Voices from the Grave: Two Men's War in Ireland

by Ed Moloney

In the mid-to late 1970s Spence underwent a remarkable transformation, seemingly shedding his hardline Loyalism and addiction to violence. On 12 July 1977, the most hallowed day in the Loyalist calendar, he addressed his fellow UVF prisoners and made a call for ‘a universal ceasefire’ by Republicans and Loyalists, an appeal that failed to inspire his audience. Spence argued that Loyalist violence was redundant because Northern Ireland’s place in the United Kingdom had been accepted by both the British and Irish governments and could not be altered without the say-so of its people. It also emerged that Spence had been learning the Irish language and studying Irish history and that he had sent condolences to the widow of Joe McCann, a prominent Official IRA activist who had been controversially shot dead by British troops. From David Ervine’s interviews with Boston College it is clear that, inside the UVF compounds, Spence had also been preaching the merits of sharing power with Nationalists, much to the dismay of some of his fellow prisoners.

  It was during this period of Spence’s political regeneration that David Ervine was exposed to some of the ideas that later became central to the political approach of the Progressive Unionist Party (PUP), the UVF’s subsequent political wing: not just acceptance of power-sharing with Nationalists but populist, leftish views on economic and social issues of a sort that could be found in the manifestos of most European Social Democrats. After his release from jail in 1984, Gusty Spence would describe himself as ‘a moderate socialist’, 16 while Ervine, when his spell in jail ended in 1980, would get into violent arguments in bars when he espoused his progressive agenda, on one occasion earning a punch in the mouth and the charge, ‘You’re a fucking communist!’ On one level this highlighted the paradox that lies at the heart of the UVF: the co-existence of left-wing political sympathies with an often violent, racist-like hatred for Catholics, more redolent of the extreme Right.

  The roots of the UVF and the PUP help to explain the anomaly. Gusty Spence and later David Ervine were essentially part of the same iconoclastic tradition as Tommy Henderson, the Independent Unionist MP for the Shankill at Stormont between 1925 and 1953. A housepainter and decorator by trade, Henderson was a founder member of the Ulster Unionist Labour Association, which had been set up in 1918 by Edward Carson to purge ‘Bolshevism’, with its sympathy for the Irish Republican cause, from the local trade-union movement. Carson’s efforts to link Labour with Sinn Fein led on one occasion to the mass expulsion of left-wingers, trade-union activists and Catholics from the shipyards.

  Henderson had political ambitions but when he ran as a candidate for the Unionist nomination for the Shankill seat in the 1920 Stormont election, he was rebuffed. Convinced that class bias had shaped the decision, Henderson stood as an Independent in 1925 for the North Belfast seat at Stormont and won, beating the mainstream Unionists. From 1929 onwards Henderson held the adjacent Shankill seat against repeated challenges from Glengall Street, as the headquarters of the Unionist establishment was known, and used his seat at Stormont to speak up for working-class constituents and to criticise the government’s patronage of wealthy interests. At the same time he took an uncompromising line on the border and relations with the Southern state and Northern Catholics. Henderson held the seat until 1953 when, tellingly, a Northern Ireland Labour Party candidate captured nearly half his vote, allowing the Unionist nominee to slip in between them. That year Henderson was part of a slate of seven Independent Unionists who stood against the mainstream Unionists in protest at what they claimed was the government’s appeasement of the Catholic Church over education reforms while demanding more jobs and housing for Protestants. It was the beginning of a revolt, in which Paisley and the UVF were key actors, against the Unionist ‘fur-coat brigade’ that ran Protestant politics in those days, a protest against appeasement of Nationalism and an expression of class antagonism.

