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

by Ed Moloney

  Gusty Spence carried the mantle for most of that, but I can remember being sent to, I think it was Compound 9, [where] the Provo compounds bordered the soccer pitches and they were out playing soccer. I loved to play a game of soccer, and Gusty asked me expressly not to do that, but to go to the football game and I asked him, ‘Aye, OK, well, what do you want me to do?’ ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I want you to get a Provo out to the wire and talk to him’ … It was Hugh Feeney, one of the London car bombers, and I remember talking to Hugh Feeney expressly about a message that I was asked to pass on and then the conversation went on further. I said to him, ‘Well, where’s your victory?’ And his reply was shocking in its simplicity: ‘Our victory is every day we can hold down the might of the British Army.’ And I said, ‘Well, Hugh, I feel sorry for you.’ And that’s exactly the language that I used, because it really was not about the outcome, but that the war was the cause. I felt that was rather a tragedy, but it was interesting, in terms of the answer, a tragic answer and was one that was unsustainable.

  We had lots of conversations with the Official IRA. They were in the same part of the jail as us, quite close … it was relatively easy to have dialogue across the wire. Even though we were separated by about ten yards, you could have reasonable discussion, but then we both also had a penchant for education and the judgement call was made whether you let them share your education facilities or not, and we agreed to let them do that. So the UVF and the Stickies used the same education facilities but the UDA did not. Now whether [that was] because they hadn’t got the interest in education, I don’t know. I’m not aware of anybody who was doing any great degree of education in their compounds. But then again didn’t John White§ get a degree, and he was in Compound 17, but he didn’t avail of the study-hut opportunities, maybe because he didn’t want to share space with either the UVF or more likely the Stickies. In those discussions with the Stickies, I mean, it just came quite naturally. You did your study and you had your work to do, but you also had quite interesting discussions about the history of the Republican movement. I have to say I was quite fascinated by a lot of their views and where they were coming from. I always had a grand desire to know my enemy and whilst they were somewhat less the enemy after 1972 when they called a ceasefire and expressed the desire to pursue any arguments it had politically, they also said that ‘If you can’t unite Northern Ireland then you can’t unite the island of Ireland’, which is quite interesting and quite practical in its outlook. So they in some ways ceased to be the enemy. You could learn a lot from them in terms of Republican ideology and the engine driving the agenda that lay behind it. It was also quite interesting to hear them talking about other Republicans or others who have adopted the name of Republican. I think we learned a bit all right … and the exposure itself was probably good because there was a difference between us. One had been brought up a Catholic and the other had been brought up a Protestant, so you were getting exposed to something … that you and many in your own community had never been exposed to before.

  Q. And did you ever bounce your own conclusions and ideas off…?

  A. Oh yes, oh aye.

  Q. And how were they received?

  A. Usually with patience and fortitude, but you’ve got to remember that the core belief of the Stickies at that time was the socialist republic and the ruling elites and all of that stuff. Whilst we understood the process of manipulation, we would not have been gung-ho ideological communists, where they were, I think. There was always a form of socialism within us, a caring politics within us, but not in an ideological sense. Spence always tried to avoid ideology because he believed that ideology was the root cause of the destruction of the Stickies and that the purist emerges when the ideologue emerges and so far, in fairness, the UVF and the PUP have managed to steer a fairly steady course … in terms of the development or entrenchment of dogma.

  In March 1975, Gusty Spence was profiled by the Irish Times, which noted that he was ‘a different man than the one who was given a sentence on October 14th, 1966, of life imprisonment’ for the Malvern Street murder. He had become, the article went on, very critical of Loyalist politicians: ‘He now says that the Unionists, and others, have conned the Loyalist population over the years, have kept them in deplorable housing and appalling slums, have played the Orange card once too often.’29 Between Spence expounding views like this and consorting with the Official IRA in Long Kesh, the UVF had earned a name, at least in Unionist circles, for radical leftist beliefs and this surfaced in an intriguing way during 1975, in the midst of a feud with the UDA that had absolutely nothing to do with ideology. As rivals for the allegiance of working-class Protestants, the UVF and the UDA were constantly rubbing against each other in the early to mid-1970s, the years of Loyalist paramilitary growth, and from time to time violence would break out between them. Invariably alcohol, as much as politics, provided the trigger and such was the case in 1975.

