but multiple. There have been few accounts from paramilitary combatants, and this book addresses that scarcity. The book is also germane to the controversy surrounding the alleged collusion between the security forces and loyalist paramilitaries in Northern Ireland. As I read the earlier drafts of the book, it became clearer how this collusion operated. As Northern Ireland struggles to establish policing and security that is independent and deals equitably with those who break the law from both communities, the accounts in this book add to the available evidence on the relationship between sections of the security forces and the paramilitary groups. That more of the loyalist side of that story is now on record in the public domain is an important contribution to truth recovery, and to public

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understanding of relationships between the security forces and the UDA in particular. This book adds something to the understanding of one issue, related to one central activity of the UDA/UFF, that of the sectarian killing of Catholic civilians. For many, particularly those from the nationalist community who were its targets, this has been the most repugnant part of this organisation’s operation. In this book, the portrayal of the UDA/UFF as a ‘people’s army’ with a loose affiliation across many loyalist communities in Northern Ireland, where the boundaries between members and non-members are blurred, suggests that perhaps the concept of a civilian – particularly a Catholic civilian – is not clear. Certainly, the IRA killing of police officers, who were almost all Protestants, was perceived by many in the loyalist community primarily as the killing of Protestants, not, as republicans would see it, as the killing of combatants representing the state. There does not seem to be a clear distinction within the accounts and analysis in this book between the political meaning of targeting those who bear arms, and killing those who do not bear arms and are not involved in combat. From a subjective viewpoint, this book is painful and shocking to read. It was my neighbours who were killed in the Greysteel killings. The lack of remorse in one of the accounts published here makes it even more painful. One would wish to protect those bereaved by these men from reading some of their proud, unrepentant statements. It has also, no doubt, been a difficult book to produce. Spending long hours immersed in such terrible stories casts a deep shadow over one’s own life. Colin Crawford has brought these stories into the public domain as a result of remaining in these shadows, without distancing himself from those he interviewed, and without disowning his human connection to them. This is a great risk to take, and no doubt some will condemn him for it. Although the analysis in this book will not be palatable to many, it is nonetheless important that, as a result of Crawford’s efforts, we can know a little more about the hidden side of loyalism, and the perspectives of those who have killed out of loyalty. This goes some way to filling a gap in existing published material. Bowyer Bell, on the topic of documentation and analysis of loyalism, wrote: Such [a] history is especially difficult because increasingly the lethal loyalists were so few, so haltingly structured, so transient

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and inarticulate, and thus, almost always beyond analytical reach. (Bowyer Bell, 1993: 300) This work goes some way to addressing that shortfall within the burgeoning material on Northern Ireland. In terms of the corresponding gap in the documentation on state terror Jeffrey Sluka points out: while there is now a massive literature on antistate terrorism, state terror has been neglected by academics, the media and governments. The reasons for this have been more political and ideological than empirical. (Sluka, 2000: 1) It is only through improving our understanding of the experience of all the citizens of Northern Ireland, and by including all shades of political opinion in political and historical documentation and dialogue, that lasting peace can be achieved.

Marie Smyth Washington DC November 2002

Marie Smyth is CEO of the Institute for Conflict Research in Northern Ireland, a Lecturer in School of Policy Studies, University of Ulster and a Jennings Randolph Senior Fellow at the United States Institute of Peace in Washington DC.

1

Introduction to the Conflict in Northern Ireland

800 YEARS OF TROUBLED HISTORY Relationships between Britain and Ireland have been historically characterised by conflict and discord. A comparative peace had been established by the turn of the twentieth century when Ireland was an integral part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and was democratically represented at Westminster, in common with Scotland and Wales. However, Irish ‘Home Rule’, or independence from Britain, was always high on the (Catholic) Irish political agenda. The First World War (1914–18) involved a conflict between Germany, and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. Thousands of Irish men joined (British) Irish and British regiments, serving with distinction in the allied trenches. The Irish population at that time were described as being ‘never more loyal to Britain’ as the kingdom united in war. This was the unlikely background to the Easter Rising in Dublin (1916), involving the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) and IRA. The IRA occupied the main post office in Connolly Street, Dublin, proclaiming Irish freedom from Britain. Irish citizens on the streets of Dublin found it difficult to comprehend the bizarre events unfolding before them. There is no doubt that this ‘rising’ did not enjoy popular support with the Irish people, and 300 civilians, 60 ‘rebels’ and 130 British troops were killed in a level of conflict not witnessed in Ireland for 100 years. Many jeered the IRA men as they were paraded through the streets as prisoners. But the rising was not as it seemed; the rising had been predicated upon the need for a ‘blood sacrifice’, in the cause of a United Ireland. The equation was psychological in nature, a gesture of rebellion, in the full realisation of the likely draconian British military response. And in this regard Britain did not disappoint the strategists of the IRA and IRB. To gain sufficient popular support the IRA had to occupy the role of ‘victim’ and the British that of the ‘oppressor’. This simple strategy was employed, in the certainty of its success. The British military establishment was challenged by the poets, writers and visionaries within 1

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Introduction

the ranks of the IRA and IRB as the tenure of British rule in Ireland became increasingly untenable. Not for the first time in Ireland it was the prison issue which marshalled popular support for the rebels. The leaders of the rising were shot by firing squad including James Connolly who was executed while sitting on a chair, unable to stand with an ankle wound. The IRA prisoners, who were treated as ordinary criminal offenders, began protesting for ‘political status’ or ‘prisoner of war status’. IRA prisoners were both being shot and brutalised as public sympathy swayed away from the British and towards the IRA. The IRA’s strategy was, demonstrably, working, with a direct correlation between escalating British oppression and support for the rebel IRA. In 1917 the first of the protesting IRA prisoners died through forcible feeding while on hunger strike. The London Daily Express commented, in relation to this single gruesome event: ‘Ashe’s funeral has made 100,000 Sinn Feiners [i.e. IRA supporters] out of 100,000 constitutional nationalists.’ The centrality of the prison/prisoner issue in Irish conflicts was, and not for the last time, being demonstrated. A second IRA prisoner, Terence McSwiney, a former mayor of Cork died after 73 days on hunger strike during 1920, in Brixton prison, London. This had, again not for the last time, drawn international attention to the cause of Irish protesting prisoners, significantly alienating the Catholic church and much of the Catholic Irish population. The conflict in Ireland had in the meantime deteriorated in a virtual guerrilla war between the IRA, the Royal Irish Constabulary and the Black and Tans, a ruthless auxiliary British force. The vast majority of the ordinary Irish people were caught between these warring groups. But as British oppression and reprisal became more extreme there was little doubt where Irish loyalty would lie. Britain’s ‘Irish problem’ was spiralling out of control, and causing embarrassment nationally and internationally, as liberal pressure mounted for some form of political compromise. In the ‘Protestant North’ of Ireland, however, unionists and loyalists organised to resist Irish Home Rule. The UVF was formed and by 1912 its membership numbered some 100,000 men. The unionist and loyalists in the North of Ireland at that time had the support of the British political and military establishment. Addressing assembled UVF men Bonar Law, leader of the British Conservative Party, pledged that ‘they will not be wanting help from across the Channel when the hour of battle comes’. A retired English General

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3

of the Indian Army was placed in command of the UVF, the appointment having been arranged by Field Marshall Lord Roberts. In 1914 gun running into the northern ports of Bangor and Larne resulted in the importation of 24,000 rifles and 3,000,000 rounds of ammunition, augmenting the existing 16,000 rifles. The British Army in Ireland when asked about their disposition to ‘coerce Ulster’, i.e. engage the UVF militarily, replied that they’d rather face dismissal. The event was immortalised as the ‘Curragh Mutiny’. An Anglo-Irish Treaty was signed in December 1921, by an Irish delegation representing the IRA and the British cabinet. Michael Collins, Commander of the IRA, reportedly commented having signed the Treaty, ‘I have signed my death warrant.’ This observation proved to be prophetic. The Treaty provided for independence for 26 of the 32 counties of Ireland, which was to be called the ‘Irish Free State’ and not the Irish Republic, which the IRA had fought for. The term ‘Ulster’ wasn’t to be mentioned during the talks; instead the ‘six counties’ could opt out of the newly created Free State. Effectively 26 counties in southern Ireland were given relative independence from Britain, whereas Ulster, reflecting the (Protestant) majority will of the people, elected to remain British. Significantly the signing of the Treaty caused a split within the IRA which has been discernible in the ranks of republicans from that time to the present. Collins’ men in the ‘old IRA’ became part of the Free State Army, while an anti-treaty IRA was formed determined to fight on for total Irish independence from Britain. Ireland had been deeply destabilised by events across what was by then the Ulster border, with 30 people killed in a single night. Catholic refugees streamed out of Ulster and into the new Free State. Collins, now caught in the double bind of having to accept the integrity of the new state, but wishing to defend nationalists in the north made his ‘could not stand idly by’ speech. This was a prelude to his arming those who were by now his enemies, the anti-treaty IRA in the north, for the protection of Catholics in the new state. The Irish Civil War broke out in 1922 between what was now the Irish Army and the anti-treaty IRA. During eight days of fighting in Dublin 60 people were killed and 300 wounded. Collins now engaged the anti-treaty IRA with the same ferocity as he had the British. In a history replete with irony he procured 10,000 rifles from the British and recruited into the Irish Army former professionals from the Royal Irish Constabulary, and the British and American armies. On 22

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August 1922 Michael Collins was killed by the anti-treaty IRA while travelling in his open-top Rolls-Royce car, his armed escort unable to save him. The war escalated as the Irish Prime Minister William Cosgrave assumed power determined to stamp his authority on the ‘rebels’. An Emergency Power Bill was introduced allowing for IRA men taken in arms to be shot. Seventy-seven executions were carried out during the following seven months. Thirty-four IRA men were executed in January 1923 alone in nine different Irish towns. Eamon de Valera eventually gave the order, endorsed by the anti-treaty IRA, ‘soldiers of the rearguard, dump arms’. ‘Other means must be sought to safeguard the nation’s right.’ The Irish Civil War was over, however the anti-treaty IRA’s war was far from forgotten. In 1921 the then IRA had agreed a ‘partitionist settlement’ with Britain separating the Irish and Catholic south and the mainly Protestant and British north. Some 75 years later, in 1998, 94.4 per cent of the population of the Republic of Ireland voted for the Good Friday Agreement predicated upon a partitionist settlement and an internal resolution of the Northern Ireland conflict. This could be seen as a distinctly unsympathetic disposition in the Republic toward those in the Provisional IRA, and others, fighting a terrorist campaign for ‘Irish freedom’, or Irish independence from Britain. (Alternatively this may have reflected a desire to limit any future conflict to the north.) Again in 1998 Sinn Fein, the political representatives of the Provisional IRA, embraced both the peace process and a partitionist settlement, apparently in direct contravention of the IRA’s own Standing Orders. In the Sinn Fein Ard Fheis convened in May 1998 96 per cent, 331 of the 350 delegates, voted in favour of the Belfast Agreement, permitting Sinn Fein members to sit in the Northern Ireland Assembly. In so doing they embraced the reality accepted by Michael Collins some 77 years earlier. Almost one million Protestants and countless others with allegiance to Britain in Northern Ireland would not be coerced into a united Ireland. At the heart of the conflict in Northern Ireland is the constitutional question. For the previous 30 years the Protestant community as a whole had argued that any change to the constitutional status of Northern Ireland can only be achieved through the democratic wishes of its people. Had the north been forcibly subsumed into an all-Ireland state the UDA/UFF would have immediately assumed a total war posture involving a massive escalation in the conflict. This scenario delusionally pursued by the IRA had always been unthinkable, precisely

The IRA and the UDA/UFF Since 1969

5

as the voting patterns confirmed. The current peace process and the resolution of Northern Ireland’s political conflict, politically and within Northern Ireland, remains as the singular way forward. THE ROLES OF THE IRA AND OF THE UDA/UFF IN THE CONFLICT SINCE 1969 The IRA’s 1922 war in Ireland was manifestly political, as a war of independence against the British, or as a civil war fought between pro- and anti-treaty IRA factions. The 1969–2002 Ulster conflict was infinitely more complex, initially involving the relative social oppression of the Catholic minority (pre-1969), civil rights, and a disproportionate unionist/loyalist response, culminating in sectarian attacks upon the Catholic community. This saw the re-emergence of the IRA, and the first political and sectarian murders. (The UDA version of this history is considered in the text.) The interest groups to this conflict were multifarious, and often fickle in their allegiance. These included the British and Irish States, unionists and loyalists, republicans and nationalists, Protestants and Catholics, the respective armies and police forces, special operations groups and intelligence services. The paramilitary groups included broadly the loyalist UDA, the UVF and the republican IRA, both the Official IRA and the Provisional IRA. The war operated at a number of levels involving both loyalist and republican terrorism, state infiltration, agents, spies and informers, sectarian violence and murder, random murder and selective targeting, psychopathic murder and torture, criminal activity, corruption, state oppression, state-sponsored terror, alleged collusion, and state policies of ‘shooting to kill’. All these important themes will be addressed in this book, upon the basis of how they were encountered and experienced by individual UDA volunteers in Ulster’s ‘dirty war’. Of the many books written about the Northern Ireland conflict most attempt to provide for historical and explanatory contexts usually within a republican or British framework. These are usually books which attempt to engage with the global or macro issues and offer analysis and commentary at that level. In my own research and writing this has proven less than helpful, serving to generalise a conflict which is infinitely complex, and precisely as variable as those who became involved in it, be they loyalist or republican. This book will break from literary convention in that it will move from the specific, actual human experience in circumstances of conflict, to

6

Introduction

the general, the social and political context as determined by the given experiences. Accordingly, this work will provide for a minimal contextualisation, into substantially considering the life experiences of individual ‘actors’ caught up in the conflict. Finally, upon the basis of this presented material, a historical analysis of the UDA/UFF war will be considered. This approach has been utilised to both individualise and humanise the experience of conflict as it impacted upon essentially ordinary people at war. While republican ideology has been articulated and disseminated by Sinn Fein/IRA and their public relations, and ‘prisoner of war’ department, the motivation of the loyalist combatants remains something which is largely unexplained. In the early 1970s loyalist ideology could be described as a resolve to remain British and to resist, at all costs, the violently enforced inclusion of the Ulster state into a united Ireland. Many loyalists viewed Catholics as their natural enemy, and found it difficult to distinguish between Catholics and IRA members. They currently point to the massive electoral support of IRA/Sinn Fein (relative to the minimal political support enjoyed by the political representatives of the loyalist paramilitaries) in vindication of such a historical disposition. The loyalist paramilitaries took the view that the Protestant population generally, and their security forces in particular, were under lethal threat from the IRA, and they clearly held Catholics in general as complicit. The loyalist paramilitary ideology is deeply embedded within (if unconsciously) the Protestant religion, and a sense of Britishness, which is probably one of the more traditional forms of Britishness remaining in the United Kingdom’s increasingly multi-cultural society. Both the Protestant work ethic, and a ‘standing on your own two feet’ mentality, are central to this ideology. The cultural emphasis is placed upon the individual, and individual responsibility, ultimately between the individual and his or her God. The Protestant religion reflects this ethos, being hugely diverse, with the congregation of the given churches often holding much democratic power, again emphasising the significance and rights and responsibilities of the individual. The Catholic church alternatively lays much greater emphasis upon ‘the collective’, interdependency, and unquestioning acceptance of both the (Roman Catholic) church and its hierarchy. Within this model dependency is encouraged through the confessional, a belief in the church’s power to forgive, and purgatory, where entry into heaven can be facilitated by prayer, mass and contributions made to the church. The Protestant version of religion

The IRA and the UDA/UFF Since 1969

7

enjoins a somewhat harsher reality, without the possibility of earthly intercession. In all of this, Protestant history has been based upon dissent, while the Catholic experience has been consistently characterised by cultural solidarity and continuity. These philosophical and ideological differences have carried clear but largely unarticulated consequences for the organisation and functioning of the IRA and UDA respectively. The IRA is a highly disciplined and coherent ‘secret army’, while the lethal loyalists ‘were few in number, haltingly structured, and transient to the point of (usually) being beyond analytical reach’ (Bowyer Bell, 1979). Their value base was deeply influenced by the Old Testament view of natural justice and ‘an eye for an eye’, and in this the victims of the IRA were repeatedly avenged by the killing of ordinary Catholics. (However, the loyalist UDA’s operational strategy changed dramatically during the late 1980s and 1990s.) The loyalist paramilitaries were for most of the 1970s and 1980s unapologetically involved in sectarian murder, not uncommonly killing their fellow Protestants, mistaken for Catholics. These killings were not, at any time, authorised by the central leadership of the UDA, again reflecting individuals’ freedom to act at will, without authorisation, and without sanction. Loyalists, unlike republicans, rarely think or speak of ‘an ideology’ per se. Rather, the ideology is assumed, implicit and understood. It is also graphically represented in the militaristic and menacing murals, often depicting doomsday war scenes, which pervade many working-class loyalist areas. Ulster, British, Scottish, UDA, UFF, UVF and Red Hand Commando (RHC) flags also festoon these same areas, reassuring a population as to an identity perceived to be fundamentally under threat. While the paramilitary loyalists emphasise their Britishness, at every opportunity the threat of a British withdrawal during the 1970s was responded to by the UDA through detailed planning for a Unilateral Declaration of Independence. This would have involved a realignment of the Ulster border, the creation of a new and overwhelmingly Protestant state, and no doubt a state of war with the Irish Republic. For the paramilitary loyalists within the UDA/UFF this remains an option of last resort. Republicans would wish to have us believe that their war was driven by ideology, while the loyalists didn’t lay claim to such grandiose motivation. The reality is men and women only become involved in conflict when that conflict becomes personal. This point is usually reached when a specific trigger, or triggers, connect with

8

Introduction

an intensity of human emotion and passion which is experienced powerfully enough to neutralise the prohibition toward violence, and even the instinct of self-preservation. In my extensive professional experience the terrorist is not someone driven by political ideology or other ‘noble’ motivation, but much more usually an ordinary person, driven beyond his or her point of tolerance by extraordinary circumstance. While the war in Northern Ireland clearly had a pathology of sectarian tension and conflict, its connection with the Irish War of Independence (1916–21) and the Civil War was erroneous, and has proven unsustainable. Notwithstanding the IRA’s methodology of conflict was drawn from that period and largely determined the course of the contemporary troubles. However, of much more significance is the question of the motivation of the individual ‘actors’ who choose to enact whichever methodology of violence in the name of their cause, be it loyalist or republican. This book attempts to address precisely that question, from a loyalist and more specifically a UDA/UFF perspective. Under what circumstances do ordinary men and women commit themselves to a paramilitary cause and a willingness to kill, be killed, tortured, or imprisoned, possibly for life? I have found generalised assumptions and constructions in this matter distracting from the individual truth. Why does one man in a street resolve to kill for his cause, while 20 others don’t? To understand this we must develop our understanding of the said individual or individuals, and of the totality of his or her circumstances during the currency of active conflict. In attempting to further understand these complex issues this book considers the oral histories or biographies of loyalist UDA/UFF volunteers throughout their campaign from 1969 to 1994. It is the contention of this volume that understanding the motivation of individuals involved in terrorist or counter-terrorist conflict gives greater insight into the nature of terrorist warfare, or more simply the social psychology of individuals whose lives are touched by war and murderous violence. It is suggested that this work takes us as close as possible to the front line of UDA/UFF experience of conflict, considering as it does the life histories of the combatants involved in it. This is a history of the UDA/UFF as told by the active volunteers of these respective organisations. To my knowledge this is a unique approach to the understanding and analysis of the Northern Ireland conflict, and its appeal is in its individual human quality. Having

The IRA and the UDA/UFF Since 1969

9

established such a basis for the book, this material will be contextualised in a social history of the UDA/UFF from 1969 to 1994, and a critical analysis of UDA/UFF strategy and tactics during that period. The post-ceasefire history of the organisation will also be considered in the conclusion and postscript, highlighting the contemporary volatility of what is now a highly fragmented and dangerous grouping.

2

Researching the UDA

THE PROBATION SERVICE, LONG KESH AND POLITICAL PRISONERS My family owned several businesses and properties in Belfast and I lived in large houses in the affluent south of the city during most of my childhood. I was educated in the genteel Inchmarlo Preparatory School, south Belfast, before progressing to ‘public’ secondary school, the Royal Belfast Academical Institution. My family took a very relaxed view of my education as I was expected to serve in, and eventually manage, the family grocery businesses. I left ‘Inst’ prematurely (at 15, without qualifications) and without regrets, until, that is, my then girlfriend (and now wife) gained academic qualifications and a place at college. That provoked a competitive academic frenzy which exists to this day (I recently registered for my fourth higher degree). At 17 I left the family business, returned to school, progressed to art college and eventually joined the civil service as we, the educated but not professionally qualified, tended to do. I was appointed as an executive officer (grade II) to the Department of Social Security. This was a newly created government department, which in those early years of the troubles, 1969–71 was often confused, in the public mind at least, with MI5. As a visiting officer assessing claims from elderly claimants I quickly demonstrated my ability to award ‘special needs grants’ in complete opposition to the culture of the department. It was during this time that I discovered that I had some skills in working with people. In 1972 I joined the Probation Service and was seconded for professional training to Croydon College, south London. During my final placement in 1974, with the South East London Probation Service, I received a telephone call while in the Eldridge Room, in the Mint Walk office, Croydon. It was the chief probation officer from Belfast, ‘we’ve got a job for you’. ‘It’s Long Kesh, near Lisburn’ (Northern Ireland). Long Kesh was the detention centre and prison camp for IRA and loyalist political prisoners with a brief but already notorious history. My probation colleagues in Mint Walk were genuinely horrified as I began to feel as if I’d been sentenced to some 10

Long Kesh and Political Prisoners

11

terrible fate during my absence from Northern Ireland. One of the assistant chief probation officers, whom I knew in Croydon, touchingly, offered me a prime job in Croydon, within one hour of the call from Belfast. But I’d been given a mission by my superiors in Belfast and I accepted it without question. I had some experience of prisons while working in London, from the closed cells of Brixton to Holloway, where one client held there on remand had no memory of it, such were the drugs she was given. Long Kesh was different, set in a desolate landscape with army patrols, guard dogs, search lights and watch towers, and low-flying helicopters. This was more akin to a scene from Vietnam. I was dispatched to the welfare office in ‘Phase Five’ of the prison which held some 500 IRA and loyalist prisoners in segregated compounds. I remember walking to the office that first morning, past the boundary walls, the security gates, the watch towers, the high wire and barbed wire compound fences, thinking ‘war crimes’. These were the ‘men behind the wire’ of legion and history, and I had ended up right in the middle of them. I was immediately aware that this was the epicentre of the Northern Ireland conflict, and that what happened behind these walls carried consequences for everyone. At first I was appalled that so many men were confined to compounds, or as the IRA prisoners accurately described them, cages, without apparent recreational facilities, or work. As the prisoners stared at me menacingly, an unknown stranger, through the wire fences, my mental associations were with a concentration camp. I questioned, how could we do this to people? To the outsider Long Kesh was a deeply threatening and frightening environment. In the event my first impressions gave way to a very different understanding of the compound system of Long Kesh. The various compounds were, by and large, run as benign communities within which life operated as normally as possible, within the confines of a prison. Prisoners had almost complete autonomy and independence from the prison and institutional forces. The prisoners had ‘special category’ or political prisoner status, and enjoyed the considerable privileges that went with it. The could wear their own clothes, receive extra visits and food parcels. All of these privileges served in maintaining the prisoners sense of self-respect and dignity, their independence from the prison, physically and psychologically, and helped in maintaining contact with the outside world. In short special category status and the compound system helped to avoid many of the devastating personal and interpersonal consequences of institu-