  The Independent Unionist tradition of hardline, populist Loyalism was again taken up in the Shankill area when the Derry-born barrister Desmond Boal won the seat in the 1960 Stormont election. Although standing for the mainstream Unionist Party, Boal was an adviser to Ulster Protestant Action (UPA), a ginger group cum embryonic paramilitary organisation, set up in 1956 in anticipation of the IRA’s coming Border Campaign. Its other leading lights included a young Ian Paisley and a clerk who worked for Belfast Corporation by the name of Billy Spence, whose brother Gusty would soon become a household name. The UPA had encouraged Boal to run and backed him during the campaign. When Boal won, local UPA activists, including Billy Spence, joined the local Unionist branch en masse in an example of infiltration tactics the later UVF would imitate. After the IRA threat receded, UPA moved into the workplace, to the shipyard, to Shorts’ engineering plant, Mackie’s engineering works and elsewhere. Branches were set up and much of their energy was devoted to ensuring that jobs stayed in Protestant hands. Boal, meanwhile, led the parliamentary opposition to Terence O’Neill at Stormont and, according to one former colleague, his motivation had a lot do with class: ‘I think he regarded O’Neill as the Big House still in charge and he resented that and O’Neill’s arrogance bitterly.’17 In 1971, Boal helped Paisley found the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), persuading the Free Presbyterian leader to show a more secular face to Unionists. He also tried to steer the new DUP leftwards, as an early activist recalled: ‘He explained that [the DUP] would continue to be right-wing on law and order but that there was a need in Northern Ireland for a party with radical social and economic policies which could embrace all people …’18 Boal remained Unionist MP for Shankill until Stormont was prorogued in 1972. The only time his seat was threatened was in 1969 when a Labour candidate called David Overend split the Unionist vote. By the 1990s Overend had become a leading member of the UVF’s political wing, the PUP.

  After Spence’s imprisonment, the UVF, or what remained of it, dropped off the radar screen. The civil rights campaign launched by Catholics in 1968 intensified the pressure on Terence O’Neill and gave Ian Paisley and his growing band of followers repeated opportunities to further weaken the Unionist prime minister. The killer blow came in March and April of 1969 when three sets of explosions crippled electricity production in East Belfast and halted the supply of water to the city. The bombs were widely blamed on the IRA and this forced an exhausted O’Neill to resign at the end of April. But the bombs had been the work of people close to Ian Paisley, including figures who had overlapped with the Shankill UVF back in 1966, and the aim had been to discredit and topple O’Neill. In October 1969 a Kilkeel, County Down, Free Presbyterian and quarry worker called Thomas McDowell was badly burned by a bomb that exploded prematurely as he was planting it at a power station in County Donegal in the Irish Republic and died later in hospital. McDowell was a member of both Paisley’s Ulster Protestant Volunteers and the UVF, further evidence of the close ties between the groups.

  The year 1966 was a bumper one for Loyalist paramilitaries. In April that year Ian Paisley set up a body called the Ulster Constitution Defence Committee with the principal task of co-ordinating the activities of the UPV, a new, Free Presbyterian-linked paramilitary outfit. By the end of the summer of 1966, Gusty Spence was in jail and the UVF was, like the IRA, a banned organisation. The remnants of the Shankill UVF found themselves leaderless and without direction. Then, in November 1966, another group appeared that offered the UVF refuge until such time as their fortunes could recover.

  Of all the Loyalist groups spawned by the Troubles there was surely none as bizarre or outlandish as Tara. Founded by an evangelical lay preacher called William McGrath, it took its name from the Hill of Tara in County Meath, the seat of the ancient High Kings of Ireland who McGrath believed were descendants of the kings of biblical Israel. McGrath also believed that the British people were the survivors of the ten lost tribes of Israel, that Ireland was populated by Celts whose origins were the same and that Tara would play a key role in a looming conflict in Ireland spawned by communism and Romanism. The re-emergence of the IRA in 1969 seemed to justify McGrath’s warnings,
bestowing on him the same oracular powers that had made Loyalist heroes out of Ian Paisley and Gusty Spence. Tara was a doomsday paramilitary group, however, and believed that violence was permissible only when the crisis arrived. Until then Tara’s job was to recruit and warn of the impending Armageddon. Once Romanism and communism had been defeated, Tara’s job was to reconquer Ireland for Protestantism after which the Catholic Church would be proscribed and the education of Irish children placed in the hands of evangelicals. Despite its place at the very edge of Unionism, not to say sanity, Tara attracted into its ranks people who would be prominent later in both the mainstream Unionist Party and Paisley’s DUP. And it also brought into its ranks the residue of Spence’s Shankill UVF.