  The roots of the trouble lay in the UWC strike of May 1974 when the paramilitaries ordered bars and drinking clubs to shut down in Protestant Belfast. One UVF bar in North Belfast stayed open and when UDA men tried to close it, a fight broke out, guns appeared and a twenty-two-year-old UVF man was shot dead. Eight months later, on 15 March 1975, a quarrel broke out in another North Belfast bar between UVF and UDA drinkers which was settled when UVF gunmen arrived and shot two of their rivals dead. The UVF claimed that the two dead UDA men had killed their man back in May 1974 and they had been targeted because the UDA reneged on a pledge given to the UVF to deal with them. There then followed a series of tit-for-tat shootings and bombings, often in bars and mostly in David Ervine’s home patch of East Belfast, which culminated in the kidnapping of two UDA men, one a local Commander, who were shot dead and buried in a secret grave in County Antrim. The UVF was tiny compared to the UDA but what it lacked in size it often made up for in the intensity of its violence.

  As this was happening the world of left-wing Republicanism was being torn apart in an equally vicious feud between the Official IRA and a break-off group opposed to the Officials’ ceasefire, the Irish Republican Socialist Party (IRSP) which soon had an armed wing called the Irish National Liberation Army (INLA). That feud prompted the UDA to allege that the Officials and the UVF had teamed up to assist each other in their respective feuds, a charge that fitted neatly into the left-wing narrative about the UVF then current within Unionism. There were even rumours circulating in both communities, unfounded it seemed, that a close relative of Gusty Spence had joined and become a rising figure in the Official IRA. The UDA claimed there was an ‘agreement between members of the brigade staff of the UVF and the Officials to act against the INLA and other Loyalist paramilitary organisations’. It added: ‘… when met with opposition to their extreme left-wing politics, the political leaders of the UVF used the media to deny their Communist ideology. We regret that an organisation with the proud and historic name of the UVF should permit some of its brigade staff to bring the organisation into disrepute and work with the Official Republican movement to bring about the destruction of Northern Ireland.’30 In an effort to deflect the left-wing charge, the next day the UVF claimed responsibility for the bombing, a month earlier, of the Bush Bar in Leeson Street, off the Falls Road, a well-known haunt of the Official IRA and an explosion the Officials had blamed on the INLA at the time. The Officials’ Chief of Staff, Cathal Goulding, was in the bar when the car bomb exploded. The UVF ‘had no Communist or Official IRA ties’, two hooded spokesmen told the media.31

  On the basis that ‘my enemy’s enemy is my friend’, the feud eventually spilled over into Long Kesh, where the alleged UVF–Official IRA liaison was mirrored by the UDA and former Officials who had joined the INLA. In October 1975, the bodies of the two kidnapped UDA men, Hugh McVeigh and David Douglas, were found in Islandmagee and the RUC, assisted by an informer, swooped on the South-East Antrim UVF men responsible and arrested them. When they were convicted and sent to Long Kesh, the UDA with the help, Ervine
asserted, of the INLA sought revenge on those responsible. He told Boston College what happened:

  … the UVF leadership in Long Kesh, I believe, operated very often with great wisdom by maintaining calm and by building processes of defence. We had a number of situations in Long Kesh where things exploded and when the UVF won hands down every time. It was simply about discipline and organisation and pre-empting [what] the UDA were likely to do … around that time there was a liaison between the UDA and the INLA and the INLA was semaphoring to the UDA the movements of UVF prisoners coming back from visits, that is South-East Antrim UVF prisoners coming back from visits. The UDA broke out of their compounds and attempted to attack a minibus carrying UVF prisoners.