12

Researching the UDA

tional criminal incarceration. There was very limited prisoner–prison officer contact, and the individual supervision of prisoners, providing for the opportunity to degrade and punish prisoners, as in criminal systems, couldn’t even be attempted. As for prison work, this wouldn’t have been acceptable to the political prisoners in any event, who instead had developed a profitable handicraft industry. In those days (1974–79) the prison welfare department both from choice, and of necessity, operated independently from the prison service, in truth maximising distance from it. Credible relationships were maintained with all the paramilitary groups extending to friendships with both the loyalist and republican leaderships. Certain members of the Prison Welfare Department were by now (1974) firmly embedded in the covert paramilitary world and in paramilitary politics. Cordial relationships between some of the loyalist and republican leaderships already existed in the prison, which was all the more remarkable given the state of the war in the outside community. The stark choice which faced loyalist and republican prisoners, facing each other in compounds only yards apart, had been live together, or die together. Intergroup ‘non-aggression pacts’, and ‘no conflict policies’ had already been agreed, to ensure the survival of individual prisoners caught in the wrong place, at the wrong time. This was the beginning of a procedural resolution of conflict between the warring factions with an obvious potential for development. There was a realisation that if this could happen in the nucleus of the conflict in Long Kesh, among the so called extremes, it could be exported outside, into the community. A paramilitary Camp Council was formed involving the most senior members of all the paramilitary groups at that time: the Official IRA, Provisional IRA, the Irish Republican Socialist Party (IRSP – a splinter republican grouping), the UVF and RHC, the UDA and UFF. They discussed ‘matters of common interest’, and even united in protest actions over food and visiting arrangements. The two most powerful paramilitary leaders in the prison, by a very long stretch, were Gusty Spence of the UVF, representing loyalists, and the Provisional’s leader David Morley, representing republican interests. There was a mutual desire to replicate the paramilitary talks on matters of common interest inside Long Kesh, ‘to the outside’, among the representatives of the same groups in the community. This was a very high risk project but it was pursued regardless with considerable commitment. (I know of at least one loyalist shot dead because of his involvement.) The welfare of the prisoners was always high

Long Kesh and Political Prisoners

13

on the Camp Council’s agenda, and a Downtown Welfare Office was proposed (1975) to include conference facilities, to centralise the various operations of the prisoner welfare groups, loyalist and republican. The office was to be manned by ‘an accepted probation officer’, who would offer professional assistance and support to the said groups. That officer was also to maintain regular contact with the prison’s welfare department, and through him or her the Camp Council, in an attempt to provide for an ‘all inclusive process’. What was being proposed was an embryonic peace process. The proposal was at first well received by the Northern Ireland Office but eventually it insisted upon having a role. This had always been a fragile, ultra-sensitive and potentially dangerous project, significantly under paramilitary control. The involvement of an official government agency was unacceptable to all sides, including the Prison Welfare Department, which ironically worked under, but detached from, the same Northern Ireland Office. The underlying reality was the H Blocks of the Maze were at an advanced stage of planning, and the compound system which had created the possibility of interparamilitary group relationships in the first place was itself doomed. I experienced Long Kesh, subsequently renamed the Maze, to be a unique and fascinating environment. I resolved to research it, in part to further my understanding, but also to record the lessons which I was convinced could be learned. I enrolled for a research Master’s degree with the Cranfield Institute (1976) and published the MSc thesis in 1979. (Published in the university sense, as in made publicly available in the Cranfield library, rather than commercially.) The principal findings of the research were (Crawford, 1999a): 1

Reconviction rates. The reconviction rates for special category or political prisoners was found to be some 12 per cent. That is, of those special category prisoners released from prison, 12 per cent had been reconvicted and returned to prison within a two year period. This was actually a remarkable finding, as it compares with reconviction rates with criminal offender groups of some 70 per cent to 90 per cent. This leads to one of two conclusions. Either a) the compound system as a humane containment penal strategy was some 500 per cent more effective that conventional criminal systems or b) the prisoners contained in the compound system were not criminal offenders in any conventional sense.

14

2

3

4

Researching the UDA

Criminalisation. My research established that criminalisation policy involved a dehumanising and brutal regime which served to alienate prisoners, their families and host communities. Escalation of conflict. My study predicted that criminalisation policy would result in an escalation of the prison protests, hunger strikes, and ultimately in the level of conflict in Northern Ireland. The study also found that criminalisation policy also brought to an end the concrete resolution conflict developments between the warring paramilitary groups.

In 1979 the findings of the research were published in the media, which was clearly in the interests of all the paramilitary groups anxious to regain political status for their members. Sadly the implications of the findings were substantially ignored as prison officers were murdered, the prison protest intensified and the conflict in the community escalated. Northern Ireland seemed to be verging towards civil war as the news broke of the death of each of the ten hunger strikers who died during 1981. Going public with the research findings carried obvious implications and I resigned from the Probation Board for Northern Ireland, before being pushed. I was a career probation officer with little interest in other fields of social work. I was flattered to be offered jobs in the fields of both community work and social work but these were of secondary interest. Eventually I was offered a lecturing appointment in the Ulster Polytechnic (now University of Ulster) at Jordanstown. But this was something of a shot in the dark as I wasn’t trained to teach, and I had no real interest in teaching. In fact I had left art college prematurely in late 1960s precisely to avoid a career in teaching. But the holidays were attractive and the polytechnic theoretically offered the opportunity for further research. In the event my research activity went into almost terminal decline given both the culture and expectations within the Jordanstown social work department. In short I found myself displaced, cut off from my probation career, the paramilitary world, and almost completely from research. I had maintained some contact with individual loyalists and republicans but that part of my life was over, or so I thought. Some 15 years after leaving the Maze, during February 1995, I received an unexpected call from Dublin. It was Tim O’Connor, Department of Foreign Affairs, then assigned to the Forum of Peace and Reconciliation, who informed me that I had been mandated by ‘loyalist prisoners and former prisoners’ to represent them and their

Long Kesh and Political Prisoners

15

interests at the Dublin Forum. I was being offered the position of, ironically, a special category observer. My role at the Forum was to attend all meetings of the Forum, contribute to the proceedings and report back to the PUP (UVF). My task was to advocate the early release of loyalist political prisoners as part of the peace process. My disposition in this matter had been correctly assumed. None of the loyalist groups had informed me of this nomination. I made contact with the UVF to be told that Gusty Spence had personally put my name forward. When I made contact with Spence he was quite nonplussed and seizing the initiative used what was obviously a well rehearsed line, ‘Colin, an opportunity has arisen for you to serve your country.’ ‘We want you to’ etc. However, the Forum’s remit for me was to act on behalf of loyalist prisoners and former prisoners, not exclusively the UVF. Accordingly I arranged a meeting with representatives of the UDA/UFF, who predictably knew nothing about the nomination in question. Within an hour of that discussion I received a reply: ‘I’m to instruct you that you have a mandate to act on behalf of UDA/UFF prisoners and former prisoners at the Dublin Forum.’ The prisoners clearly hadn’t been consulted, but rather decisions had been taken on their behalf, but I knew that there would be no dissension. This reconnection with the loyalist paramilitaries lead to further research, and the publication of Criminals or Defenders? (1999a), and to the subsequent enquiry which resulted in this book. The idea for this current text derived from a conversation with John White (Castle Buildings, Stormont, 1998). John, then chairman of the UDP, told me that, in the light of the adverse publicity given over to the loyalist paramilitaries, he’d like to write a book about the UDA men he knew. In the event we were both acquainted with many of the same people, so I realised immediately what he had in mind. But also perhaps even more than John, as a welfare officer in the Maze, I knew their stories. I knew why some of the men had ended up alone and isolate, estranged from their families and even from themselves. I knew why others had emotional and mental problems and why they used drugs to escape the panic attacks, flashbacks and the uncontrollable tremors. And I knew why some of the most decent men I had worked with ended up killing themselves. The common denominator in all of this, the shadow under which each lived, was, as they termed it, ‘the war’. The project would take the form of an empirically based study which would convey the realities of loyalism, and the UDA/UFF in particular, from the inside. I was fully aware that this

16

Researching the UDA

would stand in direct contradiction to the more conventional stereotype of the UDA and UFF. I thought that it was an excellent idea so I encouraged John in this proposed undertaking, offering my full support as a writer and researcher. John then uttered the fateful words, ‘I’ve been thinking. Maybe you could do it for us?’ The paramilitary loyalists didn’t have too many friends, academics or writers to call upon, the UDA in particular didn’t have anyone to call upon. So I’d just been given another ‘mission’. I realised from the outset that this one was going to take years. John had known all along that I would undertake it, and that was down to one simple fact, there was nobody else. We also knew that if this version of history was not documented now, no meaningful record of this paramilitary group and its history would remain. SPECIFIC METHODOLOGY My earlier research and publication was concerned with scientific social enquiry, involving interviews with larger numbers of respondents, statistical data, analysis and quantification. In all of this, however, there was an increasing preoccupation with the life histories of the individual paramilitary members who were interviewed. The questionnaires and the box-ticking became increasingly irrelevant, given the richness of oral history accounts of people who became individually involved in the Northern Ireland conflict. As each was so diverse, unique and individual, it became increasingly difficult to make any assertions or generalisations about paramilitary loyalists. Clearly there was corruption, criminality, sectarian murder, infiltration and gangsterism, etc., and all of this informs the stereotype of the loyalist paramilitary. However, these descriptions are applicable to what was often the leadership of the UDA/UFF in particular, and tell us little about that constituency of the ordinary loyalist volunteers whose war was primarily perceived of as being fought against the IRA, and not the murder of innocent Catholics (at least after 1989). This element within paramilitary loyalism had its equivalent and mirror image within the ranks of the IRA; sadly, blatant sectarian murderers were common to both sides. In the event the central achievement of this book is to examine the spectrum of volunteers from the sectarian murderers to the soldiers involved in the selective targeting of ‘hard targets’ (the IRA and known republicans).

Specific Methodology

17

The men who agreed to take part in this research were interviewed in the community, usually in the smoky back rooms of UDA welfare offices. However, a substantial number were also conducted in the wings of UDA H Block 7, HMP Maze. Arrangements for access had been made on a weekly basis, extending to approximately one year, as part of a UDP ‘political’ delegation (1999/2000). The role of this delegation was to support UDA/UFF prisoners prior to their release into the community. This was fully consistent with what I was doing in that my interventions increased the men’s self-esteem and sense of worth. In fact, without exception there was a degree of gratitude that someone had bothered to take the trouble to get their side of the story. The respondents were usually interviewed at least on two or three occasions, having been informed from the outset that the resultant transcripts may be published in book form. All the interviewees volunteered to participate in the research, largely because their cooperation had been requested by John White. I hadn’t fully realised the significance of being in White’s company as I entered the UDA/UFF prison wings. The extent of this was revealed when I was acting as a character witness for one of the men some years later. A defence solicitor had been curious as to the nature of my involvement. He had asked the man in question if he trusted me. He replied ‘Yes.’ The solicitor then asked why? ‘Because he came in [to the Maze] with John White.’ ‘And that meant you could trust him?’ ‘Completely, 100 per cent.’ ‘You’d trust him with your life?’ ‘Yes.’ I had wanted to interview as many men as possible in the UDA H Block, possibly 20 or 30 of the 80-odd prisoners there. I had interviewed about ten men and expressed my interest in seeing more, to be told, ‘Colin, there are only seven of us on this wing’ (containing some 20 men). By ‘us’ he was referring to the ‘soldiers’, those who had become the politically motivated gunmen of the UDA/UFF. To give me an example he nodded over at a tall and obviously physically fit man playing snooker. ‘You see him.’ ‘Yes.’ ‘He got drunk at a party and killed a police officer. I really don’t think you’d want to see him.’ There was hierarchy among the prisoners of which I had been oblivious, between the various elements, which could be loosely described as the politically motivated ‘soldiers’, those men imprisoned because of usually unauthorised sectarian offences, and those found guilty of non-political criminal offences. The other remarkable thing was the gunmen tended to be smaller and nondescript, relative to their counterparts who were unmistakably

18

Researching the UDA

‘hard men’. They were also quiet and ordinarily decent people, who kept themselves to themselves. I had noticed precisely the same phenomena when working with IRA prisoners. The gunmen or the soldiers on both sides are precisely those whom you wouldn’t suspect, while the obvious hard men appear at the fringes, often having committed sectarian and criminal offences. I had unintentionally drawn attention to this hierarchy, and there is little doubt that this caused enormous jealousy and resentment. However, I enjoyed the absolute protection of the organisation, and at certain times I had cause to be thankful. Regardless of where I went the ‘politicals’ were never too far away, but I hadn’t understood why before then. I had been surrounded by some very dangerous men, and protected by those who were even more dangerous. Initially it had been my intention to tape-record interviews, and I couldn’t believe my luck when I was allowed to take a tape recorder through prison security, into the H Block. I spent the first few weeks in the Maze simply playing snooker and talking to the men as the opportunity arose. I was trying to blend in as best I could, capitalising on the fact that a new face in prison always arouses some interest. I decided to interview the CO (UDA/UFF Commanding Officer) of the H Block, who was, without doubt, Johnny Adair. I went into Adair’s cell to conduct the interview, and he was obviously in an agitated state. He jumped repeatedly out of his chair to shout instructions down the wing, or to enquire who was or who wasn’t back from a visit. I explained the rationale for the interview facing Adair’s penetrating stare. Then the fateful event, I produced the tape recorder and Adair jumped back so quickly the chair was knocked flying. Adair was so angry he was speechless as he pointed in turn to the tape recorder, and then to me open mouthed. People started to gather at the entrance of the cell, having heard the noise made by the chair. The tension was palpable, and it was between Adair and me, in his cell, in the centre of a UDA/UFF H Block. John White came in and ushered Adair out of his cell. He came back to explain. Johnny Adair had been set up through conversations with police officers which were covertly tape recorded, and used in evidence against him. He was subsequently sentenced to 16 years’ imprisonment for ‘directing terrorism’. Ever since that, understandably perhaps, Adair had been paranoid about tape recorders, and the people who used them. The research instrument was changed accordingly from taped interviews to interviews and note-taking with additional material recorded on tape, in the car, outside the prison.

Specific Methodology

19

I had known about how the evidence was gathered against Adair, but stupidly enough, I hadn’t made the connection. Tape recording in this context was also, as I increasingly realised, simply too dangerous, potentially risking everyone’s personal security. Maybe that’s why the prison authorities allowed me to take the tape recorder in, in the first place. I hadn’t taken account of the fact that it could be impounded going back out, so vital confidentially could have been critically compromised. Adair’s response toward me had been vindicated. Once the interviews were written up they were returned to the men for the purposes of accuracy, and to prevent incrimination. This often involved a process of mediation until the final text was agreed as both factually correct and authentic. Some of those interviewed wished to remain anonymous, others were aware that they could be identified through their stories, while a minority wished to be named. The interviews undertaken in the Maze prison helped to provide perhaps the bulk of the material in this text, and proved vital in further understanding the nature of the UDA/UFF war.

3

The UDA/UFF: History, Organisation and Structure

A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE UDA/UFF The UDA has been, and is, one of the largest paramilitary organisations in the Western world, which had an estimated membership of 50,000 in 1974 (at the height of the troubles) and a current membership of some 20,000. However, the history of the UDA, and its role in the Northern Ireland conflict, has largely evaded academic or research enquiry. This in itself is interesting, particularly in the light of the volumous literature written in respect of the IRA. Clearly the IRA can be understood and contextualised within the Irish War of Independence and the Irish Civil War, 1916–22, affording it a historical legitimacy. From the outset, therefore, during 1969–71 its campaign was viewed as comprehensible and rational. Conversely, the role of the paramilitary loyalists was not widely understood as they were viewed, and portrayed, as acting against the very British state of which they claimed to be a part. Political developments in Northern Ireland in 1970 and in particular the emergence of a militarily effective Provisional IRA were of critical concern to the loyalist and unionist communities. By the end of June 1970 one Provisional IRA ‘special operations’ unit had carried out over 40 bombings. In July 1971 the Provisional IRA increased its campaign of terror attempting to provoke further confrontations between Catholics and Protestants at street level. A number of large car bombs exploded in central Belfast mercifully only injuring nine people. In September 1971 a series of explosions over a two-day period across towns in the Province left 39 people injured. Later that month an IRA bomb in a Shankill Road pub killed two (Protestant) men, injuring some 30 others. (Previous IRA bombs in loyalist bars had caused serious injuries but were without fatalities. These were all manifestly sectarian unprovoked attacks.) Later that month (September 1971) an Ulster Defence Association was proposed, to unify the disparate ‘Protestant Defence Associations’. At its inception during 1972 the UDA had very few guns or arms and significantly it was without friends or allies whom it could call upon. There were a few pistols and shotguns, and rifles which in the main 20

A Brief History

21

dated back to the First World War. (Most of these had been part of the consignment brought into Northern Ireland by the Clyde Valley in 1914 for the UVF. Ironically perhaps the guns were to be used to militarily resist Irish unification and the imposition of Dublin rule in the North.) The Provisional IRA had no such difficulty in acquiring guns, guns were brought in from the United States, and more disconcertingly from the Republic of Ireland during 1971. Two ministers of state in the Irish Republic, Charles Haughey and Neil Blaney, were subsequently charged with smuggling arms to the IRA in the North. They were later cleared of the arms offences as their defence council had argued that the guns had been imported as an officially sanctioned operation for the Irish Army (Bowyer Bell, 1979). The actual significance of this cannot be overstated. The UDA and the Protestant community as a whole considered that government ministers of the sovereign government of the Irish Republic conspired in arming terrorists within the sovereign jurisdiction of another country, to kill British soldiers, Protestants, Catholics and innocent civilians more generally. And there was another, more insidious dimension to this officially sanctioned, illegal importation of arms. In 1971 the IRA had two wings operating in Northern Ireland, the Official IRA and the Provisional IRA. The Official IRA were the inheritors of the traditional legacy of the original (1916) IRA with a commitment to socialist and non-sectarian policies. (For example, it had condemned the Provisionals’ manifestly sectarian bombing of the Shankill Road bar in 1971.) The Provisionals had broken away from the Officials in December 1970 because of the Officials’ obsession with parliamentary politics and the subsequent undermining of the basic military role of the Irish Republican Army (Bew and Gillespie, 1993). Relationships between these two IRA factions, both with substantial community support at that time (1971), were extremely strained with the Officials accusing the Provisionals of conducting sectarian warfare. Significantly the more conciliatory Official IRA were not given guns from the south, those guns were quite deliberately delivered into the hands of the more militant and more sectarian Provisional IRA (Bowyer Bell, 1979). This meant that the Provos were immeasurably better equipped than the Official IRA, which was to have a deadly significance for them in the subsequent violent internecine feud between those two organisations. It appeared that Irish government ministers interfered not only in British political difficulties, but in the violent military politics of the IRA itself. While

22

History, Organisation and Structure

this affair, the ‘official’ importation of guns for the Provisional IRA, had clear and tangible consequences – the military arming of a terrorist faction – the psychological and moral consequences were even more profound. It gave, and it was seen to give, the Provisional IRA a sense of political legitimacy in prosecuting its armed struggle. It was the equivalent of, and tantamount to, the British Army arming the loyalist paramilitaries. The implications of this for the loyalists were plain enough, they now faced not only a republican paramilitary force similar to themselves, but an armed terrorist army with logistical and tactical support from the south. This resulted in a dramatic escalation in the IRA’s violence and murder. While the loyalists faced an enormous threat from the Provisional IRA, they were even more unnerved by the attitude of the British government. In November 1971 Harold Wilson the British prime minister (who the loyalists viewed as ‘their’ prime minister) announced a ‘Fifteen Point Plan’ for a solution to the Irish problem. In this Wilson proposed ‘movement toward a United Ireland over a period of 15 years’ (Bew and Gillespie, 1993), which would have secured Irish unification by 1986. This was to involve the notion of ‘Protestant consent’, although the plan failed to provide any explanation of how such Protestant consent would be forthcoming. The UDA’s construction of this policy was quite clear, the British wanted out, and that in the last analysis the loyalists would stand alone. The ‘siege mentality’ and feeling of isolation within loyalism became even more consolidated. However, there was an even more important implication in Wilson’s proclamation, for the Provisional IRA. Wilson’s statement provided it with an inescapable message, ‘the Brits want out’. Accordingly as the UDA saw it the Provisional IRA would conspire to facilitate their departure through murdering British soldiers, police officers and Protestant and Catholic civilians. Its tactics of terrorism, bombings and murder were (for it) both vindicated and rewarded. It was implicitly invited to kill and bomb its way into a united Ireland. All of this provided for the back-drop of the formation and growth of the Ulster Defence Association, and explains why its membership in 1971 numbered an estimated 40,000–50,000 men and women. The UDA was substantially a Protestant army with a remit of defending the British and Protestant community, and Northern Ireland more generally. Traditionally the police reservists, the ‘B Specials’, had provided for this function, but to loyalists’ fury the B

A Brief History

23

Specials were shamed and disbanded in April 1970. This fact had greatly exacerbated the loyalist sense of vulnerability, and feelings of being both unprotected and isolated. In their view both the army and the police had failed them and the single force which loyalists had traditionally depended upon to protect them from the IRA, the B Specials, had been abolished. In many ways the UDA was formed to fill the security vacuum which now existed with police ranks. Even more fundamentally the UDA had been formed as an army of last stand, to fight the civil war in Ulster, which for many loyalists at that time appeared imminent. The British had indirectly and directly presided over a corrupt and discriminatory state, from the inception of the state in 1922 until the outbreak of the conflict in 1969. The sectarian nature of the Ulster state between 1922 and 1969 has been well documented. Northern Ireland had been characterised by discrimination and oppression, unionist and Protestant ascendancy, and institutionalised Catholic disadvantage. While clearly this was fuelled by unionist self-interest, it was also motivated by a fear of the republican enemy within. However, it should have been self-evident in any political analysis that such a sustained period of oppression would have social and political consequences. Northern Ireland was born out of conflict, and the realities of war and the republican threat to the state’s very existence were, in 1969, within living memory. When the IRA war began, with the inevitable bombings and shootings, it was not the unionist establishment who bore the brunt of its offensive, but the loyalist working-class communities, who had no part in the political corruption which had preceded 1969. The loyalist working class in the Shankill perceived themselves to be as deprived as the nationalist working class in the Falls. The loyalists genuinely didn’t understand the nature and basis of the civil rights protests and disturbances. They questioned what civil rights did they have? There was an endemic cultural resistance to understanding genuine Catholic grievance. They were taught to believe, and did believe, that any protest by Catholics was insurrection, a point behind which lay the gunmen of the IRA. Perhaps history was to vindicate such a view. Northern Ireland had been ‘ignored by London, detested by Dublin, and was unknown elsewhere’ (Bowyer Bell, 1979). The success of the IRA campaign in the early days, months and years of the conflict was in direct contrast to the government’s failure to contain it, and to maintain life, law and order. The British position was viewed by loyalists as ambivalent, lacking in political will and

24

History, Organisation and Structure

military commitment. As Bowyer Bell comments of British attitudes toward Ulster in 1969: Fair or not, it was accurate to say that no one in Britain wanted an Irish problem, few know anything about a real Ireland, and fewer wanted their acquaintance broadened …. In point of fact within the establishment clumps of specialists or Arabian tribes, or the history of the Hittites could be more easily found than those conversant with Irish politics. (Bowyer Bell, 1979) A PARAMILITARY ORGANISATION? The Ulster Defence Association is an umbrella organisation, which was formed when all of the highly localised Protestant Defence Associations amalgamated during 1972. These defence associations had been organised throughout Northern Ireland with concentrations in Belfast, Lisburn and mid-Ulster. Consisting of groups that had formed spontaneously in the loyalist community, the associations were by and large open and democratic with the central raison d’être of defence of Protestant areas against republican/IRA attack. The metamorphosis into a larger organisation, the UDA, was fraught with many problems. There were tensions between localised power and control, the ethos of democracy, and the level of local commitment to the aims and objectives of the centralised leadership. There was a particular tension between the principles of democratic organisation and military or paramilitary operation. The concept of central and hierarchical military control was similarly undermined by the organisational history of localised control. While diverse levels of commitment among individual members of an association was unacceptable, it was even more problematic in volunteers in a paramilitary force. From the outset, therefore, as a paramilitary organisation the UDA had serious structural problems, rendering it ineffective at one level as unarmed local defence associations, while at another it became a potentially deadly terrorist organisation. In September 1972 Andy Tyrie was elected supreme commander of the UDA. Although Tyrie’s title suggested a degree of centralised power and control, this could not be realised, given both structural and ideological deficiencies. On the ideological front, there was no real consensus within the organisation on the issue of whether it was prosecuting a proactive

A Parliamentary Organisation?