  The UVF stayed within Tara’s fold for the best part of five years but left as a group in December 1971, four months after IRA internment had been introduced and at a point when Northern Ireland was spiralling into the bloodiest phase of the Troubles. Afterwards Tara, or those close to them, complained that the UVF had infiltrated the group to exploit it and left when that task had been accomplished. As one newspaper report put it: ‘The tactic is to seek membership, then leave with any equipment and good men who can be seduced to the UVF.’ By 1971 not only had Tara seemingly served the UVF’s purposes but the underworld of Loyalist politics was alive with stories about McGrath’s sexual excesses, that he was a paedophile who was using his Loyalist activities to facilitate his predatory sex life. His supposed speciality was the pursuit of rising young male Unionist stars and as it turned out the rumours were well founded. A decade later McGrath was convicted of sexually abusing boys at a children’s home in East Belfast. The rumours also seem to have played a part in the break but, whatever the truth, the UVF re-emerged into a Northern Ireland where more and more Protestants were ready to pick up the gun and use it.

  Almost immediately after breaking with Tara the UVF took human life on a scale inconceivable at the time, although a few years later the slaughter it was responsible for would become almost commonplace. On the evening of 4 December 1971 a bomb exploded in the doorway of McGurk’s Bar in North Queen Street, adjacent to the Catholic New Lodge Road area of North Belfast. The bar and the accommodation above it collapsed like a house of cards, crushing and killing the bar owner’s wife, daughter and brother-in-law and twelve other people, all Catholics, who had been drinking in the bar. The death toll of fifteen shocked and horrified Ireland and afterwards British Army officers, eager to blacken Republicans, briefed journalists that the IRA was responsible. An IRA bomb in transit, they said, had exploded prematurely. The myth of IRA responsibility persisted for years but in 1978 the truth of the bombing of McGurk’s Bar was finally revealed when a UVF member, Robert Campbell, admitted driving the bombers’ getaway car and was given fifteen life sentences. Planting no-warning bombs in Catholic bars would become a UVF speciality in the ensuing years, as David Ervine would testify in his interviews with Boston College, and so would the random assassination of Catholics, shot from passing cars, on their doorsteps or snatched from the streets to meet unimaginable deaths.

  It took longer, nearly twenty years, for the UVF to admit another notorious bombing, on one of the bloodiest days of the Troubles, the 1974 car bombings of Dublin and Monaghan town in the Irish Republic in an effort to destroy the first major peace settlement since the start of the Troubles. In January that year a power-sharing executive comprising Unionists, SDLP and Alliance ministers took office at Stormont, the first step in implementing a political settlement that its architects, led by the British and Irish governments, hoped would create a measure of political stability in Northern Ireland and help to isolate and defeat Republican and Loyalist paramilitaries. Known as the Sunningdale Agreement, after the location in England where the negotiations had taken place, the settlement also envisaged the creation of ambitious cross-border institutions including a Council of Ireland which theoretically opened the way for Northern Ireland’s long-term absorption into an all-Ireland state. Largely because of this, Loyalist opposition to the deal was fierce and on 14 May 1974 Protestant industrial workers, organised in a group called the Ulster Workers’ Council, declared a general strike that began the next day. Anti-Sunningdale Unionist politicians and both major Loyalist groups, the UVF and the UDA, signalled their support for the strike and three days after it began, UVF car bombs devastated the centres of Dublin and Monaghan, killing a total of thirty-three people and injuring 258. Strangely, the UVF stayed silent about its part in the slaughter even though the devastation was welcomed by hardline Loyalists and the admission of responsibility would have scored points over the rival UDA. The more significant consequence of the two bombings was not immediately apparent but they probably marked the moment when enthusiasm for involvement in the North’s affairs on the part of the South began to diminish and in that regard the carnage marked a high-water mark for Loyalist violence. Even so, it was not until July 1993, in response to a British television documentary that claimed British security forces had helped the UVF construct and plant the bombs, that the UVF announced that it had indeed been responsible, although without the aid of ‘outside bodies’.

  Whatever the reasons, the UVF had a history, dating back to the bombs that removed Terence O’Neill in 1969, of not always admitting responsibility for acts of violence, sometimes in the hope that Republicans would get the blame. Occasionally the ploy worked spectacularly well. On 1 December 1972 two UVF bombs exploded in the centre of Dublin, killing two bus drivers. In the immediate aftermath, and for some time, the IRA was blamed for the deaths and that suspicion helped ease controversial anti-terrorist legislation through the Irish parliament, or Dail. The Offences Against the State Act would allow the Southern courts to convict suspects on charges of IRA membership solely on the word of a senior police officer, an erosion of normal due process that prompted a large number of TDs to threaten to vote against. On the night of the bombs, the measure was heading for defeat and the Fianna Fail government was threatening a general election on the issue, when the city was rocked by the explosions. After an adjournment, the Dail resumed debating the measure and it was passed overwhelmingly.