  Q. This would have been related to McVeigh and Douglas …?

  A. Yes, the UVF then broke out of its compound and sorted that problem out.

  Authoritative estimates of the UVF’s strength towards the end of 1975 put the organisation’s membership at around fifteen hundred, with ‘a hardcore’ of some four to five hundred.32 That compared to the some twenty thousand members that the UDA claimed, although when it came down to dedicated gunmen and bombers, the groups might not have had such a disparity. The UVF’s internal structures were, like Provisional IRA’s at that time, roughly modelled on the British Army and were testament to the influence of the three earliest leaders, all ex-British soldiers: Gusty Spence, ‘Bo’ McClelland and Tommy West. The UVF’s military leadership was invested in a Brigade Staff, similar to the IRA’s GHQ, and it would be led by a Chief of Staff, just like the IRA, except the UVF leader carried the rank of ‘Brigadier’. His second in command was a ‘Colonel’ and the Brigade Staff officers were responsible for a range of activities, from prisoner welfare to intelligence gathering and so on. Above the Brigade Staff was the Command Staff which consisted of the Brigade Staff plus seven Battalion Commanders and sometimes, as during the peace process, the leadership of the Red Hand Commando. Modelling the UVF’s organisational structure on the British Army made it, much like the pre-Adams IRA, vulnerable to security-force penetration. The IRA’s solution was to attempt to reorganise into cells but the UVF dealt with the problem by varying the responsibilities of Commanders to make British Intelligence’s efforts at identifying key members a little more uncertain. But the heart of the UVF, those on the ground, were not reorganised, making it somewhat easy to work out general responsibility for acts of violence. Northern Ireland was split geographically into seven Battalion areas: North, South, East and West Belfast, East Antrim, Mid-Ulster and North Ulster. There were also Battalions in Scotland and England, small in size, which were used in support of the UVF in Northern Ireland. Battalion Commanders were called ‘Lieutenant-Colonel’ and the companies in each Battalion would also be determined geographically. Company Commanders held the rank of ‘Major’ and each company had platoons within which were located active service units. For special operations individuals could be drawn from different units.

  Like their political antecedents in the Independent Unionist movement, disgruntlement with the Unionist political establishment along with economic and social populism characterised the UVF’s politics outside of the constitutional question. Of the two Loyalist paramilitary groups, the UVF was the first to dabble in electoral politics, encouraged by the success of the UWC strike to believe there was sufficient Protestant disenchantment with the mainstream political leadership to sustain a market for their brand of Loyalism. In June 1974, the UVF created the Volunteer Political Party whose founding manifesto described itself as ‘a progressive and forward-thinking Unionist party’.

  The VPP contested the October 1974 British general election in West Belfast and one of its leaflets attacked the ‘disgraceful’ social conditions on the Shankill Road. One of the issues highlighted was a piece of public housing notorious for its shoddy construction known as the ‘Weetabix’ flats after a certain physical resemblance between the blocks of flats and the breakfast cereal. The candidate, Ken Gibson, a former UVF detainee from East Belfast, polled a mere 2,600 votes and the UVF leadership got the message. ‘The general public’, it conceded, ‘does not support the political involvement of the UVF’, and the VPP was wound up. Although one of the VPP leaders, Hugh Smyth, won a seat to a Constitutional Convention established by the British the following year, he stood as an Independent Unionist while the UVF went back to what it knew best. The UVF eschewed organised politics until 1978 when the Progressive Unionist Party was created and even then it was, for many years, regarded more as camouflage for meetings between the UVF leadership and the Northern Ireland Office, rather than a serious political venture.

  The VPP experiment raises an intriguing question. If its first outing had been more successful, would this have planted the seeds of a political/military split in the UVF, of the sort that later transformed the Provisionals? The question is academic because until David Ervine’s election to the 1998 Assembly, Loyalist paramilitary parties would invariably do badly in Northern Ireland’s elections, although some individuals associated with them were more successful, as long as they stood in their own names, not that of their paramilitary group. Protestants might have been ambivalent about the UVF’s and UDA’s violence, as Catholics were about the IRA’s, but they would never vote for them in significant numbers while the violence continued. For the same reason respectable, lower-middle-class and upwards Protestants would prefer the Queen’s uniform to the balaclava if they felt the urge to get back at the IRA. Nor was there much of an appetite for politics in the ranks or at leadership level of the UVF, as one source put it: ‘… the leadership’s view of politics … was simply: “Go ahead, theorise, debate, discuss and write papers but we have a job to do and until there is a ceasefire from Republicans nothing is going to change.”’