25

war against the enemies of the union, or if it was a defence association formed simply for the defence of Protestant communities. Certainly a ‘state of readiness’ of sorts was maintained within the UDA. However, the percentage of UDA members who were actually involved in active service at any one time was minimal, and reached no more than perhaps 5 per cent of all members overall. By 1973 it had become apparent that the UDA needed a separate military wing. As a result, later that year the Ulster Freedom Fighters was formed as a special operations group within the UDA, to be deployed in paramilitary activity. The UFF identified its role as that of maintaining a balance of terror. Within the first six months of its formation, from June to November 1973, the UFF were responsible for the deaths of some 20 nationalists, including a Sinn Fein councillor. The structure of the UFF was streamlined and the organisation had a militaristic ethos, with its own operationally independent command structure, yet it was located within the UDA. In name, the UDA was under the control of the supreme commander, and six battalion commanders, who were in charge of each of the six sub-regions of Northern Ireland. These regions were, in turn, internally controlled by company commanders, and subdivided under the supervision of unit leaders. At the bottom of this hierarchy were the UDA’s greatest resource, the ordinary volunteers. These were usually decent and non-criminal local men, although it emerged that the leadership could not always be described in those terms. Figure 1 shows the command structure of the UDA and UFF, and their relationship to one another. Unit leaders normally controlled large housing estates or geographical areas, and were invariably indigenous to the local population. Democratic organisational practices were maintained in some areas, with offices being filled by election, while in other areas, power was seized by the ‘hard men’ of the UDA. Hard men are described by Feldman (1991) in his study of Northern Ireland as ‘the local barefisted street fighter intimately associated with specific neighbourhoods though often enjoying a city wide reputation. The hard man could have been a semi-professional trained pugilist (Belfast has a rich tradition of boxing families) or simply a street tough’ (Feldman, 1991: 46). From 1971 the UDA had been involved in raising funds which in the beginning had been to procure weapons for the defence of the loyalist and Protestant community (see the accounts of Sam Duddy, ‘Billy’, ‘Jackie’, Michael Stone and ‘Tommy’ for descriptions of UDA

26

History, Organisation and Structure Supreme Commander UDA

Political Advisers

UDA’s Inner Council Representing its Six Battalions

UDA Battalion Commanders

Military Advisers

Overall Commander UFF Company Commanders

Company Commanders Unit Leaders Unit Leaders UFF Cells UFF Volunteers

UDA Volunteers

UDA/UFF Political Prisoners Figure 1

UDA/UFF Command Structure

procurement of arms). Some loyalist areas were coming under sustained republican attack, and the demand for weapons was substantial. In 1972, loyalist paramilitaries were caught trying to smuggle weapons into Northern Ireland from England through Belfast International Airport. One loyalist from west Belfast was arrested and imprisoned during such a mission. The chances of success were minimal rather it was a largely symbolic act of desperation. The UDA, in common with other paramilitary groups of the period including the IRA, developed an income base by becoming involved in protection rackets, extortion and armed robbery. This aspect of the UDA’s operations is described in the accounts of Sam Duddy, ‘Billy’, ‘Jackie’, Michael Stone and ‘Tommy’. While much of the proceeds of these illegal activities were used to purchase guns, and to provide financial support for the welfare of prisoners and their families, the lack of financial governance within the organisation almost inevitably resulted in fraud and embezzlement becoming common practice within the UDA. Some UDA leaders felt secure enough in their power bases to openly flaunt their

A Parliamentary Organisation?

27

newly acquired wealth, in the form of cars, clothes, jewellery and continental holidays. That UDA funds were being used in this way was common knowledge in many of the UDA’s catchment areas, and did immeasurable harm to the reputation and standing of the organisation. Funds that had been accumulated by criminal means were being used for the personal gain of some of those within the organisation. Examples of the kind of criminal activity and personal gain prevalent within the organisation are contained in the accounts of Sam Duddy, ‘Billy’, John White, ‘Terry’, ‘Jackie’, Michael Stone, ‘Tommy’, Johnny Adair and ‘Gordon’. By 1973/74 the UDA had become an organisation composed of clearly distinct and disparate elements. The ordinary volunteers were still by and large politically motivated, not involved in corrupt activities and committed to fighting republicans and the IRA. (The selective targeting of Sinn Fein/IRA is described in many of the following accounts including ‘Terry’, ‘Jackie’, ‘Gary’, Michael Stone, ‘Tommy’, Johnny Adair, ‘Gordon’, ‘Alan’, Combatants A, B, C and D). Others within the UDA simply viewed the conflict as sectarian, and justified sectarian warfare and murder on that basis. The position of the UDA’s leadership was more complex. Many UDA leaders were politically motivated, uninvolved in corruption, and enjoyed strong support within the organisation. They had a very clear view of the war and made various contributions to it (see the accounts of Sam Duddy, ‘Billy’, John White, ‘Terry’, ‘Jackie’, ‘Gary’, Michael Stone, ‘Tommy’, Johnny Adair, ‘Gordon’, ‘Alan’, Combatants A, B, C and D). Because these leaders controlled what were called ‘military active units’ they were commonly arrested and questioned or interrogated by the police. A significantly high percentage were prosecuted and imprisoned. The level of police activity directed at the UDA was usually commensurate with the level of paramilitary activity in the command area of the local UDA battalion or company. A militarily active UDA Commanding Officer in a given location could therefore expect to be arrested or placed under close surveillance by the police on a regular basis, whereas a militarily inactive CO would not attract much police attention. Similarly a CO involved in criminal activity could expect the security forces to attempt to ‘turn’ him into becoming an informer or agent. Thereafter, he would be allowed to carry on his UDA activities relatively undisturbed by security force attention, as a reward for deflecting UDA volunteers from conflictrelated activity as criminal activity increased. Security forces’ infiltration of the UDA is described in the accounts of Sam Duddy,

28

History, Organisation and Structure

John White, ‘Terry’, ‘Jackie’, Michael Stone, Johnny Adair and ‘Gordon’. The IRA’s hatred of the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), and Special Branch in particular, is well documented, and manifest in their targeting police officers for attack. However, the IRA continues to be unaware of the debt of gratitude which they owe to the RUC, in that it was as a result of infiltration of the UDA by the RUC that the UDA attacks on the IRA were substantially neutralised. The UDA could have identified those COs who were acting as agents, or who had been otherwise compromised by the security forces, through applying these two simple criteria: a) the record of conflictrelated activity, attacks against the IRA or more disconcertingly upon the wider Catholic community, and b) the patterns of arrests of UDA commanders and their relationships with the police. The military leadership simply failed to apply these two simple criteria in assessing the wildly different profiles of the organisation. The outcome was laxity and a benign chaos which was, incredibly, allowed to continue until the reorganisation in 1989. By the late 1970s the criminality and infiltration which had permeated the UDA was an open secret, but in real terms affected only a small percentage of the organisation. In spite of the fact that this element constituted only a small minority within the organisation, it was enough for the media to be able to represent them as being characteristic of the UDA as a whole. Training The most obvious deficiency in the organisation during the 1970s and 1980s was the lack of training and the resultant lack of military coherency (both in terms of military methodology and military psychology). This would always have been apparent to the security forces, but was somewhat belatedly realised by the UDA/UFF during the mid- to late 1980s. During 1987 a UDA training camp, and military training, became established for UDA and UFF volunteers. This was probably one of the most significant developments in the organisation’s history, marking as it did an increased professional capability within the UDA and UFF. Given the state of the organisation during the 1980s it seems unlikely that a development of this magnitude and significance was suddenly initiated from within the UDA. Rather it could be suggested that outside influences were instrumental in what was to be the transition of the UDA/UFF from a largely undisciplined rabble into a militarily competent force.

A Parliamentary Organisation?

29

During the 1970s and 1980s the military training provided for UDA/UFF volunteers could be best described as rough and ready. The lack of efficient organisational practices and professionalism within these groups was surprising given that both the UDA’s and the UFF’s membership included former and serving military personnel. Andy Tyrie was credited for introducing a professional residential training programme for the UDA/UFF in the mid-1980s. This development had been fiercely resisted by a majority of the pre-1989 UDA leadership. They did not wish to see the emergence of a younger, politically motivated, militarily competent force, because their tenure could be readily challenged by such a grouping. The training was provided by former British Army personnel who were experienced in both terrorist and counter-terrorist warfare. The training offered was sophisticated and included in-depth anti-interrogation techniques, forensic science training, secure mobile communications, surveillance and targeting and psychological warfare – the art of inducing fear in the enemy. Weapons training had a decidedly special forces ethos, and included training in the manufacture of anti-personnel devices or bombs, close combat skills, lethal force – how to convert an ordinary rifle into an automatic sub-machine gun and training in the use of ‘speed strips’ for automatic weapons which could double the duration of rapid fire capacity in such weapons. For accounts of training, see ‘Terry’, ‘Jackie’, ‘Gary’, Michael Stone, ‘Tommy’, Johnny Adair, ‘Gordon’, ‘Alan’, Combatants A, C and D. Given the extent of security forces’ infiltration within the UDA, during the 1980s it can be safely assumed that both the British security forces and British intelligence (and special operations groups) were aware of this training initiative, which was allowed to proceed unhindered. Some have suggested that the security forces, including the British Army and the RUC, were at the very least non-interventionist insofar as they did not interfere with this training initiative. In effect, an anti-IRA/republican special operations unit was being formed within loyalism, which could operate outside the law and without the constraints which had hampered the security forces’ efforts to end hard-core IRA terrorism. It does not seem unlikely that the UDA’s movement towards increasing professionalism and the resultant capacity for selective targeting of IRA personnel would have been allowed to proceed unhindered by those wishing to put the IRA out of business. This training undertaken by the UDA/UFF had two significant outcomes. The first was an increased operational capability, and the second and more important was an improvement

30

History, Organisation and Structure

in the morale, psychological preparation and confidence of volunteers. By the late 1980s, for the first time in the history of the conflict, the UDA/UFF had trained soldiers who were both motivated and equipped to take on the IRA. However, this significant development coincided with the Stevens Enquiry in 1989, which culminated in the arrest and imprisonment of the old corrupt UDA leadership. These arrests included that of Brian Nelson, a British agent who was controlled by the Forces Research Unit. Other UDA commanders who were working as double agents or informers for the police and security forces were also arrested at that time. These arrests cleared the way for a younger, trained, competent UDA/UFF leadership to emerge. However, the arrests also compromised the ability of the security forces to continue its de facto control of UDA, while simultaneously facilitating the development of a new pro-British special operations unit, which could fight the IRA and function beyond the constraints of the law and normal military convention. British special operations forces and intelligence services were arguably less concerned with remaining within conventional military or policing protocols in their war with republican terrorism. A WORKING-CLASS ORGANISATION? The UDA has always drawn its members from the Protestant working class, and always has had a working-class, Protestant ethos. For a paramilitary group dependent on community support, there are advantages to this in terms of the sense of ownership within its constituent communities. At another level, however, the deep mistrust of anyone from outside the loyalist ghettos and of the educated middle class excluded those who could have offered professional leadership. The critically important disadvantage of this non-hierarchical kind of organisation is the difficulty in developing the potential of volunteers with the vision, education and personal authority to provide effective leadership. As an organisation, the UDA was formed in great haste, with ordinary men speedily propelled into positions of leadership and power without regard to their experience or aptitude for such roles. This resulted in many being placed in positions beyond their realm of competence. Nonetheless, some good individual leaders did emerge during the 1970s, and notably after 1989, but this was more by accident than design. More commonly, however, a macho culture within the UDA command

A Working-Class Organisation?

31

ensured that leadership positions were usually seized by the hard men, and as a consequence the macho culture and the strategic inconsistency of the UDA was perpetuated. The UDA’s lack of refinement was perhaps most pronounced in the public relations management of the media. With their complete lack of public relations skills, and their studied indifference towards politics and self-presentation, the emerging UDA, composed of working-class men, became a soft target particularly for urbane international journalists. International media reporting of the Northern Ireland conflict tended to reduce the complexity of the so-called ‘troubles’ into the easily digestible accounts of the ‘good guys’ and the ‘bad guys’, the ‘freedom fighters’ and the ‘reactionary thugs’ (Parkinson, 1999). The IRA were quick to accept and exploit their sympathetic and at times overtly partisan media characterisation. In stark contrast to the loyalists, republicans demonstrated enormous sophistication in international propaganda, particularity in North America. Within the context of the United Kingdom, the British were so concerned with republican media and presentational skills they imposed successive media bans. The UDA, on the other hand, with the relative lack of sophistication due perhaps to its working-class orientation and membership, to its great cost readily accepted their portrayal as the hard men. In line with this acceptance, they typically conducted interviews with the international media wearing balaclavas and carrying baseball bats. This was consistent with the image that the UDA of that time wanted to convey, in order to achieve their goal which was to intimidate the IRA. The result was that the world acquired a rather stereotyped image of the UDA. Once a stereotype is formed, and accepted as the reality, the tendency is to look for evidence to support and consolidate the stereotypical view, which becomes the societal view of the labelled and stigmatised group. Evidence which contradicts the stereotypical view or the stereotyped understanding of the given group tends to be discounted, as the psychological disposition is to accept only information that confirms the stereotype – what the external audience ‘knows’ is already formed. Thus the UDA as a working-class organisation had been portrayed by the media, whose language they didn’t understand, as being vulnerable to what Skolnick (1978) has termed ‘riff-raff theory’. According to riff-raff theory the legitimacy of an entire political movement can be wholly undermined by the criminal activities of a minority, however tiny. If the motivation or activities of just a small

32

History, Organisation and Structure

number of paramilitary volunteers can be established as criminal, the integrity of the entire paramilitary organisation can be discounted and subsequently characterised as criminal. Even if the vast majority of men in a paramilitary group or organisation are motivated by purely political factors, this becomes largely irrelevant if they become contaminated by association with the stereotype of the criminal organisation. Any claim they may have to political legitimacy is subsequently discredited and discounted with a wider audience. It was precisely this type of attempted political delegitimisation which facilitated the British government in ending the policy of granting paramilitary prisoners in Northern Ireland the status of political prisoners, and introducing their policy of criminalisation directed at political paramilitary prisoners. The policy of criminalisation ultimately didn’t work largely because of the resolve of the political prisoners to resist it, refusing to accept a designation and status misapplied to them. This was the battle of wills which led, quite predictably, to the hunger strikes of 1981, with contemporary IRA prisoners following in the footsteps of Thomas Ashe and Terrence McSwiney. Once again the prison issue, Irishmen protesting for political status in British prisons, rallied enormous support, with massive rallies, the intervention of the Catholic church and international condemnation (Crawford, 1999a). The British had, once again, shot themselves in the foot, the question being whether or not this was intentional. The prison protests had substantially swung the international audience to conclude that the British should indeed leave Ireland, a policy disposition shared by the British Foreign Office and the vast majority of the British public during 1981. The prison protests and hunger strikes had greatly enhanced the case for British disengagement, clearly serving the interests of those arguing for such an outcome (Crawford, 1999c). STRATEGY AND TACTICS: SELECTIVE TARGETING VERSUS RANDOM KILLING By 1971–72 two main strategies were being utilised by the UDA. This dual strategy involved the selective targeting of IRA/Sinn Fein, and the random murder of Catholics. This was held in response to the IRA’s bombing campaign and strategy of killing members of the security forces, and Protestants more generally. Thus the war in Northern Ireland, as prosecuted by both the UDA and the UVF, was simultaneously a political war against the IRA, a war to determine

Strategy and Tactics

33

the future of the state, and a sectarian war in which random Catholics were killed. The localised UDA/UFF leaderships had embarked upon their random strategy arguing that this strategy was being pursued by them and their members out of military necessity. This aspect of the UDA campaign is described in the accounts of Sam Duddy, ‘Ken’, ‘Billy’, John White, ‘Terry’, ‘Gary’, ‘Tommy’, ‘Gordon’, ‘Alan’, Combatants A, B, C and D. The aim of this strategy was to maintain, as they saw it, a ‘balance of terror’ between the two communities. From 1972 until 1976 the IRA escalated its violence and this was met with an increased and almost equal level of loyalist paramilitary violence. After 1977, UDA violence declined and fell well below the level of IRA killings. As Malachi O’Doherty (1998) commented some years later: ‘Murdering Catholics at random made a certain amount of cynical good sense, if your objective was to keep reminding all Catholics that there was a price to be paid for some of them supporting the IRA.’ In spite of the apparent tactical merits of the random killing strategy, a majority within the UDA/UFF did not agree with it and refused to implement it. By the mid-1980s elements within the UDA, and within the UFF in particular, were increasingly aware that they were not attracting the calibre of volunteer required to effectively engage the IRA. It seemed to the leadership at that time that the organisation would remain unable to attract high-quality recruits while they continued to conduct a sectarian war. A further disadvantage of the random killing strategy became evident: the leadership realised that they could not work with potentially sympathetic sections of the security services until their killing became more targeted, focused and selective. 1972 was Northern Ireland’s most critical year. In January of that year the Parachute Regiment shot dead 14 Catholic civil rights supporters in Londonderry in what became known as Bloody Sunday. This traumatised the Catholic population north and south and paved the way for the IRA to characterise the British Army in Northern Ireland as a hostile army of occupation. This one event led to a massive influx of volunteers into the IRA, and lent a renewed sense of legitimacy to the republican fight to remove the British presence from Ireland. The consequences of Bloody Sunday and the subsequent recruitment into the IRA would be felt in Northern Ireland and elsewhere for decades. In March 1972, the IRA set off bombs in the Abercorn Restaurant and in Donegal Street, both in central Belfast, causing multiple deaths

34

History, Organisation and Structure

and horrific injuries. Media coverage of these events was gruesome. Human torsos were filmed lying smoking on the ground, severed limbs collected in plastic bags. This atrocity was for the loyalists the equivalent of America’s 9/11. Unlike America, however, the moral outrage was met with governmental complacency, and as far as the UDA was concerned further concessions to terrorism. Law and order was fragmenting in Northern Ireland, reflected in a state of increasing social and political chaos and in these circumstances the Northern Ireland parliament, Stormont, was suspended, as direct rule from London became imposed. The loyalists regarded this as a concession to the IRA, and a victory for its violence. This sense of aggrievement was further consolidated when in July of that year the media reported that secret talks had taken place between the IRA and representatives of the British government in London. The UDA at that time saw republican terrorism gaining concessions from government and concluded that when dealing with the British, violence pays. (See the accounts of Sam Duddy, John White, ‘Jackie’, ‘Gary’, Johnny Adair and ‘Gordon’.) That point was not lost on rank and file UDA members, and as result, loyalist violence escalated, mostly in a largely unplanned and spontaneous fashion. In late July 1972, more than 20 bombs exploded in the Belfast area, causing horrific human injury and the loss of lives. As the IRA bombing campaign intensified, the UDA’s random assassination of Catholics increased in frequency. The IRA were claiming 1972 as its ‘Year of Victory’ (Bowyer Bell, 1993). Both loyalist and republican paramilitaries believed that the British were on the verge of disengaging from Northern Ireland. Increased political destabilisation in Northern Ireland resulted, and the loyalists prepared to fight a ‘holy war’, which had in effect already commenced. (See the accounts of ‘Ken’, ‘Billy’, John White, ‘Terry’, Michael Stone, Combatants A, B, C and D for views of the conflict as a holy war.) For the IRA this destabilisation gave them a glimpse of potential victory and led to renewed paramilitary activity on their part, which translated into a ‘one last push’ mentality based on the conviction that one more horrendous atrocity would cause the British to withdraw from Northern Ireland. In July 1972 alone, a total of 401 people were killed, 280 through republican violence and 121 through loyalist violence, 71 of which were claimed by the UDA/UFF (McKittrick et al., 2002). This pattern of violence in 1972 was to set the tone for the UDA’s military strategy, and for the next five years, until 1977, the UDA/UFF continued to wage what was largely sectarian warfare against a

Strategy and Tactics

35

Catholic community, which it regarded as complicit with the IRA. Table 1 shows the total numbers killed by loyalist and republican violence. The interdependant nature of loyalist (UDA/UFF) violence is evident from the total killed and the patterns emerging. The rationale for this is evident in the accounts of Sam Duddy, ‘Ken’, ‘Billy’, John White, ‘Terry’, ‘Jackie’, ‘Gary’, Michael Stone, ‘Tommy’, ‘Gordon’, ‘Alan’ and Combatants A, B, C and D. Table 1

Year

The Statistics of Murder Responsibility for deaths IRA/all republicans UDA/UFF

1970 1971 1972 1973 1974 1975 1976 1977 1978 1979 1980 1981 1982 1983 1984 1985 1986 1987 1988 1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 *

21 107 280 137 149 130 163 74 62 104 58 84 85 62 51 47 41 74 69 57 52 53 42 *39 *27 7 14 *5 37 4 *3 *0

Loyalist killing exceeds that of republicans

Source: McKittrick et al., 2002

1 4 71 44 41 20 50 12 2 10 9 5 1 2 2 2 6 12 12 6 8 17 21 31 12 0 1 4 2 0 2 1

All loyalists 1 22 121 90 131 121 127 28 10 18 14 14 15 12 10 5 17 20 23 19 20 41 39 *48 *38 2 5 *13 17 3 *8 *4

36

History, Organisation and Structure

After 1976 the marked drop in the number of deaths caused by the UDA can be explained by their lack of a military strategy from 1976 onwards. From that point, corruption and criminality began to take hold of the organisation in a substantial way involving protection rackets, extortion, armed robbery and petty crime. Another key factor was the extent of police infiltration of the UDA, with many police informers and double agents involved in the organisation. The combination of these factors had the effect of largely closing down the UDA’s paramilitary operation. This remained the situation throughout the 1980s, when the UDA’s paramilitary campaign remained relatively inactive. One additional factor served to reduce the number of killings carried out by the UDA/UFF. In common with the UVF, the UDA was attempting to become more selective in its identification of targets. From this period onwards, the UDA/UFF began to target known IRA and Sinn Fein personnel in preference to its previous policy of randomly selecting targets in the Catholic community. Martin McGuinness, Gerry Adams, Owen Carron and Bernadette Devlin were among the public representatives on a very extensive list of UDA/UFF targets. (See the accounts of ‘Ken’, John White, ‘Terry’, ‘Jackie’, ‘Gary’, Michael Stone, ‘Tommy’, Johnny Adair, ‘Gordon’, ‘Alan’ and Combatants A, B, C and D.) Loyalist paramilitaries had in fact attempted to assassinate all four. UDA/UFF reorganisation: 1989–94 By the mid-1980s many of the gunmen of the UDA/UFF were being persuaded by their political advisers as to the futility of killing ordinary Catholics as a primary military strategy. However, a significant number of gunmen within the UDA/UFF still reserved the right to carry out fatal attacks on randomly selected Catholics in retaliation for specific acts of IRA violence, although this meant that the UDA/UFF strategy was not entirely coherent, composed of sporadic retaliatory acts attacks alongside attacks on selected targets. The impetus to move towards a more selective targeting strategy was subsequently facilitated by the Stevens Enquiry. This was established in 1989 headed by Sir John Stevens, Metropolitan Commissioner of Police, and was charged with investigating allegations of collusion between the security forces and the loyalist paramilitaries. As a result of the Stevens Enquiry, many of the pre-1989 UDA leaders were arrested and questioned, and the extent of infiltration of the organisation by the security forces began to enter the public domain. This led to a root and branch reorganisation of the UDA and UFF. Many