  Another violent effort to blacken Republicans turned out to be a military failure but it managed none the less to pitch the Irish and British governments into a bad-tempered spat, bringing the UVF an unexpected political bonus. On the night of 31 July 1975, one of Ireland’s most popular musical groups, the Dublin-based Miami Showband, was travelling home to Dublin after playing a gig at a dance hall in Banbridge, County Down, when its Volkswagen van was stopped at a military checkpoint outside Newry, a few miles from the border. The checkpoint, however, was fake. It had been staged by members of the Mid-Ulster UVF, some of whom doubled as soldiers in the Ulster Defence Regiment, a largely Protestant militia established by the British in 1971 to replace the discredited B Specials. Their plan was to hide a bomb on the van which was timed to explode when the band had crossed the border and was in the Irish Republic. Had the plan succeeded, the band members would all have been killed; no one would have known about the fake roadblock and it would have looked as if the band had been transporting explosives for the IRA, a claim that would have embarrassed Republicans and increased the pressure on the Irish government to act against the IRA. But it all went wrong. The band members were ordered out and lined up beside the van as two of the UVF gang placed the bomb in the back. But the bomb detonated prematurely, killing the two UVF men, both of them also soldiers in the UDR. The rest of the gang opened fire on the band, killing three of them. The lead singer, Fran O’Toole, was shot twenty-two times in the face.

  Afterwards, the Irish government summoned the British Ambassador, Sir Arthur Galsworthy, to complain ‘that not enough has been done to stop sectarian assassinations …’, this friction between the two capitals some consolation for what otherwise had been a disastrous operation for the UVF.19 The Miami Showband massacre, as the event was called, was a staging post in a significant escalation of UVF violence,
in part spurred by a new tougher leadership, which later in 1975 would see the group once again proscribed by the British government and the beginning of the Shankill Butchers era, one of the darkest episodes of the entire Troubles. The upsurge was fuelled by an IRA ceasefire and secret talks between Republicans and the British, events that sharpened Unionist suspicions of an incipient sell-out. This was the same ceasefire that Brendan Hughes, Gerry Adams and Ivor Bell saw as ruinous for the IRA but the UVF knew nothing of that. Like most Unionists, they suspected the worst and acted accordingly. Nervous about their political future, the UVF struck out, with more violence and bloodshed than any other Loyalist group. The record shows that in 1975 the UVF killed exactly one hundred people, the highest yearly death toll attributable to Loyalists in the entire Troubles and four times greater than the number killed by the UDA.

  Like the UDA and the other much smaller groups in the world of extreme Loyalism, the UVF subscribed to the view that the best way to deter the IRA in the North was to terrorise the Catholic community from where it sprang and that fed, sheltered and protected its members. Billy Mitchell also dealt with this in the paper he prepared for the Progressive Unionist Party in 2002 and he explained or justified the sectarian nature of UVF violence in these simple, if chillingly honest, terms:

  The UVF regarded the conflict as a conflict between the Nationalist and the Unionist communities. The IRA was simply a physical-force component of a wider opposing force. The IRA was conducting its campaign of terror for, and on behalf of, the Nationalist community. The Nationalist community provided the foot soldiers, the financial support, the safe operating environment and the moral support for the IRA. It also willingly accepted any political gains that were obtained as a result of Republican violence. In Nationalist areas west of the River Bann it is generally the so-called moderate Nationalists who benefit most when Protestants are expelled from their homes and farms by the IRA. The Nationalist community was, in the eyes of the UVF, culpable. It was the enemy that stood behind the IRA’s campaign of terror and it was the only visible enemy that could be targeted. Many UVF volunteers did not believe that there was any real difference between physical-force Republicanism and constitutional Nationalism. The UVF has never sought to hide the fact that its campaign was aimed at subjecting the Nationalist community to a level of violence that would instil fear and terror in members of that community. The objective was simple – subject the Nationalist community to an oppressive force of violence as retribution for Republican violence.20