  As the VPP experiment flopped, the scene was set for a dramatic change in the UVF leadership, one effected at the point of a gun but prompted not by politics but by military matters, in particular a series of what the British Army called ‘own goals’, UVF men killed by their own bombs and a number of ‘reckless’ operations such as the Miami Showband attack, which had harmed the UVF’s image. The leadership was removed in a coup when gunmen walked into a meeting and told them they had been deposed and should leave the scene. The then Chief of Staff actually left the country for his own safety. The Shankill UVF had strongly supported the coup and so it is likely that so did Lenny Murphy, an activist who had built a fearsome name for violence by 1975 and would soon provide material for a notorious chapter in the history of the Troubles as leader of the Shankill Butchers. Put another way, if Murphy had opposed the coup it would have caused the rebels problems. The incident was testimony to the power residing with the UVF’s gunmen.

  Into this new mix was added a truce between the IRA and the British that lasted for much of the year and like all ceasefires it made many Protestants more edgy and suspicious. The ceasefire became tangible when ‘incident centres’ were set up to allow the British and the IRA jointly to monitor infringements and when legal weapons were issued to the Republicans manning the centres, all of which set Loyalist nerves on edge with predictably violent results. The following year saw UVF violence reach new heights. In July 1975, the Miami Showband massacre happened and then on 2 October twelve people died in an unprecedented wave of UVF bombings and shootings in Belfast, Antrim, Coleraine, Armagh and County Down. Six of the victims were Protestants, four of them UVF members killed in a premature explosion. The single worst incident was in Belfast at a bottling plant near the city centre. In a UVF gun attack cum armed robbery four workers, all Catholics and two of them sisters, were shot dead. Three of the victims, including the two sisters, were killed by the gang leader Lenny Murphy, who shot each in the head.

  Murphy, who was from the Shankill Road, had joined the UVF at the age of sixteen and killed for the first time four years later in September 1972 when he shot dead a Protestant gun-dealer accused of having dealings with the IRA. Charged along with an associate with
the murder, Murphy was remanded first to Crumlin Road jail and then to the remand compound in Long Kesh. In April 1973 he poisoned his co-defendant with cyanide in Crumlin Road prison after suggestions surfaced that he might co-operate with the police against Murphy. He was acquitted of murder but convicted of trying to escape from jail and was imprisoned until May 1975. After the explosion of violence in October 1975, the UVF was again placed on the list of banned organisations and within weeks the coup restored the leadership that had been in charge prior to the beginning of Loyalist internment. Among the new leaders was John ‘Bunter’ Graham who was Chief of Staff by 1976 and, aside from a time spent in jail on a ‘supergrass’ charge, has been Chief of Staff ever since. During the peace-process years his support of the positive approach advocated by Ervine and Gusty Spence was probably crucial. David Ervine’s recollection suggests that the leadership changes in October 1975, which he called a ‘coup’, had a mixed reception from some, if not for ideological reasons then for personal ones. The overthrown leadership had treated Gusty Spence’s politicking with something close to contempt. One position paper produced inside the jail for the leadership was returned to Long Kesh with a dismissive ‘Fuck Off!’ and that sort of behaviour would now end. Spence’s emphasis on discipline also alienated some in the jail including the newly convicted Lenny Murphy. With some allies, Murphy got himself transferred out of the UVF compound.

  … there were, I think, little ramifications … some people ended up going to Magilligan from Long Kesh not long after that, and they were people who were less inclined to accept [the changes]; they didn’t really want to accept the very sensible, relatively strict discipline in the jail. Joe Bennett¶ was one of them … he went to Magilligan and came back eventually when they closed Magilligan, but there were a few Shankill Road men left and went to Magilligan around that time …