Strategy and Tactics

37

of the corrupt and criminal elements within the UDA were removed, and the top leadership, which had actually been largely controlled by the police and army through infiltration, was also expelled from the organisation. The resultant internal reorganisation led to the production of a new UDA/UFF mission statement in 1989, which read like an up-dated version of Andy Tyrie’s original 1971 objective of ‘terrorising the terrorists’. This new reformed UDA/UFF formulated the goal of ‘taking the war to the IRA’. The UFF would claim in retrospect that that is precisely what it went on to do. Between 1989 and the ceasefire in 1994 the UDA/UFF claim to have killed some 26 IRA or Sinn Fein personnel, although they have never differentiated between the IRA and Sinn Fein (while acting on reliable intelligence). (See the accounts of ‘Terry’, ‘Jackie’, ‘Gary’, Michael Stone, ‘Tommy’, Johnny Adair for descriptions of this intelligence.) However, this UDA/UFF claim was either ignored or discounted by the media and republicans, both anxious to deny the legitimacy of loyalist paramilitaries. The selective targeting strategy was not always successfully implemented. In 1988, UDA member Michael Stone went to the Milltown Cemetery with the intention of killing Gerry Adams, Martin McGuinness and Danny Morrison at the funeral of the IRA volunteers killed in Gibraltar. Stone conducted a gun and grenade attack in the cemetery in an attempt to selectively kill IRA/Sinn Fein personnel and demonstrate that loyalists were departing from a policy of random killing of Catholics. However, this went badly wrong and two innocent civilians, Thomas McErlean and John Murray, were killed. The third person killed, Kevin Brady, was an IRA volunteer who was given military honours by the IRA at his funeral. The dispute over the effectiveness and accuracy of UDA/UFF targeting came to a head in 1989 over the murder of Loughlin Maginn. Maginn was a Catholic living in Lisburn, killed by the UFF who claimed to have been increasingly selective in targeting IRA/Sinn Fein members. After Loughlin Maginn’s murder the media claimed that it was another sectarian killing of an innocent Catholic. However, the UDA/UFF claimed to be in possession of documentation from the security forces which associated Maginn with the IRA. In its frustration at the allegations of sectarian murder, the UFF showed a BBC reporter the security forces’ intelligence files they had of alleged IRA suspects, including Maginn. Jackie McDonald, a south Belfast UDA brigadier commander, insisted that intelligence information on Maginn had come from the Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR), the local regiment of the British Army. He maintained that

38

History, Organisation and Structure

the intelligence the UFF received was ‘verbal, written and pictorial’ and that ‘there was absolutely no doubt that Maginn was, in UDA/UFF terms, a “genuine target”’ (Taylor, 2000). This led to widespread allegations of collusion between the security forces and the loyalist paramilitaries, and pressure on the legal authorities to investigate, which ultimately resulted in the Stevens Enquiry. The IRA nationalist politicians and a range of human rights organisations continued to claim that there was collusion between the security forces and the UDA/UFF from 1988 until the ceasefires in 1994. The UDA/UFF’s response to these allegations is to maintain that they were acting on good intelligence, and that they were getting the right people, namely IRA/Sinn Fein members. The precise reliability of the intelligence they were acting on and the legitimacy of the targets remains open to debate. The UDA/UFF claim that they were acting upon either their own or low-level security force intelligence. Apart from the broader allegations of collusion between loyalist paramilitary groups and the police from political parties such as the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP), Sinn Fein also complained vehemently about collusion. This was because republicans – the IRA/Sinn Fein – were for the first time being effectively targeted by the loyalist paramilitaries, no doubt to their discomfort. In addition to the 26 republicans – either members of Sinn Fein or of the IRA – that the UFF claimed to have killed, they made over 80 assassination attempts. These attempted assassinations were evaluated as successful operations in that they contributed to the psychological warfare objective of ‘instilling fear in the enemy’, namely Sinn Fein/IRA. According to some accounts, on several occasions a target was deliberately not killed, because the UFF preferred to leave him alive so that he could import the fear back into the ranks of the IRA. The targeting of Catholic civilians may have served to increase Catholic support for the IRA as the defender of the Catholic community, and thus perversely served the interests of the IRA. However, when IRA/Sinn Fein members began to be targeted, many loyalists have observed that the political climate altered quickly, in the direction of a cessation of hostilities. During 1988 and 1989 the UDA/UFF began reorganising all over Northern Ireland. Perhaps for the first time it had an effective leadership and a successful strategy in UDA/UFF terms. The new loyalist campaign had been initiated within the UFF’s 2nd Battalion C Company in Belfast, and steps were being taken to replicate the

Infiltration

39

new leadership’s organisation and tactics of taking the war to the IRA throughout all UDA/UFF units in Northern Ireland. The pre-1989 UDA/UFF with its widespread corruption, criminality and infiltration was being systematically cleaned up and restructured. These changes had many implications for the organisation, and impacted on many of its operations, not least of which was recruitment into the organisation itself. Hundreds of young UDA volunteers had been prevented by the self-serving nature of the old regime from succeeding in their objective of taking the war to the IRA. The inadequacy and corruption of UDA leadership at local level, compounded in no small measure by police infiltration, had conspired to render the UDA largely ineffective. This had resulted in large-scale disaffection within and around the UDA throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Indeed it is surprising to some that the organisation survived at all until 1989. The organisation’s ranks had been depleted because there were many high-calibre young loyalists who had no wish to join an organisation whose principal activity was random sectarian murder. This tension is described in the accounts of ‘Terry’, ‘Jackie’, ‘Gary’, Michael Stone, Johnny Adair, ‘Gordon’ and ‘Alan’. This new generation of recruits had been deterred by the racketeering, drug peddling and gangsterism within the UDA. However, joining the UDA/UFF as a reformed disciplined and military force was quite a different and more attractive prospect. At the point when the UDA/UFF began to demonstrate their new political and military coherence, a new breed of higher-calibre volunteers came forward. Men who would have previously joined the UDA were now recruited by the UFF. This, in turn, led to significant operational changes within the UFF after 1989. INFILTRATION BY THE POLICE AND SECURITY FORCES Prior to 1989 the UDA/UFF had been infiltrated by the police and the security forces at the highest levels (see the accounts of Sam Duddy, John White, ‘Terry’, Michael Stone, ‘Tommy’ and ‘Alan’). This infiltration and external security forces’ control and influence resulted in very few paramilitary operations being carried out by the UDA/UFF. Paramilitary operations were also subverted, and volunteers were routinely arrested. Men were apprehended in circumstances which could only have been possible with information gleaned from security forces’ infiltration of the UDA. The police and army agents in the UDA set about neutralising the military capacity

40

History, Organisation and Structure

of the organisation (see the accounts of John White, ‘Terry’, ‘Jackie’, ‘Gary’ and Michael Stone). In retrospect, this should have been obvious to anyone in the UDA who had bothered to analyse the pattern of arrests and botched operations. Guns were doctored so that they failed to fire during operations, safe houses were kept under surveillance, operations were patently set up by the security forces so that UDA/UFF men could be apprehended en route to or returning from them. Events occurred that could not be coincidences. Elements within the security forces were clearly determined to put the UDA out of business. However, the role of special branch and the British intelligence services with the UFF was distinctly less certain, as is clear from the accounts of ‘Tommy’, Johnny Adair, ‘Gordon’ and ‘Alan’. By 1989, the UDA/UFF began somewhat belatedly to learn the lessons from the 1970s and 1980s about infiltration and security and secrecy within the organisation became of paramount importance. The flow of information within the organisation was reduced drastically, and communications were restricted to a minimal ‘need to know’ basis. Volunteers were not advised of the details of a mission until a particular mission was initiated. Volunteers were ranked according to their level of security clearance, with the highest clearance given only to those who had successfully proven themselves in action. Intermediate clearance was given to those who volunteered for active service, and there were selection procedures, in-depth interviews and trial runs before they were placed on active service. These differences in the UDA/UFF after 1989 were noted by the security forces, in particular by the police. Sir Hugh Annesly, Chief Constable of the RUC, described the newly reformed UFF in September 1991: There is very little doubt that the ‘old guard’ if you like, would have had a level of activity above which they would not have gone, and I think that in that sense they were something of a restraining influence … That influence has now gone … the teams that are coming through are more aggressive … I think they are prepared to match some of the activities the IRA have committed … and I think that some of those who might have stood in the way have been pushed to the side, to be replaced by harder, more determined, more ruthless and better quality individuals in their capacity to organise and carry out attacks within Northern Ireland.

Infiltration

41

The men selected for active service were rated as ‘high calibre’ by the leadership, and only those who were not known to the police and security forces were chosen. This precluded the deployment of those with records of arrests, or with paramilitary or criminal records. Other volunteers with low levels of security clearance were used only in non-combat capacities. At this time, all weaponry was stored in pristine condition in dry storage. All guns were checked and regularly fired to ensure that a supply of weapons in working order was available in advance of a mission. Discussion about missions was only permitted to be conducted by those who had directly taken part in them. Volunteers were provided with training in their legal rights upon arrest and of their right of access to legal counsel. Active volunteers were trained in interrogation and anti-interrogation techniques. They were trained to deny knowledge of anything illegal. As a result of all of this the ranks of the UDA/UFF were not depleted by the operations of the security forces, UDA/UFF volunteers were successfully evading arrest, and those who were arrested mostly managed to avoid subsequent prosecution. In stark contrast to the earlier leaders of the UFF, the new leaders were expected to lead by example, to lead ‘from the front’. No ranking officer could require a volunteer to undertake any action which he had not previously undertaken himself. Accordingly, officers were required to carry out the most dangerous aspects of missions in order to provide role models for the men in their command (see the accounts of John White, ‘Jackie’, ‘Terry’, Michael Stone and ‘Gordon’). All of this effected dramatic changes within the organisation. Prior to 1989, UDA/UFF volunteers who went on active service faced almost certain arrest and imprisonment. It is remarkable that even this prospect did not deter many of them. However the reorganised cells – which were formerly referred to as active service units – operated strictly according to the new organisational ethos and under the new ‘standing orders’. Secrecy became paramount; the information flow was restricted to a need to know basis. Companies acted independently from battalions to minimise the knowledge base to those directly involved in active operations. Nonetheless, as a precaution, volunteers who had been arrested and questioned by the police were stood down from active service, and were forbidden to associate with those who remained active. This was to prevent infiltration and assumed, correctly, that those volunteers who had been

42

History, Organisation and Structure

arrested would be subject to security force surveillance. As the success of the UFF’s more selective strategy of taking the war to the IRA became apparent, and the old strategy of randomly killing Catholics was demonstrably abandoned, the organisation attracted more and higher-quality recruits (see the accounts of ‘Terry’, ‘Jackie’, ‘Gary’, ‘Tommy’, Johnny Adair, ‘Gordon’ and ‘Alan’). By 1994 the UFF was engaged in its war with the IRA/Sinn Fein with growing confidence. As one senior UFF commander put it: ‘For the first time we were playing to win.’ This observation was confirmed by others within the organisation, see the accounts of ‘Jackie’, ‘Gary’, Michael Stone, Johnny Adair and ‘Gordon’. Within the UDA in 1994, morale was high, the new strategy was demonstrably working and they determined to draw their war against the IRA to a successful conclusion. However, the UDP and the political advisers to the UDA/UFF had by now realised, in common with Sinn Fein, that a resolution of the conflict could only be achieved politically. The UFF agreement to a ceasefire in 1994 went very much against the tide within an organisation that was experiencing, at long last, a degree of military success. The ceasefire was agreed as a result of the intervention of trusted political advisers within the organisation, who had a track record within the organisation and had proven themselves militarily. Without their military credentials, they would have lacked the credibility and gravitas to influence the hawks within the organisation in the direction of seeking a political resolution to the conflict. COLLUSION BETWEEN ELEMENTS OF THE BRITISH SECURITY FORCES AND MEMBERS OF THE UDA/UFF One of the key questions about the UDA/UFF as an organisation is also one of the most controversial and perennial dimensions of the Northern Ireland conflict. This is the question of the allegation of collusion between elements of the British security forces on the one hand and the UDA/UFF on the other. Were there sections of the security community who realised that, while conventional police and military tactics could limit and contain republican terrorism, they could not defeat it? Were there some within the intelligence and special forces who feared that the IRA’s terrorist campaign could be waged indefinitely at enormous cost to the lives of British civilians and security forces? After some 25 years of patrolling the streets of Northern Ireland, of sustaining heavy

Collusion

43

casualties, and heavily constrained in how they could respond, did those same forces decide to enlist the help of pro-British paramilitary forces? The UDA/UFF were quite willing to operate outside the law in taking the war to IRA/Sinn Fein, their common enemy. Enlisting the help of ‘friendly forces’, in the form of local militias, against a shared enemy is a standard military tactic, the most recent example being the Americans’ support for the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan. Accordingly, security forces’ intelligence files on IRA/Sinn Fein members and known republicans were passed on to the UDA/UFF. This is addressed in the accounts of ‘Jackie’, ‘Gary’, ‘Tommy’ and Johnny Adair. It has been established by the Stevens Enquiry that security files were indeed passed on. A major debate has arisen around whether sections of the security forces passed over files of innocent Catholics; was this systematic, deliberate, or does this stretch credibility? The status and affiliation of many of the murdered men remains in dispute. There is an inevitable propaganda battle between the UFF and the IRA. The UFF claim to have had their own undisclosed intelligence sources and clearly the IRA would have wanted to keep its volunteers’ membership secret, whenever possible. Accordingly the status and affiliations of many of the UDA/UFF’s victims remain in dispute, as in the case of Loughlin Maginn. For the views of UDA/UFF members on this issue see the accounts of ‘Gary’, ‘Tommy’, Johnny Adair and ‘Gordon’. The UFF maintain that the number of known republicans and IRA members it killed was greater than had been suggested, implying that some of those it killed who are regarded as civilians were, in fact, in the IRA. The UFF claim to know this upon the basis of its own intelligence sources, derived from low-level security forces, their own surveillance, and from a variety of other sources regarded by them as ‘absolutely proven and reliable’. However, this is a difficult issue to resolve without access to this intelligence, and the danger of impugning the reputation of those innocent Catholics murdered by the UFF is a real one; this is simply to record the UFF’s version of its history and motivation. The UFF argue that there is a propaganda battle on this issue, and maintain that the IRA has not claimed all of its dead members for a variety of reasons. First, the IRA wish to deny the legitimacy of UFF killings, and its military success in engaging the IRA. By claiming that those killed were, in fact, civilians, the IRA minimise the success of the UFF. Second, the IRA withhold claiming dead volunteers as members at the request of volunteers’ families who are anxious to

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History, Organisation and Structure

maintain anonymity and respectability in the community. Third, the UFF allege that dead volunteers are not claimed by the IRA as members so that they do not jeopardise insurance and claims for damages against the state. Finally, the IRA allegedly do not acknowledge dead volunteers as members in order to maintain the cover of its remaining volunteers. The IRA, like other paramilitaries including the UFF, had volunteers whose clandestine activities were completely unknown to family members, even their wives. Such individuals’ continued value to their organisations depended on their ability to operate covertly, and to keep their paramilitary involvement secret. One of many cases where an apparent civilian later proved to be in the IRA was that of Kevin O’Donnell, who was killed by the SAS in 1992 as he was attacking the RUC with a heavy machine gun. He had previously sworn in a British court that he was a ‘devout Catholic’ and ‘not an IRA supporter’ (Geraghty, 2000, McKittrick et al., 2002). The truth in relation to the affiliations of many of the victims may never be known, rather the ‘truth’ may be perceived as an entirely subjective entity, determined by whichever version of history one subscribes to. There is little doubt that elements within the British security services during the mid-1980s and 1990s did have an interest in the increasing military, professionalisation of the UDA/UFF. It can also be established that from 1986 in particular, elements within the UDA/UFF were involved in selective targeting. Brian Nelson had been recruited as an army agent by the Forces Research Unit while serving in the British Army. Nelson was encouraged to join the UDA where the Forces Research Unit ensured his progression by supplying him with high-grade intelligence (i.e. about republicans). He was to go on to become the UFF’s Intelligence Officer and his role according to secret army files was to ‘make their [UFF] targeting more professional’, and to get ‘these gangs’ (UDA/UFF) to concentrate on ‘specific targeting’ of ‘legitimate’ republican terrorist targets (Ware, 2002). Security files were passed to Nelson giving details of the ‘right people’ (so called ‘legitimate’ republican targets). The UFF acted upon this intelligence, with a conviction that army intelligence was accurate. This appears to have been a reasonable assumption, but in reality some of the files are known to have related to civilians suspected of IRA involvement, which fell far short of the ‘hard evidence’ the UFF gunmen assumed they were acting upon (Ware, 2002). On one occasion Nelson sent a gunman to the wrong address, and Terry McDaid, an innocent Catholic, was killed. Nelson was furious that a

Collusion

45

Catholic civilian had been killed, and complained aggressively to his army handlers. Nelson was subsequently informed that Terry McDaid was traced as having links to the Provisional IRA. This was the British Army’s attempt to placate Nelson. The significance of this was truly astonishing: the UFF, in the form of Nelson and his associates, were apparently more concerned about the murder of innocent Catholics than sections of the British Army, who had supplied the intelligence, and then subsequently tried to justify the murder through falsely linking the victim to the IRA (Ware, 2002). All of this took the UFF completely by surprise as it had assumed that the FRU would have wished to have attacks on the IRA/Sinn Fein if not clinically, at least accurately, focused. In the absence of any other military explanation the UFF had reasoned that the army’s strategic objective was that of terrorising the IRA’s host (general Catholic) population. This was a tactic which the UDA/UFF had employed for decades but by 1989 many of the commanders reached the conclusion that this was essentially counter-productive. It was precisely that realisation which was instrumental in the UFF’s strategy change to the policy of selective targeting. The UFF knew the balance of terror argument well enough but it appeared to many that as it was becoming more selective, the army’s interest extended to maintaining the random strategy (the tactical murder of innocent Catholics). However, there were those within the UFF who remained uncomfortable with this explanation, believing that it stretched credibility to accuse the British security forces of sanctioning what was in effect sectarian murder. It was not until the Scappatticci revelations (May 2003) that the UFF, and others, understood the underlying dynamic. The UFF had become very successful both in acquiring intelligence on and in targeting IRA/Sinn Fein personnel. The intelligence gathered extended well beyond that which was passed on by the FRU, as the UFF began to independently target IRA men who were in fact British Army agents. The FRU had accordingly passed on information relating to innocent Catholics to deflect the UFF away from the assassination of the army’s own operatives placed within the IRA. By that time (1989) the FRU and British intelligence had almost totally compromised the IRA through intelligence infiltration, and the highest priority was given to keeping agents within that organisation intact. That was the intelligence and operational imperative, regardless of who else got killed or imprisoned or tortured by an IRA increasingly aware of the extent to which it had been penetrated. This was the beginning of the end for the IRA’s long war in the north.

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History, Organisation and Structure

FROM PARAMILITARIES TO A POLITICISATION OF THE CONFLICT The IRA and the loyalists from the outset of the troubles were involved in overtly sectarian murders. These could be listed ad nauseam. However, the ‘political thinkers’ in the IRA wished to legitimise IRA operations through becoming more selective in whom they murdered largely for PR purposes, and accordingly more police officers and soldiers were killed. This extended to include retired police officers, previously serving police officers, members or former members of the security forces, those who worked for the security forces (including cleaning ladies, for example), members of the families of security forces, etc. Accordingly the press would report ‘an innocent Catholic’ being killed but an equally ‘innocent’ Protestant would be described as a ‘former (retired) police officer’, almost implying that one murder could be explained, while the other couldn’t. The list of legitimate targets became so comprehensive it lead Professor Steve Bruce (1994) to comment that ‘the IRA found PR-friendly reasons to kill pretty well everyone in the Protestant community’. However, Protestants did not regard ‘their’ soldiers or ‘their’ police officers or ‘their’ civilians for that matter as legitimate targets and each and every such murder was not uncommonly taken personally. The IRA was fully aware that their actions would result in a loyalist backlash, it had violently pushed for precisely such a backlash, which it knew full well would be visited upon the human shield of ordinary Catholics. This was for the very simple reason that the UDA (and loyalist paramilitaries) didn’t know who the IRA were. However, this situation changed during the late 1980s and 1990s amid the allegations of collusion as discussed. While the IRA could invoke a degree of legitimacy (presumably) in killing a British soldier or police officer (and ordinary civilians for that matter), inevitably loyalists in the early and mid-stages of the conflict would kill ordinary Catholics in reprisal. That was deeply regretted by the command of the UDA throughout the 1970s and 1980s, but it was accepted by others as being absolutely inevitable. As Andy Tyrie, supreme commander of the UDA, subsequently commented (in relation to the 1970s/1980s): I was sickened every time I heard about the death of a Catholic taxi driver or shop keeper. We wanted to go for the IRA and republicans but we couldn’t locate them, we didn’t know who they were. The bottom line was if they [the IRA/Catholics] killed us

From Paramilitaries to Politicisation

47

[Protestants/British citizens], some of us were going to kill them. We would have loved it if the Irish Army had been in Northern Ireland. We [the UDA] would have taken them on, head on. We wouldn’t have bothered shooting one or two in the back, we’d have gone straight for them. You see that’s the way Protestants fight, we make good soldiers but bad terrorists. Well that’s not strictly correct, by the late 1980s some of our men were getting it [terrorism/counter-terrorism] right. Those were men who studied the IRA and who used the IRA’s own strategy and tactics against them. It took us all that time to learn [terrorist tactics] because we had no history and no tradition of it [terrorism]. The IRA started out with an enormous advantage over us. They had a history of terrorism going back fifty years. To be quite honest the Protestant people didn’t know what had hit them. Nobody in Northern Ireland should ever have been regarded as a legitimate target. There never should have been a war here and we are lucky that it didn’t get out of control. As far as I’m concerned the UDA actually prevented total war in Northern Ireland because we held men in line and held them back. Of course we wanted to ‘take on’ the IRA but we couldn’t find them, so it was largely sectarian murder, and I was desperate to limit that. The UDA held the power to escalate things ten-fold but where would that have got us? Tens of thousands dead in a sectarian war just to end up with some sort of a realigned Ulster, as a Protestant state. This thing [Northern Ireland] had to be sorted out politically, there never was a military solution but it took the Provos 25 years to catch on. Elements within the UDA/UFF were fully aware, as were elements within the security forces, that conventional means of engagement were totally ineffectual against determined, ruthless IRA terrorism. That was the unspoken truth, and the underlying reality, which drove the intelligence flow and the specific targeting in the covert war in Northern Ireland from the mid- to late 1980s until the ceasefire in 1994. It was based upon an understanding of brutal reality, beyond the comprehension of ordinarily decent, if naive, British logic, and notions of playing by the rules. As Bowyer Bell (1993) eloquently states: No-one in power in Great Britain, certainly none of the trendy media people attracted like carrion birds to Northern violence, understood Ulster reality, grasped that the IRA not only intended war – was

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History, Organisation and Structure

waging war – but would also destroy all that had been cherished and defended over the centuries. The IRA wanted a 32 county Republic, Tone’s Republic ... The British army saw merely armed agitation ... They [the IRA] wanted everything ... war had come to Ulster, a war waged by the IRA cunningly and with provocation, with recourse to brutality and terror, a war waged regardless of the costs, waged by those beyond shame or compromise. The UDA/UFF accordingly became involved in the intelligenceled, brutal and ruthless dirty war tactics necessary in a counter-terrorist campaign. (However, when such tactics are employed by the state, these can be characterised as governmental oppression of the people, which is almost inevitably counterproductive. This difficulty is substantially overcome when the conflict is articulated between, and confined to, rival terrorist groups.) Some loyalist strategists maintained that only the admittedly simplistic logic of psychological behaviourism would eventually bring an end to conflict and in this the timing of retaliatory strikes became important, with the emphasis upon rapid response. They reasoned that the IRA had to learn that if loyalists, or the wider British community, suffered from republican terrorism the IRA/republicans, and the nationalist community, would bear the brunt of equally brutal counter-terrorism. Many within the UDA/UFF argued that this, and only this, would be the factor of limitation in combating republican terror and in securing a cessation of hostilities. In this regard the UDA/UFF were, with some help, escalating their war in order to end it. Commenting on this in the Sunday Life some years later John Taylor, a unionist MP, stated: ‘The loyalist paramilitaries achieved something which perhaps the security forces could never have achieved. The [loyalist] killings convinced the Provos that they couldn’t win.’ Some time earlier, in 1996, another MP, Colonel Michael Mates, had made a similar assessment: A bunch of loyalists came out of gaol where they had been serving life sentences, during which time they found out a helluva lot about how PIRA worked and they said to themselves ‘There must be a better way than filling a bar with bullets. We need to knock off major players’. The ‘selection committee’ were sitting in the place where all the best candidates were. Among those who were assassinated between the Downing Street Declaration [December 1993] and the declaration of peace [August 1994] were about

From Paramilitaries to Politicisation

49

fifteen top [Sinn Fein/IRA] people. [Again such claims are in dispute.] The IRA were taking a hell of a ‘pasting’. The hard men agreed to a tactical pause. They said ‘we can’t go on taking casualties at this rate’. That’s exactly what it was, a tactical pause. (Geraghty, 1998) An extension of this ‘military’ analysis may point to the desirability of a maintained ‘live’ loyalist paramilitary presence. As Geraghty (1998) himself observes of the republicans’ ceasefire at this stage of the war (1994): ‘The number one theory is that the loyalist assassination offensive had pushed the republicans to a position where they needed some respite … The deniable, surrogate [loyalist] death squads – a potent weapon in the war against the IRA – had had their day.’ The reality is, they remain intact. During the 1970s and 1980s the loyalists waged their campaign, largely reactively, against the ordinary Catholic community, many arguing that this was necessary in maintaining ‘the balance of terror’ in what they viewed as a sectarian war. By the mid-1980s there was a discernible movement toward the selective targeting of Sinn Fein/IRA members. As discussed, the source and nature of the intelligence the UDA/UFF were acting upon remains in contention, as does the actual status of many of the victims. No doubt these matters will be subject to further enquiry. Accounts of the loyalists campaign have been documented, more often critically than objectively, but this has been relatively neglected in relation to the literature amassed on republicanism and the IRA. As Cusack and McDonald (1997) observe: ‘Until now there has been a dearth of literature related to all the Loyalists’ terrorist movements in the North. This may be somewhat deliberate.’ Since 1971 the UDA and UFF have developed very considerably, not only in terms of their military and strategic capacity, but also in relative political sophistication. Since the early days of loyalist militarism, the loyalist paramilitaries have made a commendable and impressive political journey. (In fact the loyalist paramilitaries and their political representatives have had a considerable history of seeking an accommodation with republicans – Crawford, 1993.) The loyalists for example, have no difficulty with ‘parity of esteem’ for all citizens in Northern Ireland, nor with a Bill of Rights which would actively promote non-discriminatory policies. As Crawford et al. (1999b) state:

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History, Organisation and Structure

It is interesting to note that the Loyalist ‘extremists’ and in particular the political representatives of the Loyalist paramilitary organisations are more willing to seek accommodation with Republicans than Unionists, who seem to harbour thoughts of racial superiority, and who wish to maintain a sectarian caste system in which even Loyalists have their inferior place. McDonald and Cusack (1997) make a similar observation relating to the politicisation of the Protestant paramilitaries: Their metamorphosis from sectarian militarism to a position more liberal than the mainstream Ulster Unionist party has been a remarkable political journey. While preserving the Union, they appear prepared to accept some form of Government which would accommodate nationalists rights and fears. However we probably have to draw upon conflict resolution theory to further understand the process of the politicisation of the military conflict in Ulster. If the parties can neither conquer or avoid each other, some form of procedural resolution is likely. In procedural resolution the parties have to stay together, and live with each other. Conflict in general may not be resolved permanently in so far as the parties continue to exist in contact, but particular conflicts may become resolved simply in the sense that they come to an end as social systems and are replaced by other conflicts and other systems. [i.e. from systems of violent conflict, to those of democratic dialogue] … It is almost inevitable that an element of commonness injects itself into enmity once the stage of violence yields to another relationship even though this new relation(ship) may contain a completely undiminished sum of animosity between two parties. (Coser, 1972)

4

Phase One: Beginnings – the UDA’s Chaotic Sectarian War of the 1970s

SAM DUDDY Sam Duddy (now aged 50+) presents as a mild mannered and polite man, smallish with a light build. He is an avid reader with literary interests in history and psychology. Following a visit to the university a colleague enquired: ‘He’s hardly one of “them” is he?’ In the event Sam is an archetypal UDA man who has always maintained a significant role in the organisation. Duddy has been active in work with loyalist prisoners and their families over a period of 30 years. We lived on the Shankill Road. There was my mother and father and I had three brothers and five sisters. I remember my mother died when I was just eight. I was only a child at the time of course but I remember that as a very sad time. The house always seemed to be dark after that. I suppose that we were comparatively well off. We lived in a big house with a third floor, an attic really but that gave us space. I can remember primary school quite clearly. I remember when I was in P1, I would have been five or six, and the teacher asked me to read a passage from my reading book. It was a story about a cottage in the country which had nasturtiums growing around the front door. The teacher was surprised that I could read so well, but my mother had bought children’s books for me with words and pictures and she had taught me to read. Then the teacher asked me ‘could I spell “nasturtiums”’ so I spelt ‘nasturtiums’ for her. She was delighted, she actually went out and got the other teachers to come into the classroom just so as they could hear me read and spell ‘nasturtiums’. I loved to read and I’ve always enjoyed reading books. I enjoyed school a lot, I suppose I would have been a bit of a ‘teacher’s pet’. Although I did very well at school I had to leave at 15 to go into the family business. They gave me something I’d never heard of before or since, a ‘school leaving certificate’. [A school leaving certificate 51

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which may have been something of a rarity and unheard of in the Shankill area, was in fact the state school equivalent of the grammar school junior certificate, denoting academic ability and potential.] I went into the family business after school, with my father, and things were going well but he died two years later. I tried to carry on but it was impossible for a 17 year old in business. I was getting bills left right and centre and tax demands and it got to be that I was paying out far more than I earned. The business was run from our house and when an older brother and sister moved out [and stopped paying their share of the rent] I just couldn’t afford the rent. So we had to leave our home and the family split up. I went to live with a married sister in Rathcoole. That would have been around 1968. I got married shortly after that and my wife and I moved into a terrace house in the Oldpark [at that time a religiously mixed part of Belfast]. This night my wife and I went for a walk down Agnes Street, and on down to the bottom of the [ultra-Protestant] Shankill Road. The atmosphere at the bottom of the Shankill was eerie, very tense. We could sense that something was wrong. There were women standing outside their front doors and huddling in small groups but no children or men were about. I asked one of the women what was wrong and she said, ‘The Catholics were here last night throwing stones and petrol bombs. They said they’d be back tonight with more petrol bombs, to burn us out.’ That was in [Protestant] Conway Street which ran through to the [Catholic] Falls Road. There had been a lot of sectarian tensions in the area and everybody had known for a long time that there was going to be trouble. Then she [the lady in the doorway] said, rather proudly, ‘Our men are down there [Bombay Street] now, they’re going to sort them [the Catholic’s] out.’ I turned to my wife and said, ‘Listen, I have to go down there.’ I half expected her to say no but she didn’t. She just nodded. The lady of the house said, ‘You go on love, don’t you worry about her, she’ll be fine here with me.’ ‘Just you go on and do what you have to do, she’ll be here when you get back.’ Sectarian tensions in Belfast were running very high at that time. There had been rioting all over Northern Ireland and some [Catholic] rioters had been shot by the police. In October of that year Herbert Roy [a Protestant] had been gunned down by the IRA in a sectarian killing while he was standing at the corner of [loyalist] Dover Street. That had sent shock waves through my [loyalist] community, the IRA were back and they were back killing Protestants. That was a big thing at that time. It traumatised the whole loyalist community. It’s

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funny how you can always remember the first one who gets killed. So many people were killed after that you just got used to it, well actually you never did get used to it. But that came out of the blue, Herbert Roy’s murder, and it was a real shock. The IRA are back. There was a dangerous combination of rage and fear of Catholics killing Protestants. There was a real sense in the community that we [Protestants] couldn’t let them [Catholics] away with that. It was as if everyone took it personally, and it was personal – it was between them [Catholics] and us [Protestants]. On the two nights before Bombay Street Catholics had attacked the Protestant lower Shankill. Then Herbert was gunned down. All of that was orchestrated, it had been deliberate in order to provoke Protestants. The IRA were well aware of the tensions in the Shankill and in the Province more generally, but they pushed and pushed and pushed. Shooting Herbert was like throwing petrol onto a fire. The IRA were using tactics but we didn’t have a clue about ‘tactics’. All we knew was our people had been attacked and they were living in fear and that they [Catholics/IRA] had started killing ‘our’ people. There were crowds of men [Catholics and Protestants] facing each other when I got down there [near [Catholic] Bombay Street]. There was a very foreboding atmosphere. There was a young policeman there, a B Special. He was saying, ‘For God’s sake lads keep well back. They [the Catholics] have guns.’ We could hear a burst of automatic fire and the young police officer turned around to look over at the Catholic side. The next thing I knew there was more shooting and he was shot right in front of me. He had been wearing a walkie-talkie and a bullet [from the Catholic side] had gone right through it and into his chest. Me and some of the other men dragged him over to the cover of the wall of a house so as they [Catholics/IRA] couldn’t shoot him again. I noticed a trail of dark liquid and I knew that it was blood. I tried to give him first aid and made him as comfortable as I could. I said to the other men standing around, ‘Look if the Catholics come over [i.e. if they ‘charged’ from Bombay Street] he’s dead. Carry him the fuck out of here because they’ll tear him to pieces.’ I ran to get an ambulance and the police. I was trembling with emotion and anger and I just thought to myself over and over again, ‘Right if that’s what they fucking want, that’s what they’ll fucking get.’ When I got back to the [Protestant] crowd everybody had heard about what had happened and they all felt exactly the same way as I did. First Herbert Roy and then a young B Special gunned down right in front of us. When we started moving down toward Bombay Street we noticed

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the removal lorries. The IRA were moving people out of Bombay Street, with removal lorries. It had all been planned. They [the IRA] had wanted us to invade Bombay Street, it was to be sacrificed in part of the wider strategy. But of course you didn’t think like that at the time. Sometime afterwards, when I started to put two and two together it was obvious the gunmen, the lorries, all of that took planning. They [the IRA] were sacrificing Bombay Street and that part of the Falls Road so as they could take the role of the ‘defenders’ of the oppressed ‘Catholics’. The fact was they had pushed us beyond any reasonable tolerance. They had attacked us, killed and shot ‘our Protestants’ and then that young police officer, right before our eyes so it was absolutely inevitable that we [Protestants] would attack them. Catholics and Protestants in the Shankill and Falls had been like followers of different football teams before that. There was rivalry and fights, that’s just the way it was and you expected that. But then the guns came out and people got shot, and got shot dead, and then everything changes. Can you imagine if Manchester United and Liverpool fans were facing each other in Wembley stadium and suddenly a Liverpool supporter shoots a Manchester United fan! All hell would break loose and the Liverpool supporters would be annihilated. Well that’s just the way it was on Bombay Street that night. As we [the Protestant crowd] were going into Bombay Street we could see them [the IRA/Catholics] setting fire to the houses they had moved out of. You still had gas lamps in those days and they [Catholics] were putting them all out. The street was blackened out. Then they [the Catholic crowd] threw petrol bombs into the houses and they burst into flames. Orange and red flames lit up in the darkness. The police had arrived by that stage and they appealed to us, ‘Come on lads, this is dangerous, go home.’ But nobody listened. After that it was just sheer group hysteria. We [the Protestant crowd] went berserk wrecking all the houses. The Catholic crowd had just disappeared, like they were supposed to. And that was Bombay Street. The IRA had known full well that the world press was there [in Northern Ireland] and sure enough they were there in Bombay Street, by [IRA] invitation. The IRA had wanted to give them a show, and stupidly enough we were so naive we gave them one. Footage of Bombay Street on fire was flashed around the world, and there we were, the ‘Protestant thugs’. What the cameras didn’t show you was the body of Herbert Roy, or the shot police officer, or the Catholic intimidation of Protestants on the two

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previous nights. Fair enough we had run riot and property was damaged but we hadn’t killed anyone. OK you saw the result of loyalist anger, but that was taken completely out of context. The loyalists had valid reasons to be angry, we had been deliberately and calculatingly pushed into doing what we did. The IRA had set us up to give them a mandate and sure enough we walked into it, and we gave them one. I joined the Westland Defence Association [WDA]. I was in the tenants association as well, helping people, particularly the old people, as best I could. There was a lot of sectarian intimidation and people [Protestants and Catholics] were being threatened all over the place. Belfast was being divided up into Protestant territory and Catholic territory. Sometimes you couldn’t even tell where the dividing line was, but it was there alright just as if it was a brick wall. I became involved in printing a local newssheet to let people [Protestants] know what was happening, and to keep the morale up. That showed them that we were organised and that we were in there with them. The IRA got to know about that and sure enough they came for me. My wife and I were put out of our house at gunpoint and we were told that if we ever went back we’d be murdered. We both thought that they [the IRA gunmen] were going to kill us anyway, so we were only too glad to get the hell out of there. We had to leave our home that night with what we were standing up in. A friend in the Westland Estate [a predominantly Protestant housing estate in west Belfast] agreed to put us up, but really they didn’t have the space. We spent the night in the front room [the lounge] but we were well past sleeping so we just drank cups of tea until the morning. Men from the local [Protestant] defence association called the next morning. They knew of an empty [vacant] house on the estate and they helped us move in there. We had no money so they [Westland Defence men] lent us enough to buy a bed and a couple of chairs to sit on. We were glad of anything we got because as we thought, now at least we’re safe. The funny thing about this was the man who was to become the chief constable for Northern Ireland, Ronnie Flannaghan, lived in the next street away from us. There was trouble and rioting all over the place, ‘Prods’ were being forced out of the Oldpark [west Belfast] and the ‘Bone’ [Ardoyne, north Belfast] and Catholics were being forced out of the ‘East’ [east Belfast]. The atmosphere was very ominous, between the rioting, fires, barricades and the gunfire. We hadn’t realised it at the time but we had actually moved out of the frying pan into the fire.

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The Westland Estate was literally surrounded by republicans from the [Catholic] Antrim Road, the Ardoyne and the New Lodge [road north and west Belfast]. We were under attack from republicans and the IRA and make no mistake about it, that was all about naked sectarian hatred. They [the IRA] wanted us [Protestants] out, and they wanted to kill us. People [Protestants] in the area were shot dead. They [the IRA] came in on ‘drive-bys’ and shot people going about their business in the streets. [A drive-by is where a car is driven into a given area carrying one or more gunmen. The car ‘drives by’, identifies a target then the gunman opens fire and the car is driven on usually at high speed.] The army and the police were nowhere to be seen. We [Protestants] were on our own up there [in the Westland Estate]. I was in the Westland Defence Association by that stage. Vigilante patrols were set up but we had no guns. The IRA had automatics [machine guns], high velocity sniper rifles, powerful pistols, the lot, but we had fuck all. There were virtually no guns on the loyalist side. The only weapons we had were baseball bats and I just thought to myself, ‘What the fuck are we going to do when they [the IRA] come in with their machine guns? Throw bats at them?’ The bottom line was, all we were doing was providing targets for the IRA. Everybody knew that, but we did it anyway, all night every night, each man just getting a few hours sleep. The women and children could sleep better knowing that the men were on the streets. Mind you the women were good as well, they supported us to the hilt bringing us tea and buns. When cars we didn’t recognise drove by the estate some of the men would flash ‘handguns’ but they were toy guns. The UDA got the nickname of ‘the water-pistol men’ in those days because all we had for guns were water pistols, which we painted black, that’s how desperate the situation was. In the darkness of night the IRA wouldn’t have known the difference. They were so well armed it probably never occurred to them that we didn’t have anything [guns]. But believe it or not that worked, the areas that were ‘patrolled’ were much less likely to be attacked. So the IRA with their machine guns, AK47s were deterred by WDA men with toy guns. That tells you a lot, doesn’t it? A short time after that the UDA was formed to bring all the [Protestant] defence associations together under one umbrella organisation. That had been a brilliant idea, to have a unified command across Belfast and all of Northern Ireland. One big united Protestant defence force. It was exactly what we all needed. Arrangements were made for a UDA officer to visit our area. He was a colonel in the UDA

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but he had been a sergeant in the [British] army. He must have been promoted every day for a week in the UDA. But give him his dues he was obviously a military man and he was the sort of guy you wouldn’t fuck around with. He told us that republicans and the IRA had started a war with the loyalist and unionist people of Ulster. Some of us resented that because we were in west Belfast and the IRA had been targeting us. We didn’t need somebody from the East coming over to tell us what we already knew. That’s the thing about Belfast, it’s very territorial. Even in the Shankill Road for example, it’s the ‘upper Shankill’ and the ‘lower Shankill’ and there’s great rivalry between the two. So even in the same organisation it would be the upper Shankill UDA and the lower Shankill UDA with different battalions and leaderships in competition with each other, and usually they couldn’t agree about anything. That spirit of independence and local difference would have very serious consequences for the UDA. The UVF was very different, it was run from the Shankill, there was one command and that was it. The Shankill command ran the UVF all over Northern Ireland and that was just accepted. Anyway this colonel from east Belfast told us that there was going to be a war in Northern Ireland between the loyalists and the IRA. He told us what we already knew, that we couldn’t count on the army or the police, because the government controlled the army and the police, and that the [British] government wanted out of Northern Ireland. ‘Therefore,’ he said, ‘the government doesn’t want to defeat the IRA, the government wants to help the IRA.’ ‘The government has already told the IRA that they want out [of Northern Ireland], and they have publicly said that to the IRA, to encourage the IRA.’ ‘But things haven’t changed from 1916, Ulster [Protestants] will still fight, and Ulster [Protestants] will still be right.’ [As quoted by Winston Churchill, 1916.] Then he [the colonel] told us that the UDA needed volunteers and that the volunteers would be armed and trained in combat. He guaranteed that every volunteer would receive training and a gun. Then he told us that guns were expensive and that UDA volunteers would be expected to pay ‘all they could’ in weekly ‘dues’ for the ‘defence of Ulster’. The community centre we were in on the Westland Estate was badly run down. There was no furniture and we didn’t even have glass in the windows. The people [of the estate] didn’t have anything. The seats we were sitting on were comprised of rough wooden planks on cement blocks. The colonel was sitting at a table which was actually two tea chests pushed together and draped with a Union

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Jack with a bible on top. There were about 50 of us in the room and you could have heard a pin drop. We all knew that this was the ‘real thing’. The next thing we knew was the colonel pulled out a submachine gun from under the table. He said, ‘the time has come, the UDA needs you as volunteers’. ‘We need you to serve your God and your country.’ The guy next to me just said, ‘Oh for fuck’s sake’ and ran out. About 20 of the men just ‘bottled’ [lost their nerve] and ran out. They went out of there so fast they left a cloud of cement dust on the floor. The rest of us, about 30 in total, stayed and volunteered. As far as I was concerned this was exactly what we [Protestants] needed, at long last we were organising to defend ourselves. The colonel swore us in one by one. We all took an oath on the bible swearing allegiance to ‘God and country and the UDA’. We were told that the UDA was organising all over the country and that we would have to elect our own officers, ‘men who could command the respect and loyalty of the volunteers’. We agreed to meet the next night because there were men we wanted in who were working and couldn’t attend that night. There were no hard feelings toward the guys who left. Some of them had wives who wouldn’t let them join, some of them held down two jobs and couldn’t afford the time, and some were just too old. We met the next night and elected our Commanding Officer or CO as he was called. It was all above board and democratic. We were just ordinary decent working men trying to defend our area and our families. The guy we chose was the wisest man in the room. He was a shipyard worker and he was a good man. —— was very intelligent, he could have talked about anything, but more than that he’d travelled and he’d been around. —— was a hard man but fair, he never looked for trouble. Another guy had also run for election but we knew that he had a criminal record for fraud against the ‘national assistance’ [department of social security] so nobody voted for him. At that time two police officers lived on our estate. They knew the [UDA] meetings had taken place but they just turned a blind eye to it, and let us get on with it. Later on we asked them to join, but they weren’t having any of it. It was hot and heavy in those days. Protestants were being shot and killed all over the place. But we [Protestants] hadn’t hit back. We knew that the UVF was there and we all thought that they’d hit [the IRA/republicans] first [i.e. before the UDA] because they were more military than us, and they had guns. They also recruited [former] soldiers who had fought terrorists in Cyprus and Borneo, whereas we really hadn’t a clue. I’d never

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fought anybody in my life. I’d run from a fight, but you couldn’t run from this, not the IRA. In June 1970 the IRA shot and killed five Protestants in sectarian murders. That was it, as far as we were concerned the ‘balloon’ was up. It wasn’t long after that [August 1970] they [the IRA] blew up and killed two police officers along the border. Then [February 1971] they blew up a BBC Land-Rover and killed five people, a BBC LandRover! Soldiers were getting killed all the time. Nearly 60 [60 actually] members of the security forces were killed in 1971 alone, and over 20 [27] Protestants murdered and that was just for openers [just the start of it]. We [the UDA] got more and more organised and we had patrols going out every night. By then [1971] we had street barricades, and a few pistols. Two-man patrols would go out and around the estate, and one of the men would have a gun. But it was all psychological more than anything else. A .38 pistol won’t do much up against an AK47, or an Armalite [IRA automatic weaponry], there just was no contest. In the early days we [UDA members] all paid our dues and we could see that guns were coming in, and we knew that the [loyalist] prisoners and their families were being looked after [given money] so that was fine. All of that worked very well for the first couple of years. In those days everything was up front. We were getting Steyr rifles, they were ancient. —— fired one and it knocked him clean off his feet. Flames belched out of the barrel, and you could nearly hear the bullet travelling down it but at least they were guns. After a while we were told that the funds had to go to the [UDA] battalion HQ in the Shankill Road, and that’s when the corruption started. People like —— started to take over. —— was a classic hard man who was no more than a criminal really, and he had worked his way up [the UDA ranks] by bullying and extortion. Even in our own wee area things [corruption] started to happen, and it was probably the same all over [Northern Ireland]. The simple reason was that UDA commanders really had to be full time, because by that stage there were so many people involved and all of that took time. But a UDA commander wasn’t paid. So the vast majority of people, who had jobs, either had no interest, or couldn’t afford to put themselves up for [UDA] office. That meant unemployed people, people who’d never done a day’s work in their lives got into positions of leadership. It was accepted that full time UDA officers were entitled to a percentage of the ‘proceedings’, but it was largely up to area commanders to decide what percentage to take. And human nature

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being what it is, the percentage of what was taken went up and up and up. These guys started wearing ‘the suits’, they drove fancy cars and took continental holidays. In those days none of the ordinary people in our areas went to Spain, we went to Millisle or Ballywalter or Portrush [i.e. stayed in Northern Ireland]. Another side to that was when an area was ‘active’ [in paramilitary terms] the COs would be arrested and taken to Castlereagh [interrogation centre] for questioning. But when an area was inactive the COs would be left alone. Now that was a very clever strategy by the police, because they knew that if they hit the CO on a regular basis for paramilitary activity the COs in question would make bloody sure that paramilitary activity stopped. And that’s exactly what happened, by the end of the 1970s and early 1980s the UDA had become militarily inactive. Police infiltration was another major problem. The police would befriend certain individuals, they’d offer them drinks in the police station. If someone was caught for drunken driving, or a domestic [violence] it was, ‘OK you play ball with us.’ I heard of one guy, they gave him four whiskeys in the police station and then arrested him as he got into his car. Charges weren’t pressed so that was it, the police had him [i.e. as an informer]. We [UDA] knew that they’d [the police] slip our guys some money, and if you accepted that they had you by the balls. You were a ‘paid informer’ and paid informers were tortured and shot [by the paramilitaries] so you had to play ball with them or they’d threaten to tell someone in the organisation. The police would turn a blind eye to the criminal stuff, the racketeering and the robberies, just as long as the paramilitary activity was kept in check. So the UDA was seriously compromised, if not brought to its knees, by the police. All of that posed serious problems for me because I was a UDA man, and I was fully committed and loyal to the UDA, but I was having more and more difficulty with the local command. At that time Andy Tyrie was in charge of the UDA, he was the supreme commander of the UDA, I knew that Andy was straight [i.e. noncriminal] and that he wanted to do what I wanted to do, to take on republicans and the IRA. Tyrie had no interest in killing ordinary Catholics because he knew that that’s what the IRA wanted. When we [the UDA] killed Catholics the IRA was delighted because it gave them the role of the defenders of innocent Catholics. The UDA as an organisation had never been ordered to kill Catholics. Andy Tyrie had given the order to ‘terrorise the terrorists’ [i.e. the IRA]. Anyway I went down to meet Tyrie in UDA HQ in 254A

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Shankill Road. He was a very busy man with a desk loaded with unanswered correspondence. He asked me to draft a few replies for him to sign and because I’m a good writer I was pleased to do that. Tyrie obviously liked the work and he offered me a job there and then in his personal staff. I thought that was tremendous because I would be a salaried full-time UDA man. As far as I was concerned I couldn’t have had a better job. Being in that position gave me an even greater insight into the corruption in the UDA. By the late 1970s nearly all the good military men had either moved on or moved out because of the corruption. It actually seemed that most of the good men who remained became corrupted themselves. So that was the UDA. You had a good top leadership, the best grassroots volunteers anyone could ask for, but almost everything in the middle was bent [corrupt]. Andy Tyrie tried his best to reform the organisation but despite his best efforts it just got worse instead of better. In the end he just gave up and walked away from the UDA, at least as it was then [1988/89]. As a full-time UDA man I was a target for the Provos. I knew that anyway but the police confirmed it for me. I was on an IRA death list. In the early 1970s I drank in a local bar, Crangle’s pub near the Westland Estate. It was a [religiously] mixed pub with middle-class Catholics from the ‘private’ houses around there and working-class Protestants from the estate. That was fine and nobody minded that because we thought that middle-class Catholics would have more sense than to be in the IRA. We met there every Thursday night. This Thursday I left [UDA] headquarters and I was travelling through Belfast when a whole series of [IRA] bombs went off. The town was in chaos and roads were sealed off everywhere because of bombs or bomb hoaxes. Army and police jeeps were flying around everywhere with their sirens going off. It seemed to me that they were just going around in circles. Some of those young soldiers actually looked scared. I was standing at a bus stop when a jeep pulled up beside me in traffic. A young squaddie nodded at me and said, ‘Fucking hell does this kind of thing happen a lot around here mate?’ I just laughed over at him and said, ‘Welcome to Belfast son.’ I arrived at the bar about two hours late. There had been an IRA attack and they had killed two men with automatics and semi-automatic pistols. The IRA team had left just before I arrived, and I knew that they had been there to get me. I was going to be blamed for it anyway. Walking into that bar was like walking into hell, blood, bodies and the

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screams of the injured. I went over to one of the men who had been shot. He was the son of a friend of mine. He was sitting with his back propped up against the bar, the blood pouring from his head where he had been shot. He said, ‘Sammy, Sammy I’ve been hit. I think it’s bad.’ I said, ‘Listen you’ll be fine it’s just a scratch on your fucking head.’ But I knew that he was dying. He said to me ‘Sammy, top pocket it’s my wages, give my wages to my Da to give to Mary [his wife].’ I said, ‘Son, don’t you worry about that now, I’ll make sure your wife’s OK.’ But he insisted, ‘No, Sammy take the wages.’ I pulled the money out of his top pocket, there was £20 soaked from the blood running from his head. The tears choked me; I just thought, ‘You’re lying here fucking dying and all you’re worried about is your wife getting your wages, 20 fucking quid.’ There was something unbelievably human about that, him lying there with a bullet in his head worrying about his wife. I looked over to see another bizarre sight. This other man had been shot in the neck and he was lying beside the phone trying to phone home with the blood pumping out of his neck. He was trying to phone his wife. I knew —— and his wife and they hadn’t spoken in years and here he was trying to reach her. —— thought that he was dying and here he was trying to make the peace, that taught me an awful lot. At the end of the day it’s who you spend your life with who matters, whether you realise it or not at the time. What actually happened [to ——] was he was shot in the neck and the bullet had come out through his mouth. The next thing was the police arrived on the scene, they burst through the door with their guns at the ready. It was like watching a tape at high speed slowing down to low speed. They burst in through the door fast and then they almost froze as they surveyed the scene of carnage in the room. One young police officer in particular went very pale. He started to sway on his feet and then he just vomited. He didn’t have time to turn around, he just spewed up in the direction of bodies he was looking at. A sergeant pushed him backwards, out of the bar. All of that strengthened my resolve to get the IRA, and the people who were bringing such wanton destruction to ‘my’ country, and ‘my’ people. As I walked out of the bar a friend’s wife came running up the road. ‘Sam, Sam is Joey OK, oh please God he’s OK.’ Joey was still lying on the floor in the bar, Joey was dead. I didn’t say a word to her, she knew from my expression, and the tears in my eyes and she just ran on past me wailing. The wailing sound she made will haunt me for the rest of my life. I never ever want to hear that again. We [the

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UDA/loyalists] had no victories [over the IRA] in those days. We were always on the receiving end, it was nearly always Protestants being killed and that’s because we [the UDA] were so badly organised. That’s the price we were paying for the corruption and a leadership who only cared about themselves. That’s the way it went on until early 1989 when Nelson was arrested [Nelson was the intelligence officer of the UFF who had been a police/army agent]. After that a new leadership began to take over and the UDA/UFF became a military operation again. But what happened to the UDA should never have happened and we have to learn from all of this to prevent it ever happening again in the future. It was the UDA’s job to protect the Protestant people but the UDA let them down, it failed them. But they weren’t failed by the ordinary volunteers, because you couldn’t meet better men that them. The people were failed by the local leaderships who cared more about themselves than the loyalist people. Those guys wanted a quiet life, they didn’t want trouble with anyone, least of all the IRA. Let me give you an example of that. After Milltown [the cemetery where Michael Stone attacked an IRA funeral] two UDA brigadiers from two Belfast battalions telephoned the IRA to say that they didn’t know Michael Stone. They said that he was just a rogue loyalist who was acting without authorisation. But Michael was UDA, he was a travelling gunman who went after the IRA and republicans and he needed no authority for that because that was his job. Those two brigadiers were scared in case the IRA would retaliate against them or their areas which would mean trouble, so they disclaimed Michael, one of our [UDA] best operators. By way of contrast the UVF had actually claimed Michael as one of theirs [i.e. as a UVF volunteer]. These guys were top brass in the UDA and they telephoned the IRA to apologise for the actions of one of our top men, because they were scared of the IRA. What sort of a fucking chance did we have? ‘KEN’ ‘Ken’ (now late 40s) conforms to the more conventional stereotype of a UDA man as a tall big man with a menacing physical presence. Obviously a hard man in his day with a formidable reputation for extreme violence he has mellowed becoming almost the opposite of his younger caricature. As a UDA killer who gloried in his role ‘Ken’ gained insights in life which challenged his profound sectarian hatred, giving way to remorse, clinical depression and suicidal tendencies.

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Well basically I lived in an area known as Brown Square which is right at the bottom of the [ultra-loyalist] Shankill Road [in Belfast]. I was born in 1962. As a child I would have remembered playing ‘kick a tin’ in the streets, and ‘rally-o’, those were the sort of games we played. It would have been a happy childhood only we lived in a very small house. I actually shared a bed with my two brothers. My mum and dad had a room and my uncle had the back room, and an old aunt who couldn’t walk she lived in the ‘living room’ of the house. So it was actually a very small house with loads of people in it. I suppose looking back the things you would remember would be the tin bath in front of the fire. Getting washed in front of everyone and that type of thing which doesn’t happen anymore. I would have had a very good relationship with my parents. They were loving parents. Looking back I can never remember my parents working. They couldn’t get work. My dad had worked in the shipyard on a ship called the Canberra, which would have been some time before I was born. He’d got a back injury working on the ship, and so he wasn’t really fit for work. One of the ways we got an income at that time was my Dad used to do the ‘pitch and toss’. My dad and a couple of uncles were hard men. You had hard men at that time, street fighters, Stormy Weatherall and Silver McKee, and my granddad ——, who used to go about with people like that. There was no trouble in those days, no paramilitaries or anything like that, so you had nothing to worry about. They played pitch and toss in a wee entry at the bottom of the Shankill, ‘Brady’s Lane’. For pitch and toss you had a group of adults who stood around in a circle, and one person would have had a small stick with two of the old half pennies. They would throw them in the air and they would land, two heads, two tails, or odds, and the men would bet on how they landed. If they fell on a head and a tail they were thrown again until you got what they called a ‘result’, either two heads or two tails. My dad was always a hunting man. He was away nearly every day hunting for rabbits. Basically in those days we lived on rabbits. Rabbits and hares and fish. He was always out with the dogs shooting or fishing, so there was always food in the house. He used to go down to the [Belfast] lough shore at low tide, and he would have got mussels and cockles and willicks, and that was the diet we grew up with. He also went down to Ballykinler, there was a big sandy strand

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there. I also remember as a child going with him to Rockport just outside Bangor and getting mussels there. The food wasn’t too bad. I remember in those days it was the old street system. You would have had 50 or 60 houses in a street. We lived in a street called Sackville Street. All the doors would have been left open and you could run in and out of anybody’s house. In those days you were ‘elected’ [lucky] if you got a big heel of bread with loads of butter and sprinkled with sugar, or else red sauce or brown sauce on the bread. That’s what you looked forward to. You hoped that whatever house you went into, they would give you the heel of the bread with the butter and the sugar. My mother was a very good person, she was very small. I know that she was a very caring person, a loving person. She always made plenty of time to be with us. If any of us had problems we would have gone to her. She would have tried to the best of her ability to give us all she could. In those days there wasn’t a lot of money about. I can remember one Christmas in particular a couple of the brothers got the old Dalek suit [as in Dr Who], with a toilet plunger sticking out at the front. Because I was the smallest I only got playing with it last. Things like that. There wasn’t much there but there was love, you were respected as a child. I went to Brown Square Primary School. It was built in 1811 and was the oldest school in Belfast. I remember going into my first class in P1. The teacher was called a Mrs ——. She was a big giant of a woman. I was very very small. I remember walking into the classroom on the first day. I fell straight onto the floor and crawled under a cupboard, and I didn’t want to come out. I didn’t want to be left there even though it was only 100 yards from my home. I think I had a fear of authority. Anyone outside your family telling you what to do. I was a very slow learner. In those days you had to work at the teacher’s pace, rather than at your own pace. I found that frightening, because I couldn’t work at the teacher’s pace. That meant that I was always getting into trouble, getting the cane and things like that. I couldn’t learn because I was too frightened, I was always frightened of being caned. I needed people to encourage me for the attempts I was making, not people putting me down. I would have been caned at least once a week, sometimes twice a day because of different things but mainly because I couldn’t keep up. It was very frightening, and very very sore. You got caned right across the tips of your fingers and it was very painful, the ‘whoosh’ of the cane coming down, and if you took your hand away you’d

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get another one. Every time it happened to me I just wanted to run home. I just did not want to be there. When you got beaten you cried, everybody did and it was humiliating. Standing there crying in front of the class. Girls and boys. Secondary school wasn’t much better. I was expelled at the age of 111⁄2. I was in a classroom with all boys then, because I went to Summerdale Secondary School. One of the boys in the class had broken the back off one of the chairs. He broke it off and threw it at the teacher. When I was nervous I always laughed. I was too frightened of school and of teachers to have ever thrown anything at them. But when the teacher turned round he saw me laughing and he assumed that I did it. He came down and thumped me on the head. He hit me so hard it knocked me down and I was crying. I hadn’t done anything. I only knew of one way to respond to that. I lifted a chair and hit him over the head with it. The next thing I knew was I was expelled from the school and I was never allowed back into secondary school after that. So, I didn’t really have an education. At 12 years of age I started working in a pub in the Shankill. There were no social workers or education welfare officers who came to see me from between the age of 111⁄2 until I was 15. When I was 15 someone must have thought, ‘Why’s he not at school? Let’s put him in a home.’ It was like a boarding school for people with learning difficulties, and for kids who had got into trouble. It was a place in Lurgan, a place called Fallowfield. I hadn’t been to school since I was 11. I had started off cleaning glasses in the bar, and I progressed to pulling pints. I had matured very quickly in one sense, always in the company of the men, and they were good to me. But I still couldn’t read or write or put things down on paper. My mum, and an uncle who was on holiday from Australia at the time, drove me down to Fallowfield. Because of my background I was already smoking at the age of 15. When I was unpacking my clothes at Fallowfield the teacher made me hand over my cigarettes, but I held on to one pack. My mum and my uncle had left me there at about 9.30 that morning. They put me into a class with young people. At about 10 o’clock there was a break, to have a glass of milk and whatever there was. I took out a cigarette and started to smoke, with my background I thought nothing of it. I was taken straight over to the headmaster. He said, ‘Hand over the cigarettes.’ I said, ‘No.’ He said, ‘Hand them over now.’ I said, ‘No, and even better than that, give me back the cigarettes you already took from me, because I won’t be staying here. I’m not going to be treated like this.’ So they packed

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my gear and put me on a train back to Belfast. I made my way back to the house, and when I got in my sister and my dad were there. They said, ‘What are you doing back?’, and I told them about the cigarettes. I got back so quickly my mum and my uncle weren’t back yet. The next thing was the car pulled up, and I hid behind a chair in the living room. My mum came in and said, ‘Thank god that’s him away.’ That took me by surprise, I’d never expected to hear her say that. When I came out from behind the chair she couldn’t believe it. I suppose I had been a bit of a nuisance. After that they just sent out a remedial teacher but I didn’t want to know. She didn’t want to know either, because she was scared coming into our area. In the early days, 1970/71, there were vigilantes out in the streets. In Brown Square we were on the front line so there were people out protecting the streets. Even as a child you had wanted to be a part of that. We were under constant attack [from republicans/Catholics]. I lived in Sackville Street, which was opposite Coaches Street. Coaches Street was to become the peace line with barbed wire and that separating the two communities. When I was growing up I felt that this was my community and that we were being attacked by Catholics. I had early memories of being trailed out of bed at one or two in the morning with fires and burning all over the place. Smoke and shouting and screaming. Petrol bombs coming over. We lived at the end of the street so we always got it. We used to be taken into Duncairns Court, which was two small streets in the middle of Brown Square. We would have been herded in there like cattle, maybe 50 kids in the one house. You had to soak blankets in water and hold them up against the doors to keep out the smoke and the CS gas that the army would have fired. When you got up the next morning it would have been over and the army would be there. The streets would have been littered with bricks and broken glass, smouldering houses and burnt out cars. In Wilson Street you could have seen the petrol bombs lined up. These were there to protect your community from attack, to keep the Catholics out. There would have been gunfire, bombing and shootings. Many a night I hid under the bed, it would have frightened the life out of you. In Brown Square we were at the bottom of the Shankill, but we were actually very isolated. We had to get hundreds of people from other [Protestant] areas to come and help us protect our area but sometimes other areas were also under attack and they couldn’t send anybody so you felt very vulnerable. At that time in 1969 when I was nine they sent the soldiers in. They were based in Brown Square Barracks, presumably

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to defend the Protestants, but sometimes all they could do was protect themselves. I always hung around with the soldiers and I became a sort of mascot for them. They gave me my own bed, and my own wee uniform. At that time, when I was nine I can remember them buying me a wee plastic rifle for my birthday, out of Woolworths in Lower North Street. The reason I remember that was, one of the soldiers was playing about with me and he broke the rifle, and I started crying, so he gave me the money and sent me down to Woolworths to get another one. In Brown Square Barracks they [the soldiers] used to give me bread and butter, meat and cheese and I would have taken it home to my mum, and my mum would have made sandwiches for the soldiers on the streets. She did that because we felt that they were there to protect us, because it was our community that was under siege. When I think back to it I was involved [with the loyalist paramilitaries] without even realising that I was involved. I was 12 years of age and I went up to the Salisbury Bar and I had this wee scooter with me, I was on this wee scooter. I went into the bar, and the barman said to me, ‘Can you run down to the loyalist club and get ——’ [a former UDA leader who was later shot by the UDA, suspected of criminal activity]. I went down to the loyalist club, and all these guys were coming out with white shirts and ties. I said, ‘I’m looking for ——.’ This small stubby guy said, ‘I’m—— what do you want?’ I said, ‘I’ve been sent down from the Salisbury Bar, there’s some fella there you want to see.’ ‘Right,’ he said, ‘come on.’ I remember we went up the Shankill together, me beside him on my wee scooter. As we got closer to the bar he started to quicken his pace, then he pulled out a gun and ran into the bar. The next thing there was a shot. That was my first involvement with a killing, but I thought to myself it must have been OK, because —— was UDA, and the UDA were protecting us. When you work behind a bar people ask you to take this here, put that there, so at the age of 12 I was involved before even realising it. But I regarded these people [the UDA] as my community, these people were protecting me and I wanted to be a part of that. I can remember when I was being herded out of my house, into the safe house in the ‘courts’, I said to myself this must be what it means to be a man. That you can protect your community, and protect the children in your community. So you wanted to grow up quickly to do what they were doing, that was your model of masculinity, of manhood.

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During 1971, the time when I would have been a ‘mascot’ for the soldiers, there were three Scottish soldiers murdered in Legoniel [outside Belfast]. The soldiers had been drinking in a bar and three girls had invited them to a party. The only problem was that these girls were IRA and they drove the soldiers out to a ditch were they were murdered. They were from the Royal Highland Fusiliers. They had been from Girwood Barracks, but we had Fusiliers in Brown Square as well. After they were murdered I got permission to go to Scotland to attend the funerals. I travelled with another soldier who was the bugler. I was obsessed with their deaths, ‘Who did this, who was responsible for killing the three soldiers?’ Their murder had a traumatic and profound impact upon me. These were soldiers who were protecting my community. They had left their own homes and families to come over here to protect us and they were being murdered. There were policemen who were protecting my community and they were being murdered. People in my community were being murdered. At 11 and 12 years of age I was asking questions, who’s doing all this, who’s killing my people, and the people who are trying to protect them? ‘It’s the IRA’, ‘well who are the IRA’, they’re the ‘Fenians’ or the ‘Taigs’ [Catholics]. It was one community against the other community. Therefore I believed that anyone from the Catholic community would have been the enemy. I was a Protestant, the Catholics were killing us, they were Catholics, so Protestants would kill them in retaliation. When I was growing up we faced [Catholic] Unity Flats. Because I didn’t attend school I went out and threw stones and bricks, to bring the Catholics out. That would start a riot and then both sides would start shooting at each other, and I thought this was great. I did that a lot because it was exciting. You didn’t think about getting shot, that just never entered your head. You never thought that you might be the one who ends up getting shot. It was just part of life then. You had nothing to do so ‘let’s get a riot going’. I didn’t see it as breaking the law, they [Catholics] were the people who were breaking the law, destroying the country and murdering everybody. When I was growing up 14, 15, 16 I looked around and all my friends, every one of them, were joining paramilitary organisations, either the UDA or the UVF. When you joined the UDA you got a blue coat with a fur collar on it so I thought to myself, ‘I’ll have one of those’, so I joined the UDA. There were very strong links between my family and the paramilitaries. —— [a UDA commander] and —— [a prominent loyalist] they

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would have been in the extended family. It was already a personal thing, between me and Catholics, but then after the INLA (Irish National Liberation Army) murdered —— [an uncle] it became really personal, they’d started to kill my family. My brothers were heavily involved, everybody in that generation was involved. My joining was inevitable. It was a geographical thing. If you lived in a certain area you joined the UDA, in another area it was the UVF. But the bottom line was, if you were a young man in the Shankill, you joined a paramilitary organisation. The organisation was more than a gang or a peer group thing, it was your family. The organisation defined who you were, it gave you an identity, a purpose. You might call it tribal or territorial but that’s the way it was. I’ve actually thought a lot about this. I did an interview for the Observer magazine when I was 16 years of age. It was entitled ‘At home with the UDA’. —— [a UDA leader] told me, ‘Whatever you do don’t mention anything about guns or stuff like that.’ Basically I made the statement that ‘if any republicans came into the Shankill they’d be killed’. The interviewer asked, ‘Does that mean that the UDA have guns?’ I said, ‘I didn’t say that. I said that if any republicans are found in the Shankill they will be murdered.’ That was 20-odd years ago. From there I became involved in a UDA outfit, C1 we were called, about 30 of us. It gave you a sense of purpose an identity, people looked up to you. I hate to say it, but I’m being honest here, my ambition had been to kill a Catholic. That went back to when I was about nine or ten and the Scottish soldiers were killed. I wanted to kill members of the community that had killed them. To me innocent Protestants were being killed, and the soldiers had been innocent. They had been naive enough to trust Catholics, that’s why they died. They could never have thought that Catholic girls would lead them away to be slaughtered. As far as I was concerned all Catholics were the enemy, I wanted to kill them, they wanted to kill me. It was something that I needed to do, it was forced upon me. I hadn’t wanted any of those terrible things to happen, but they did, and I felt that I had to respond. When I was 17 I had been out drinking with some friends when I came across a group of men who were holding two Catholics. They had been found in the Shankill, but they weren’t carrying weapons. We reckoned they were doing intelligence work, and ‘sussing’ out a bar or whatever. One of them [the Protestant men] shouted over to me, ‘—– have you got a gun?’ I shouted back, ‘No, but I can get one, hold them there.’ Then one of the guys escaped, so I went over and led the other one away. —— went off to try to

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get a gun. I waited for a while but no gun arrived so I killed him with a breeze block. I hit him on the head with it and knocked him down, then I finished him off. I was pulled into UDA HQ next morning and they asked me why I did it. What happened? I just said, ‘Well at the end of the day we are fighting Catholics and the Catholic community, we’re fighting against the IRA and that guy was a Catholic so what are you worried about?’ There was a whole big debate about it, some people were appalled, they didn’t like it. It wasn’t so much that a Catholic had been killed, it was more about how it happened, in that he had been beaten to death by a breeze block. Eventually they just told me to go on, to forget about it. I had thought in my mind that these were Catholics, these were the people who were murdering us. I knew that if I’d been caught in the [Catholic] Falls Road, or the [Catholic] Ardoyne, I would have been murdered, and I just accepted that. That’s why I joined the paramilitaries, I wanted to do it, I wanted revenge. I didn’t join the UDA to become involved in Catholics’ welfare, I joined to kill them, just like they had killed us. That’s just the way it was in those days. The only thing that I was annoyed about was that the other one [the other captured Catholic] had got away. I lived my whole life for the organisation [the UDA], I was there to do whatever they wanted me to do. Hijacking cars, robbing banks, anything that they wanted me to do. I was very heavily involved with the UDA leadership at that time. I remember one particular incident. When I was 16 —— gave me my first gun, and that has quite an impact upon you at that age, it gave you power, you were ‘somebody’. I was on my way to becoming a UFF gunman, and that was fine with me, that’s why I’d joined in the first instance. I was convicted of one murder, and I can’t comment upon anything else. Because I was a young prisoner I couldn’t be sentenced, so I was detained at the ‘Secretary of State’s Pleasure’. During my remand time in the ‘Crum’ [Crumlin Road Prison, Belfast] we would have been mixed, they didn’t segregate us [as loyalists] from the republicans. I was in A wing. One day you were locked up and the next day you were allowed out for ‘association’ [free association with other prisoners]. One day the loyalists got out, the next day it was the republicans turn. One day you got exercise, the next day you didn’t. It was de facto segregation. Basically your day consisted of lying in bed listening to the radio. When we got into the yard we would have played football. We

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weren’t allowed a football so we made a ball out of socks. If someone hit it a high kick it would stick on the barbed wire and we had to get more socks to make another one. I was sentenced in 1982 and moved down to the H Blocks, H Block 3 YPs [young prisoners]. I didn’t want to be there, I wanted to be with the men from my community [who were sentenced prisoners]. At that time there was a lot of fighting between loyalist and republican prisoners with fire bombs going off in the cells. I went to the governor and asked to be transferred [to be with the adult sentenced prisoners]. He said no, that I was too young. I told him that if I didn’t get transferred I’d have the wing wrecked. At that time I was in charge of the young UDA men. He said, ‘You can’t do that.’ I said, ‘Just you watch.’ So he put me down as disruptive, and moved me in with the men, so I got my way. When I went into the wing I found that we shared it with some top republicans, ——, ——, people like that. The loyalists were outnumbered by about three to one. As I was the only life sentence prisoner there, people looked to me to take charge. We pulled —— and —— [two republican leaders] into a cell and told them that if any loyalists were attacked we’d kill them and that they would be the first two killed. They [the republican prisoners] didn’t allow us into the dining hall for about six weeks after that, so we had no hot food for six weeks. That was when we wrecked our cells protesting for segregation. After 18 months we eventually got it. We were locked up 23 hours a day. I spent a lot of my time ‘on the boards’ [punishment cells], and that could be rough. There were a lot of beatings and things. Now a lot of people mightn’t like to hear this but during that time some of the republican prisoners [i.e. those who weren’t on protest and hence got access to the prison ‘tuck shop’] gave me fruit and tobacco and things. That was like a culture shock to me, at first I thought they might have been poisoned, so I waited. I saw other loyalists eating it, and they were OK so I knew it was OK. When we were on protest the republicans would have slipped us a couple of cigarettes under the door, or a wee bit of tobacco, and that meant a lot to us, because you had nothing. And they taught us Irish as well so as you could talk to them and the screws wouldn’t have known what you were talking about. We collaborated in a sense, ‘Watch out there’s a screw on the landing’, that sort of thing. Turning away from sectarianism happened for me in 1980, when I was sent to the YOC [Young Offenders Centre – outside Belfast].

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I was in Hydebank [the YOC] from 1980 until 1981. It was for a robbery. It wasn’t for myself [i.e. criminal], self-gain, it was under the instruction of the UDA, and it was for money to buy guns. At that time I was caught and sentenced to a year. With 50 per cent remission as it was then, that meant I had to do six months and then I was out. So I lost my six months remission for not conforming [to the requirements of criminalisation policy, calling prison officers ‘Sir’, doing prison work] and I got another two months for fighting with prison officers. I just hated authority. During that time I was on ‘lock up’ [kept in a cell for 23 hours a day] for four months. I remember —— and some of the other UDA leaders came up to visit me. The governors were panicking, ‘Why are these UDA men coming up to Hydebank?’ [A significant number of prison officers would have lived in areas controlled by the UDA and they would have been extremely vulnerable.] They assured —— that I was OK that I hadn’t been touched. At that time prison officers were being beaten up and shot in the community, we were approaching the height of the prison conflict, before the hunger strikes of 1980/81. The prison officers were worried in case I sent out a bad report. After that visit, after four months on the ‘boards’ [punishment cells] they decided to put me back on the ‘committal wing’ again. But they were putting me into a cell with a Roman Catholic. Not only that but this was a guy I had fought on numerous occasions, during the rioting in Unity Flats and the lower Shankill. I remember walking into the cell, and he said, ‘Right big lad, what are you going to do?’ I said, ‘Well there’s one thing, I won’t be staying here with you.’ There were ‘bed packs’ in the cells, you had to fold your bed pack up like in the army. I said to him, ‘I’ll not be making any bed pack in here.’ He said, ‘But ——, they’ll just throw you back on the boards.’ He said, ‘Look big lad we can work together here.’ I said, ‘What do you mean we can work together?’ He replied, ‘We can get a racket going, get tobacco in and sell it to the other prisoners. We can look after each other.’ As a gesture of good will he made my ‘bed pack’ in the cell. So we struck up a friendship, we became friends. I came out of Hydebank in 1981, and within three weeks this guy [this Catholic friend] came looking for me. Now I had got reinvolved in the UDA. Within one hour of being released I had reported in to HQ volunteering for a mission. Anyway I went and met with him and we went into the King Arthur in the town centre and had a few pints and smoked a few joints. Then we went back to my flat in the

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middle of the Shankill estate. About two o’clock in the morning there was a knock on the door, so I went down. When I opened the door there were two hooded men with handguns ‘ready to do the business’. I said, What do you want?’ They said, ‘We’re here to shoot ——.’ I said, ‘Look I brought him in and I’ll be taking him out again.’ They said, ‘We’ve been sent by the CO to shoot him.’ I said, ‘Nobody is shooting anybody here. I’ll see the CO first thing in the morning and get it sorted out.’ So the next morning I took him [the Catholic friend] to the CO’s mother’s house and left him there while I went to see the CO. I said, ‘Look I brought a Taig [Catholic] into the estate last night. He’s not a republican he’s just an ordinary Catholic, he was in Hydebank for robbing a bank, but it was criminal, not political. He wanted the money for himself.’ I said, ‘If you want him killed, I’ll kill him, but he’s just an ordinary Catholic.’ After some time the CO said to me, ‘Because of who you are, and because of what you’ve done, I’m going to let it go this time. Don’t let it happen again.’ So I went to the CO’s mother’s house and got —— out of that estate as fast as I could. I would probably have killed him if I’d been ordered to do so. I didn’t want to but I probably would have. But it would have been quick, one [shot] to the back of the head. He wouldn’t have known a thing about it. But the reason I’m sharing this with you is to let you know that for the first time in my life I had stood up for a Catholic. Make no mistake I had put myself on the line for him. The two of us could have been killed, him for being a Catholic in the Shankill and me for protecting him. This was a very, very crucial period in my life, my perceptions were changing. My understanding of things was challenged. For the first time I had realised that not all Catholics were in the IRA. I knew I thought that because I had said it, but it wasn’t until I said it that I realised it was true. That’s what created the dilemma for me over the next months. I had been bought up in a sectarian world in which all Catholics were IRA men. I didn’t only believe that, I preached that gospel in the full conviction that it was right and now this had happened. It was actually traumatic, it caused me a crisis of confidence. For us, Catholics were so linked to the IRA the two were inseparable. At that particular time I was a UDA man. There were expectations of me, that I would kick a door in and shoot someone [a Catholic]. Now I had no problem with that, if it was an IRA man, but now I did have a problem if he was just an ordinary Catholic. Now that was a dilemma for me and it caused me serious

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mental problems. I was actually on the verge of a nervous breakdown. I would be out drinking in the loyalist clubs, I was the ‘big lad’, ‘big reputation’, but they all expected me to kill Catholics. I thought that I was going to crack up. It’s easy to go and do something when you think that it’s right, but if something happens to suggest that maybe it isn’t right, that’s traumatic. That ‘does you head in’ [creates mental instability]. It was like suddenly I was in a different world to everyone else. I had always believed that all Catholics were my enemy, the enemy of my people, and that it was them or us. It was like a revelation, they’re not all in the IRA, they’re not all bad. It was frightening, all the certainty in my life had gone. I never had any conscience about all that had gone on before but now it was different. That guy [the Catholic] who had been killed, I was never convicted for that, but my three mates had been the year before. When he was killed I was the only one present. Every one of them named me, but there were no witnesses and I didn’t make a statement so there was nothing that they [the police] could do about it. There was this police inspector Anne ——, she was always on my back. I was standing at the back of this house kissing a girl when the house was raided. It was Anne ——. Afterwards she came over and asked if I wanted a lift home. I told her to fuck off, that people would think that I was a ‘tout’ [informer]. A week later I was in Paisley Park drinking with my friends and a thought came to me. If you see Anne ——, stop the car. I walked along the West Circular Road and on to the Ballygomartin Road and there was a car coming up. It was Anne —— and another detective. I got into the car and then confessed and Anne knew that I would. Anne —— didn’t judge me, it was as if she understood. All she said was, ‘We live in very bad times and very bad things happen.’ We were driving down the Shankill and Anne turned around and looked at me, and she knew, she asked compassionately, as if she knew the emotional turmoil I was in. ‘—— what about the murder?’ I confessed there and then. I was taken to Castlereagh [interrogation centre] and charged. I felt I’d let everyone down, my comrades, the organisation, my community. I’d been in Castlereagh over 20 times and I’d never made a statement. It was about the dilemma I was in about killing more people. I don’t think I could have killed anyone else without knowing who they were and all about them [i.e. if they were IRA], and that wasn’t possible. So I couldn’t have lived in my community and lived up to the expectations that people had of me in that community. I was so confused, I didn’t know what was going on. The rules of

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combat as I had known them had changed, now there was a different reality. I confessed, I was convicted of murder, and I served 121⁄2 years in prison. Now I didn’t have to do that, they couldn’t have touched me without a confession. That was the price of my dilemma. I still believe that the loyalists were right to fight the IRA, they had no choice. But the IRA shouldn’t have killed ordinary Protestants, and the loyalists shouldn’t have killed ordinary Catholics. But by its very nature the innocent do get killed, that’s the reality of war. War itself is the enemy, men think they control war, but war controls men, it consumes them. I know because I was one of them, and I still don’t understand it. We do things when we are at war that we would just never, ever do, in normal circumstances. It’s like a contagion or an infection that takes over your identity and blinds you. You become a different person, and you are a different person. I’ve been clinically depressed and suicidal and sometimes I felt that I just couldn’t go on. I spend all my time now working with young people, trying to make sure that they don’t go down the same road as me. Because that’s the road to hell. ‘BILLY’ ‘Billy’ (now in his 40s) is a slightly built man who has retained an almost boyish aspect of his personality. He has a ready sense of humour and is very engaging in conversation. As a young man he was imprisoned for ‘fundraising’, that is robbing banks for the UDA. This was during the period of criminalisation policy, a brutal and dehumanising prison regime predicated upon the need to criminalise political prisoners in Northern Ireland (1976–90). Like a majority of the loyalist prisoners who fought against criminalisation, Billy had never talked about his experiences of degradation and torture at the hands of the prison service. The interviews with Billy were both emotional and traumatic, in exchanges which were of mutual significance. Early childhood. I lived in —— on the Shankill Road. My grandma lived in ——. My paternal grandfather lived in ——. Mostly I would have gone up to my paternal grandfather. My grandmother died early on. Most of my early memories would have been of the family. My father worked in the zoo then. Every Sunday my father would have taken me out and we went to one of the uncles’ houses or the grandparents. Or we would have gone for a walk. We would have gone to the zoo quite a lot because he was a zoo keeper, and we got in free.

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Or we would have gone up around Hazelwood [a local park] for walks, things like that. In the summer my mother would have taken us to Hazelbank. We were well looked after as children. We got taken out all the time. It was a big close family. My father worked all week but every Saturday morning we would have gone out with my mother and we visited her side of the family. We would have been left in one of our aunt’s houses and all the cousins would play together while they went shopping. My father got up early on a Sunday morning and made us all a big breakfast, a big fry-up. I hated school when I first started. The first day I went to primary school my mother was in hospital, with [giving birth to] one of the other sons, it must have been Sam. She was in having him, and there was only my father and me in the house. When it was time for school my father took me before he went to work. I went to the Riddel Memorial in Malvern Street. He took me up and dropped me at the gates and said more or less, ‘Will you be alright?’, I said yes, I’d be fine and he left. As soon as he left I started backing away. I wasn’t having any of it. This teacher came out. The teacher was actually a Pakistani, you know an Asian, and I’d never seen a coloured woman. That made it even more traumatic for me. She grabbed me by the hand and tried to pull me in and I kicked her in the shins, and tried to do a runner. I ran up Malvern Street, and on to my grandda’s house. I told him about it, and said, ‘You want to see the people that are trying to drag me in. They’re not even white people’, and all this business. My grandfather took me back down, and carried me into the class, and set me down. He’d had a word with me and told me not to worry. When I got into the class I must have settled down fairly quickly, because I was alright after that. During the first couple of months I was a bit rebellious but after that I settled down and I was alright with it. I got to like the teacher, once I got to know her. I was in the Riddel until P4 and after that I got moved up to Highfield [Primary School]. We were moved out into the Highfield [a larger housing estate on the outskirts of Belfast]. I thought that we had actually moved to the country. We had a garden and all, our own garden, and coming from the Shankill [inner Belfast] it was like moving to the country to me. My mother had a very rough time even getting me home to bed because I was up the back, up in the fields and up to the mountain. There were dams up there where you could find sticklebacks. To me these were like newts, or baby crocodiles. I was into everything, I didn’t know anything about the countryside coming from the Shankill. I got all the boys who were

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already there to show me about the place. When I went to school I found an orchard at the side of it. I’d never seen an apple tree before. They couldn’t get me out of it. There was a wee farm beside it, and your man had chickens and all. I used to bring bread and feed the chickens. The only problem they had with me in Highfield [school] was getting me in, because if I wasn’t up the apple trees I was feeding the chickens. I thought this was tremendous. I made a lot of friends, friends I’ve had all my life from primary school. I couldn’t wait to get out of the class into the fields. I became very interested in nature study, learning about insects and animals and how they ‘operated’. I had a terrible thirst for knowledge about these things. Nature study, I was right into it, and I’m still into it, in a big way. Some of the boys would have kept me going, they’d call me ‘trout mouth’ because I’m never done talking about fish and things. I remember one time we were ‘doing’ [stealing apples from] an orchard when the ‘boy’ [owner] of the house came out. We all did a runner but one of the boys slipped and slid all the way down the tree. He dislocated his shoulder. We had to take him to the doctors, and we told him [the doctor] that he had slid down a bank. We were scared in case the Peelers [police] would be after us. I went back and told my father the story and he fell about laughing. He said, ‘That’s a “wheeker one” [good one] now what were you really doing?’ He told me that no one would be bothered to chase us because of that. I was four when my younger brother was born, ‘Eric’. I felt a great resentment about his being born to be honest with you. Looking back now I don’t know why. I suppose before he came along I had my parents all to myself. Then he came along and he seemed to be taking over the love and affection that I had been getting. I had a terrible dislike for him for a while. Actually it got to such an extent that when I was about eight, just before we moved to Highfield, I took him up to the waterworks. He was about four at the time. I took him up and we were walking by the side of the waterworks dam and I pushed him in. There were people around and I knew he’d be rescued, but I wanted him to know what it was like to get pushed out. Two bigger lads came along and pulled him out, and I just said that he’d slipped. I said, ‘He won’t listen to me he runs away’, and one thing and another. In the early years I had a lot of resentment for him. But then the others [brothers and sisters] came along and it wasn’t so bad. After all I couldn’t fight with all of them. Time went by and I sort of discovered my niche. I realised that I could do things that they couldn’t. I got interested in pigeons. My father built me a

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pigeon loft and we used to go down to the pigeon market every Friday night in Smithfield, at six o’clock. Anybody who had pigeons to sell went down there rather than go to a pet shop, to cut the ‘middle man’ out. We used to go down and trade in pigeons, there were all fancy pigeons, ‘fan tails’, ‘feather foots’, things like that. My father never had pigeons when he was young so he got into it along with me, so the two of us were into pigeons. Because he and I had that interest together I lost the resentment which I had towards the rest of them [younger brothers and sister]. When I went to secondary school it was Ballygomartin Secondary School, and I loved it because there were new people to meet, people from the Shankill and Woodvale and all over. I just loved it. In the first year they put us all together in ‘Victor’ I think it was called, 1V, 1I, 1C, 1R. They put me in one of the ‘clever’ classes but all my mates were in the ‘bottom’ class. I went to the form teacher and told him that I wanted to be moved down to be with my mates. He said no, so I ‘mitched’ [truanted] and got into trouble so then they moved me down. One of the guys in my old class shouted over to me before I moved, ‘Plasticiner’. I said, ‘What the fuck’s a “plasticiner”’? He said, ‘That’s what they are where you’re going. They’re all so fucking thick all they can do is sit around and play with plasticine all day.’ Then in the second year you got mixed about a bit, where the ‘go getters’ were in the top class V1C then the middle one’s in the TO. And then the people who were going to be binmen and that were in the O and R classes. That was in second year, in third year that became more prominent. 3G, 3H – boys who were heading for GCE Geography, GCE History, and then you had 3V or something, they were the ones going for CSE, then you had 3V1. They just went and did what they wanted, they weren’t even trying to teach them. They just didn’t care, or didn’t want to go to school, or they were as ‘thick as champ’. In third form I was in 3H [History] heading for a GCE and it was alright because I had a few of my mates with me. When I got into fourth year, two of my mates had turned 15 and had left school, and there was only me and another friend left. The rest of the people in the class were all middle class. There was a private estate which bordered the estate I belonged to. They were all ‘bought’ [privately owned] houses. The rest of the class was made up of people from there. To me they were all snobs, ‘shirtlifters’ [homosexuals], I took nothing to do with them. When Easter came my only friend in the class, John, left to go to work in the shipyard. That left me in the class on my own, without any of the friends who

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I’d knocked about with. I asked the teacher if I could get moved down [to a lower class to be with his friends]. They moved me down to another GCE class, but I wanted to move down further to where my mates were [i.e. in the lowest performing class]. The teacher refused saying, ‘You’re throwing your education away here.’ This was as I say the ‘plasticine class’. The school had an outdoor pursuits centre. Canoes and all of that. All these boys did was make sails for the canoes, make canoes, repair canoes, go down to this centre and paint it, and go out canoeing. I wasn’t going to sit doing maths while the boys were out canoeing. I told the teacher I wanted to move down with my mates. I told him that I wasn’t going to do PE with those ‘shirtlifters’. To me they [his classmates] were all snobs and homosexual types. They weren’t my type of people at all, they were all ‘mummy’s boys’. I mitched off school for two weeks and then I went to the form teacher and said, ‘Look I’ve been mitching for the past two weeks and if I don’t get moved down [to the bottom class] I’m going to mitch for the rest of the year.’ So I got six of the best, and moved down with 4Y. That was the class that nobody [teachers] cared about. About that particular time the UDA was being formed. I was involved in the vigilantes in a loose way, running messages and that. The area I came from was surrounded on all sides by republican areas. There was a siege mentality in the area at that time. As far as people were concerned the republicans were about to march in and burn us out of our homes. A lot of men in the area ‘threw up’ [erected] barricades. One of the barricades was directly facing my house. Being the age I was this was like a big adventure. I was out scouting around and listening to the gunfire. It was like a John Wayne movie was happening just outside the estate. At that particular time we [loyalists] had no guns. There were a few guns about, old shotguns, legally held shotguns, but they were specifically held at the barricades. To the best of my knowledge there was no offensive fire from the area I came from. The shotguns were no match for the rifles and automatic weapons the republicans had. The shotguns had no range. I was only 14 or 15. What happened was my father was with the vigilantes. My father would have been one of the ‘leading lights’ [commanders] in the area. I would have been out delivering messages, taking cups of tea to the barricades, things like that, taking cigarettes. Then the UDA formed. That was in my last year at school. Me and most of my mates joined the junior

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UDA. Most of the people in my class would all have been members of the Highfield Unit of the junior UDA. That [UDA membership] was all over the school. I loved it. The boys I knew were in sort of a gang. We would get together on a Saturday and go into Belfast and hang around the town. We would buy clothes and records and would go into Woolworths to buy our dinner [lunch]. We would meet boys from other areas, Tartan gangs. I was involved in a gang called the Ulster Boot Boys. We would meet boys from other areas, the Shankill Tartan, the Young Newtown, Woodstock Tartan, the Rathcoole. We would all go down to the ‘loyalist stand’ in Royal Avenue. Then there were Catholic gangs, the Nerks from the New Lodge [a Catholic area]. We would have a fight with the Nerks or the Divis Tartan [an ironically named Catholic gang] which was another nationalist gang. It was just a big adventure really, there wasn’t anything serious in it really. It was all sectarian, on both sides, but we enjoyed it. That’s who we were, Protestants and Catholics. This particular Saturday we were going down into town when we heard that there had been a bomb on the Shankill Road. On the way down we stopped off at the Balmoral showroom, which was a furniture shop off the Shankill Road, where the Shankill Leisure Centre is now. We stopped there and saw people digging in the rubble, looking for bodies. It was very confusing. There were men crying, men and women standing crying. There were men shouting and running about ranting and raving. Men digging, and men shouting, ‘We’ll kill the bastards’, ‘Kill the bastards.’ I remember they brought out the first body. It was the body of a child just a wee thing, I found out later it had been 18 months old. It was wrapped in a blanket. I remember when they brought it out I couldn’t help it the tears just welled up in my eyes. They carried the next body out, it was a three year old child. I felt this isn’t a game here any more, these people [the IRA] are out to slaughter us. They’re going to kill us all, we’re going to have to do something about this. From that day on things just weren’t the same any more. The UDA had only been formed a couple of weeks prior to this. I’d heard about it because of my connections with the vigilantes, and the boys on the estate. We are very tight knit were I come from, if anything goes down everybody knows about it. This UDA thing was a good thing in the area at the time. We discussed it among ourselves and we felt that this [the formation of the UDA] was going to be good. The boys just wanted to get trained [in combat] and one thing led to another.

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Up until then it had been a bit of an adventure, just like cowboys and indians, but from that day on [after the Shankill bomb, 1972] it was no adventure. We knew that the UDA held their meetings on a Sunday night, Sunday teatime, in the area. About 12 of us went and offered our services. The UDA said yes, that they would form a junior wing, and they would accept us into it. The entire membership of the Ulster Boot Boys in the area went and joined the UDA. I think there were 73 of us who all joined together. This would have been about 1972. As far as we were concerned we were going to start fighting back. Before that when the republicans had been shooting into the area, it was like a big game to me, from then on it was no longer a game, these people [the IRA] were out to kill us. They weren’t going to be happy until they’d slaughtered every last one of us. So we had to do something. From then on every shot fired into that area, or every Protestant attacked, to me it became a personal thing. It was as if it was an attack on me personally, and I had to do something about it. That’s the way I felt. I put my name up for active service in the UDA. Gradually I got more and more involved from then on. At the start it was like cowboys and indians but then it got serious. In the early days [1972] the Highfield [Estate] was under fire from [republican] rifles and automatic fire. I remember the film crews would come around, and the foreign film crews in particular. They had been so indoctrinated by the republican propaganda machine that they refused to believe that we as Protestants were coming under fire. They had assumed it was only the Catholics under attack. We had to take them around and show them the bullet holes in the houses. A number of Protestants had been shot and killed just going about their business. There was one camera crew in particular, I think it was French. They didn’t believe that we were under fire [from republicans] and all of that. So I got up on a ladder to point out a heavy-calibre bullet hole. There was a ‘ping’ on the wall and they all hit the ground. The republicans had tried to shoot me when I was up the ladder, even though there was a camera crew there. They [the IRA] slipped up that time. In those days the UDA held [controlled] the bottom half of the Highfield and the [British] army the top. By this time we had got a few rifles. This day there was a very heavy exchange of fire and we felt we were going to lose it. These Paras [Paratroopers] came down behind a wall in our section of the estate and began to return fire. There was a big green field separating Highfield and the Catholic

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estates, and we could see this IRA man working his way down with a machine gun. That could have flattened [killed] us. The IRA man clearly didn’t know that the Paras were there. He must have thought it was just us with our .22 rifles and shotguns. When they shouted ‘Drop your weapon’ in an English accent he ran like fuck, but the sergeant quietly said ‘Drop him’ and that was the end of that. The next thing we knew a priest ran down to the IRA man who had been shot, and seemed to be giving him the last rights or whatever they [Catholics] call it. The next thing you know the priest grabbed the gun and began to run back to the Catholic lines. The sergeant shouted out, ‘Father drop the weapon, please drop the weapon’, but he ran on. The sergeant turned to a soldier behind him and said ‘Drop him.’ The priest was shot. By this stage I was really getting to like that sergeant. But what that really proved to us was that the British could have mopped the whole thing up any bloody time they wanted. The IRA were no match for the Paras. That one patrol could have probably taken out all the gunmen in the Catholic estates. They just moved in quietly, did the business, and moved out. That was the end of the gun battle, the Paras had saved our bacon. As the sergeant left he turned around and looked at me, I’ll never forget it, I felt proud of him, this soldier I’d never met. I was only a young fella, but he nodded over to me as if we were friends, and then wheeled around and ran after his patrol. I never saw him again. They’d no interest in taking our guns, they knew the score. They knew that if they hadn’t come down, we would have been dead. That machine gun would have cleaned [killed] us. If it wasn’t obvious before that it was bloody obvious after it, we needed guns. That’s how I found my forte. It wouldn’t have been in our nature to kill people but at least we could rob banks. Unlike the republicans we had no guns, and we had no friends to give us guns. We had to buy guns, but we had no money. What do you do, you rob banks. I became a bank robber for the UDA, so as they could buy guns and as it turned out I was good at it. I robbed banks and post offices all over Northern Ireland. There was this one week when I robbed a bank and a post office. Nobody ever got hurt. You could say that I commanded a certain respect as a bank robber. We worked in a tight cell. We all decided where to ‘hit’ in the morning so no one could know in advance. If any of us had a bad feeling about a particular hit, it didn’t get done, we moved on somewhere else. We were making thousands of pounds for the organisation, to buy guns. We were getting the guns alright but certain people seemed to be

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getting rich in the process. None of us approved of that. We risked getting shot or jailed and they were getting rich! We got caught eventually. It was a bank in ——. After we robbed the safe I was first out the door, but on the way out I saw that the town was full of police and army. They were over the cars and Land-Rovers with handguns, rifles and sub-machine guns. It was like a scene out of Bonnie and Clyde. I never actually got out through the door, I went straight in behind it. I signalled to the boys that we were surrounded. The next thing I saw was gun barrels coming through the door. That was that, we were arrested. I don’t know what sort of people live in —— but we felt like Negroes in Alabama being taken out by the police. They were all shouting, ‘Shoot the bastards, hang them, robbing our bank you bastards, our money, hanging is too good for them, hand them over to us.’ The whole town was out, it was a lynch mob. We were really glad the police and army were there by that stage. If the good people of —— had got us, they would have killed us. We were remanded in the Crumlin Road prison [Belfast]. Although we were in prison I wouldn’t have had it any other way. You were in with other good loyalists and we’d been caught fighting our war. We felt good about it, like we were serving our country, and now we were in prison for serving our country. There was no segregation [between Protestants and Catholics] in those days and you would have had two loyalists in a cell, and then two republicans in the next cell. There was a lot of fighting. So we felt as if we were still fighting the war even though we were in prison. We’d go for them [republicans] at every opportunity. The other thing was, and it was quite funny, we were obsessed with escaping. We would eventually loosen the bars in the cells, so that we could pull the bars out and jump. The screws would catch on and move us to a different cell. The thing was if we had removed the bars and jumped out, it would have been a 30 ft drop into an exercise yard. We didn’t know where the fuck we would have gone from there, it was all high walls and wire. The only thing we did know was that if we’d had the opportunity to do it we would have. Eventually we were sentenced and transferred to the H Blocks. Because we were classified as ‘young prisoners’ we were sent to H Block ——. The Crumlin Road hadn’t been to bad. It was an adult prison and you were treated like adults. The screws knew not to push it, at least not with the paramilitary prisoners, although the criminal prisoners could get knocked about.

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H Block —— was different altogether. It was a borstal system they ran there. I don’t know where they got the screws from for there, I’d never seen screws like them. We’d been taken to reception for our uniforms, trousers which were three sizes too big, shirts that you could smell were dirty, jackets too big or too small, and shoes that were too small and cramped your feet, or so big so that you clomped around in them. The screws in reception had made us use the showers, we were in full view of them, and they had laughed at us. They had taken our clothes, so we had to wear the uniform. When we complained and asked for our clothes back they said, ‘Ask the officers in H Block —— , they’re nice fellas, they’ll fix you up.’ We felt stupid in those uniforms, and we looked stupid. We looked laughable, but this was no joke. I felt desperate, like I was suddenly loosing my identity. I turned round and looked at ‘Tom’, and saw just how much the uniform changed him. He was just like some old fucking criminal prisoner in that uniform. ‘Tom’ was usually the life and soul of the party but here he was, sullen and scared. There was something about the attitude of the officers, ‘You boys enjoy your stay with us now’, ‘You’re really in for it this time’, ‘You wee shits are going to learn your lesson the hard way now.’ By the time we got into the van for H Block —— we were shitting ourselves. We’d no idea of what to expect. We were pulled out of the van and instructed to run into the H Block. We went in through the first grille which faced the second grille. The prison officer pushed us up to the grille and banged our heads on the grille from behind. ‘You’ll know your driver in here you wee shits.’ We were pushed into the ‘circle’. The principal officer [PO] was there with two class officers. ‘Do you boys not know how to enter a room? I can see you’ll have to be taught some respect around here. Stand to attention, still, rigid. What’s your name?’ ‘Billy,’ welt [slap] on the face, ‘Billy ——, sir’, welt. Yes sir, principal officer, sir. You get hit in the back and winded by the class officer standing behind you. ‘Did I not tell you to stand to attention!’ Welt, and so on. I saw one young fella, just a wee lad going through that once, and he wet himself. The principal officer shouted, ‘Oh look, —— has pissed himself.’ He went to each of the four wings and shouted down, ‘Watch out for ——, he wets himself and he’ll piss all over you.’ He came back to the young fella and welt across the face. ‘You dirty, dirty, wee fucker. After you lick that mess up from my fucking floor, you can go to the punishment block for three days. You can piss all over the floor and lick it up all you like over there.’ I was heart sorry

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for him, he was shaking like a leaf and crying. I was scared in case he would shit himself. Anyway, after our ‘reception’ we were taken to the wing where our cells were. There were officers lined up all the way down the wing outside the cells with batons at the ready. They were all shouting and jeering. I looked at my mate, and he looked scared. I was scared, how hard were you going to be hit? Would you ‘go down’, and if you went down would they keep beating at you? We were UDA prisoners, but nobody had told us what to expect. Half the problem here was it had taken us by surprise. If we’d known what to expect it wouldn’t have been so bad. The officers behind us pushed us into the wing and they began to beat us. They hit us with the batons, and with the baton straps which were like whips, they kicked us, punched us and tramped on us. It was really sore, really painful, we were beaten black and blue and we hadn’t done a fucking thing to deserve it. We were moaning and limping about the cell, standing in whatever way caused least pain, and I said to ‘Tom’, ‘What the fuck would these bastards do to you if you actually did something wrong?’ They just couldn’t have treated us any worse, like I say it was a borstal system. We were in prison during the time of criminalisation policy. The IRA were ‘on the blanket’ protesting for political status. [The IRA prisoners refused to accept a prison uniform and instead draped themselves with blankets from their bedding.] We heard that they were getting it rough, getting their shit kicked in. The next thing we heard was that loyalists were on the blanket, including UDA men. I talked to the other UDA YPs [young prisoners] and said, ‘Listen, why don’t we go on the blanket for “status” as well. We’re getting our shit kicked in anyway, why the fuck don’t we go on protest.’ Some of the boys didn’t want to be seen to be doing what the IRA were doing [i.e. protesting]. Some of us, the hardliners, decided to go on the blanket. The next thing I knew I was called in by the principal officer. He accused me of conspiring in a mutiny. I was sent to the ‘boards’ [punishment block] and I was beaten twice a day. I spent three days and nights on the boards and then they took me back to the [H] Block. The PO interviewed me again. ‘Do you know why you were sent to the punishment block?’ ‘Yes sir.’ ‘In the circumstances do you think that was a fair punishment? ‘Oh yes sir.’ ‘Were you mistreated in any way during your stay in the punishment block?’ ‘No sir.’ ‘Were you well treated during your detention in the punishment block?’ ‘Yes sir very well treated.’ I knew fucking rightly that if I complained,

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I’d end up back in the punishment block for another three days. But the next bit threw me. He said, ‘Are you willing to sign a statement to that effect?’ I said yes, but I didn’t know what their game was. As it turned out my Da [father] had got wind of what was going on, and he’d arranged for a special visit to see me the next day, Friday. My Da was big in the UDA, and the screws in the compounds [political prison section of the prison] were very wary of the UDA and they had put pressure on for my Da to be allowed to visit. I went out for my visit with the PO. When my Da saw me he nearly went mad. I was still black and blue with cuts and half closed eyes. He asked me what had happened, and I told him the truth, that the screws had beat me over and over. The PO said, ‘But Mr —— that’s not the way of it at all. Look I even have this signed letter from “Billy” assuring me that no prison officers were responsible, he’s just had some hassle with some Fenian [Catholic] prisoners, now isn’t that the way of it “Billy”?’ My Da says, ‘Don’t give me that shite, he’s been systematically worked over, and more than once. Look at his face, he can hardly walk.’ My Da said that ‘any understandings between the UDA and the prison service were over’. He warned the PO that I wasn’t to be touched ever again. They must have left me in peace for all of two weeks. Shortly after that screws’ cars were being vandalised and burnt out in loyalist areas. Then a screw was shot. The PO called me into his office. There was only him so I knew something was up. He said, ‘I know all about you. You’re the leader of the fucking UDA in here.’ I said I knew nothing about the UDA. Then he produced a bullet from his drawer and put it pointing upwards on the table. ‘You see the next time a prison officer gets shot, you wee fucker, I’m going to put that in your fucking head.’ Then he hit me so hard I fell. I had absolutely no doubt that he meant it. I went back to my cell and said to ‘Tom’, ‘Send the word out, shoot more fucking screws. Tell them that we’re getting fucking tortured in here.’ The word came back a few days later that it wasn’t organisation policy [to shoot prison officers]. We were getting tortured and they [the UDA] didn’t give a fuck. That’s when we decided to go on the blanket. There were about ten of us. The PO came down to the cell, and you could see the anger come over him like a wave. His neck got red and then his face, nearly purple. You could see the veins in his neck. ‘Put that fucking uniform on, immediately.’ I just said, ‘My name is “Billy” ——, UDA, political prisoner on protest for political status.’ That was it we all got a digging [beaten up] and got sent to the boards. The screws would come in and

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beat us up twice a day. They would start in the first cell and work their way up. They used the batons and the baton straps. They would hit you all over, but especially on the back, where it was most painful, and where it didn’t show. The hardest bit was listening to the screaming of your mates. Some of the boys cried for mercy but they never got it. These screws had been hand picked, they didn’t know what mercy was. Some of the ordinary screws who were assigned to the punishment blocks didn’t like it. They would say, ‘Don’t worry boys a few more days and you’ll be back in the Block.’ They didn’t understand that it was nearly as bad in the Block. One old screw even brought us ham from the kitchen. We were on punishment rations, so we were starving. Ham never tasted so good. The funny thing was those two prison officers were Catholics. They could have lost their jobs for what they did, for giving us decent food when we were meant to be on a number one diet. They were the first Catholics I’d ever met. I was very confused by that. These were Catholics but they were the good guys. It was our own kind, loyalist prison officers, who were being bastards to us, I learned from that that there were good and bad on both sides. Then before you knew it we were getting ‘beat’ again. We could only take it for so long and then we’d go off the blanket to recover, but then we’d go back on it again. Things got so bad I used to dream about shooting screws, we all did. You know the BBC building in Belfast, with the satellite dish. I used to have daydreams about getting up there with an AK47 and shooting screws as they marched by on the 12th [12 July Orange Parade]. Half of the fucking screws were in the ‘Orange’. I used to dream about ‘opening up’ and scattering them, and then picking them off, one by one. I’d blow this one’s head off, and shoot that one in the back of the spine. Shoot this one’s legs off, and shoot this one’s son. Talking to you now like this seems crazy, but it wasn’t crazy to me then. That’s what kept me going. I would send the word out again, stop them torturing us, shoot more screws. Our boys [UDA] weren’t shooting screws, but the Provos were. Every time I heard about one getting shot I wanted to shout, ‘Yes, yes.’ The UDA leadership had let us down, and let us down badly. We knew that there was corruption in the organisation, criminal elements. Some people had been creaming off funds and getting rich. It wasn’t on. They didn’t support us as political prisoners, because they didn’t understand what political prisoners were. We weren’t having it any more. When we [the political prisoners] got out we started to take over. We put our people in positions of power and

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influence and then eventually we took over and cleaned up our act. Certain people were ‘removed’. We didn’t shoot them or anything, they knew who we were, and they knew that we were taking over. They knew better than to go up against us. We weren’t in the business of racketeering or intimidating Protestant businessmen. Our business was taking on the IRA. The UFF increasingly became the cutting edge of the UDA and we were going for the ‘right ones’. Provo activists were getting shot and shot dead and they didn’t like it. People like Johnny Adair were frightening the fuck out of them. He had a simple message for them [the Provos], ‘You’re going to get killed.’ They tried to assassinate him seven times. One time two of them [Provos] opened up on his car with AK47s, Adair had managed to crawl up under the steering wheel. He walked away with a cut on his back. That scared them. They sent their top men, two of them were six feet away from Adair with the AKs and still he walked away. All the while Provos were being killed. You know that old picture house in town, the one beside the Grand Opera House? They used to have bingo there. My wife and her friends would go down, and there would be these Catholics there, from the New Lodge or somewhere. Anyway, this day one of the Catholic mothers couldn’t control her wee lad. He was running up and down the aisle, up to the front, throwing paper cups. The mother shouted at him, ‘Stop it, come here and I’ll give you a sweet, stop it now or I’ll give you a welt.’ The wee lad didn’t take a blind bit of notice. Then she said, ‘Come here quick there’s Johnny Adair in a black taxi.’ The wee lad quick as you like ran and crouched at the mother’s feet. When I heard that I knew we were on top, we’d put the fear into them [Catholics]. It was only a matter of time until they [the IRA] would call it off. The UFF’s campaign was the single biggest factor in the Provos calling their ceasefire. It would be true to say some of our lads were disappointed. We’d gone so far but some of them wanted to go the whole way, to finish it for good. As it is, we’ll just wait and see. JOHN WHITE John White (now in his 50s) is approximately 5’10”, well built and balding. He presents as a sombre person, one who has been bowed down by years of pressure. As a self-educated man John was the spokesperson for the UDA for many years, mediating between the paramilitary and political wings of the organisation. White bore the scars of having served

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a life sentence in prison for murder, becoming very guarded in relationships and suspicious of those outside his immediate acquaintance. I had a reputation as a bit of a hard man when I was younger, so I was expected to join the paramilitaries. In reality I was always very quiet but I could handle myself if it came to it. I would never normally have looked for trouble. I joined the UDA because I lived in a UDA district. Nearly all the young men of my age were in the UDA, but as far as I was concerned nobody was doing anything. The IRA was murdering Protestants, Catholics, members of the security forces, children. Bars and town centres were being bombed. You saw it on television, people’s dismembered bodies just lying on the street like so much charred meat. The loyalist paramilitaries were letting it happen as far as we could see, they just weren’t hitting them [IRA/Catholics] back. As I saw it then the IRA and Catholics were one in the same, because if the Catholic community hadn’t sheltered and supported the IRA, the IRA couldn’t have operated as they did. That is what we all thought in those days. That’s what we were told and that’s what we believed. Because I was regarded as a hard man I went up in rank in the UDA very quickly. Everybody was asking, ‘When are we going to hit back, when are we going to even the score?’ By that stage I was a company commander in the UFF. The men in my unit were good, they were politically motivated, dedicated loyalists. In 1972/73 the British wanted out [of Northern Ireland]. The IRA were committing sickening atrocities to prove that the law had broken down under British rule, and that the continuing British administration was untenable. We were at a state of war. There was no mistaking that, the Shankill Road where I lived was a war zone by any criteria. That was the funny thing about the Northern Ireland conflict, it was localised. The Malone Road just a couple of miles away could have been south London. But there was no mistaking that the Shankill was at war, and that we had our war dead. The men in my [UFF] unit were enraged by everything that was happening. I was angry, I was angry almost beyond control. The IRA were killing our people and ruining the entire country, and nobody was doing anything. The men were pressing me to get things done. I went to the leadership to get some action, but they spent most of their time in meetings, talking about doing something. The men increasingly looked to me, ‘What are we going to do?’ Everything was going in one direction. Everybody expected me to give the lead, I was the commander. I wanted to give

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the IRA some of their own medicine, I wanted to sicken them for a change. Then in June 1973 six Protestant old age pensioners were murdered in Railway Street, Portadown. Republicans had been responsible. I still remember their names and ages. Dinah Campbell was 62, Elizabeth Craigmile 76, Elizabeth Palmer 60, Robert Scott 72, Francis Campbell 70 and Nan Davis 60. I remember reading their names over and over again in the Belfast Telegraph. Those old people were killed by republicans because they were Protestant. I can remember shaking with rage and shouting at the paper. It was almost as if I had some sort of emotional connection with those people, and I memorised their names and ages in the knowledge that I was going to do something about it. I just couldn’t walk away from that, I felt a deep obligation to act. If my sense of attachment to my people had been more ambivalent, or if I’d been indifferent, I wouldn’t have joined the paramilitaries in the first place. I became involved because of the victims. I wanted to let the IRA know that if they gave us victims, then we in turn would give them victims. As I saw it, if they suffered as we suffered, they’d stop, because normal human beings can’t tolerate that. I thought that they’ll want to bring an end to it when it’s their own people getting killed. Those murders touched something inside me. Who were they going to go for next, the old people of the Shankill, my parents? It wasn’t just the war any more, it was my war. I knew that I’d have to hit back, it was personal now. The men in my unit all felt the same way, we had had enough. Somebody was going to pay a terrible price for the IRA’s actions. I knew that my life had changed and that I was going to kill someone because of what the IRA had done to innocent people in my community. There was no disincentive for the IRA, they were bombing their way into a united Ireland. The British had to understand that if they pulled out of Northern Ireland, they would be leaving a war behind them. It was up to the loyalist paramilitaries to demonstrate that. We wanted to kill IRA men and republicans, but of course none of us knew who they were. As for sectarian murder, the IRA had given us the lead in that, so if innocent Protestants were murdered, innocent Catholics were fair game. Those were the rules and that was the nature of the war in Northern Ireland. The IRA had written the rules, and they viewed everyone as a potential target. Car bombs don’t discriminate, they killed innocent Catholics and Protestants. The IRA was so fanatic they had no hesitation in killing their own [Catholics]. That’s what we were up against. Determined, ruthless terrorism without compassion and

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humanity. To fight that effectively you have to become as ruthless as the enemy, you have to put the fear into them. You have to demonstrate your capacity for violence is equal to or even greater than theirs. The loyalists felt betrayed and abandoned by the British security forces who were almost completely ineffective in fighting the IRA. We knew from our own sources that the army had been told not to take on the IRA. They had been given the role of containment, ‘pending political resolution’. We took that to mean containment pending a British withdrawal. It was obvious that the IRA were winning the war against the British, and we calculated that the next stage of the war would be between Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland. From where we were sitting that war had already started. Then on 21 June 1973 a mentally subnormal Protestant boy, David Walker [16], was abducted from his place of employment in Belfast and murdered by the IRA. I was totally sickened by that, they’d started to murder subnormal children because they were Protestant. Men in my unit telephoned me totally incensed. What were we going to do about it? When I walked down the road people looked at me expecting me to do something because of who I was and the position I held. I felt as if I was letting my own people down, because I hadn’t taken action. We hadn’t hit back. We were the hard men of the UDA, the IRA were killing Protestants all around us, and everybody expected us to act. When you are surrounded by those sets of expectations, when people are willing you on like that it becomes like an irresistible force, and you almost feel compelled to act. You want to do it, and everyone in your social world expects you to, so you do it. All of that pressure was mounting so I decided to do something big. The IRA had terrorised the Protestant community and I was determined to terrorise the Catholic community. That was the mission that I set myself, and that became the most important thing in my life. The adrenaline rush took over. The only thing that mattered, the only thing I could think about was the mission. I was on course to kill, it was only a question of who. Obviously I would have liked to kill an IRA man, but if it couldn’t be that it was going to be a Catholic, and the more prominent he was the better. I wanted people to notice this one. As I saw it then I was a loyalist paramilitary with an obligation to attack and kill a Catholic. Catholics had countenanced the IRA’s murder of my people, and now I was going to make one or more of them pay the price. And I intended to keep on doing that until I was caught or killed. We had people out looking for a suitable target. Eventually I got word. Paddy Wilson, a Catholic

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SDLP politician, had been located in Belfast. The minute I received that telephone call Paddy Wilson was dead. It was my intention to go for a ‘spectacular’, I wanted to strike fear into the Catholic community and the IRA. With all the killing and murder of Protestants I had lost it, I was angry beyond my control. We had all been sickened by IRA atrocities and murders, now I took it upon myself to sicken the Catholic community. And that was down to me and people like me because there was nobody else. The police and the army had proved themselves useless. As far as we were concerned they weren’t defending Ulster any more, they were only getting in our way. Every loyalist they arrested and put in prison was worth ten of them, because we were the ones willing to do the fighting. Even in those days police infiltration and informers were rampant. If a UDA man left his house with a weapon he was almost bound to get caught. Everybody knew everybody’s business and that meant that the police knew. A lot of people took the view that the loyalists and the police were on the same side, but the fact is that they were giving us [the UDA] real problems. So I decided not to take a gun for the mission, because the police were arresting our men carrying guns all over the place. The police had good intelligence on the loyalist community and it seemed that every time a gun was moved one of us would be arrested and charged with possession. That’s three years in prison, if you were lucky. So, I took a carving knife instead. We located Senator Wilson and his lady friend and I killed them. I stabbed Wilson 32 times and his lady friend 19 times. I was detached from all of that, like I was on automatic pilot. I had programmed myself to kill, and to commit an atrocity and that’s what I did. I’d felt at the time that that would help to stop it, if Catholics and the IRA knew the terrible price which would have to be paid for their violence. In a statement issued after the murders ‘Captain Black’ of the UFF claimed that it had been responsible stating: ‘Tonight we got Senator Paddy Wilson and a lady friend. Their bodies are lying on the Hightown Road [Belfast], after the IRA murdered a retarded boy. We are not going to stand by after what they [the IRA] have done to us over the past four years. There will be more deaths in reprisal.’ We meant every word of that, if the IRA were going to kill Protestants, then we were going to kill Catholics. Everyone in my community understood that and I was regarded as something of a folk hero, particularly by the paramilitary people. We all accepted that we were at war, and in a war situation a soldier’s job is to