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

by Ed Moloney

  I think that the Anglo-Irish Agreement threw Loyalism and Unionism into a state of flux but the debates within paramilitarism were quite interesting, certainly those within the UVF … quite a number believed that the responsibility for the political conditions that led to the creation of the Anglo-Irish Agreement lay with the Westminster MPs. They had singularly failed, and that whilst there were many UVF people who felt, ‘We’ll react because it’s the … thing to do’, there were others who were saying, ‘Hold on a wee minute, really this is a political problem and these people have not done their job. Why didn’t they warn society, why didn’t they agitate, why didn’t they create conditions which allowed the population to really know what was coming?’ So there was some confusion, and maybe lack of clarity about where we were going because Loyalists didn’t have any of the cards. The one card … they knew they had was the capacity to inflict violence and … rather than a reactive response in the Loyalist leadership, they seemed [instead] to be much more politically attuned in the use of violence.

  The graph of Loyalist violence, as measured by their killings, takes the shape of an inverted U between the years 1971 and 1976, the years of greatest political instability and therefore of Unionist insecurity. After that the line becomes a straight line, more or less, bumping along at the bottom of the horizontal axis, each year’s toll of death a mere fraction of what it had been in the mid-1970s. Of the two, the UVF’s killing rate declined at a slower pace than the UDA’s but even so the change was dramatic: there were, for instance, more people killed by the UVF in 1976, a total of 71,44 than in the entire next ten years, between 1978 and 1987. Even the two years of the Anglo-Irish Agreement, 1985 and 1986, saw no great variance from the new lower norm. By and large the two groups continued to do what Loyalist paramilitaries had done ever since Gusty Spence’s killing spree in 1966. When they wanted to kill they targeted uninvolved Catholics, often at random, and, like Gusty Spence’s victims in 1966, many met an unintended death due to sheer incompetence. It was not that the Loyalist paramilitaries did not have intelligence on the IRA or that they did not know where IRA activists lived or what they looked like. Lack of such information was never a Loyalist problem. It was an open secret, in the early years of the Troubles especially, that departing British troops would stuff UVF and UDA letterboxes with photomontages of IRA ‘players’ culled from intelligence files. If the UVF or the UDA had wanted to, they could have gone for real IRA targets but they mostly didn’t. It seemed that killing Catholics randomly with the gun or bomb was a lot easier to do.

  That started to change in 1980 when Loyalists began choosing their targets more carefully and strategically. The first such victim was a Protestant Republican politician and landowner called John Turnly who lived on the North Antrim coast. At one time in his life an officer in the British Army, Turnly had joined the moderate SDLP, but left to join a radical splinter group, the Irish Independence Party, from where he later supported the IRA hunger strikers. In June 1980 he was shot dead as he sat in his car with his Japanese wife and their two children. The assassins were members of the UDA and the Turnly killing marked the start of the most directed and coherent campaign to date organised by any Loyalist group. Their next victim was Miriam Daly, a former Sinn Fein activist, who along with her husband James had become a leader in the Irish Republican Socialist Party, the political wing of the INLA. She was shot dead in her Andersonstown home. In October the UDA killed Ronnie Bunting, the radical son of Paisley’s former aide who had become a leader first in the Official IRA and then the INLA. He was shot dead by gunmen who used a sledgehammer to break down the door of his Andersonstown home, and alongside him was killed Noel Lyttle, a member of the Red Republican Party. The following year, in January 1981, UDA gunmen shot and seriously wounded the former civil rights leader Bernadette McAliskey and her husband Michael in their isolated home in County Tyrone. Other activists from the civil rights days were targeted, some fleeing Belfast for the safety of Dublin. The UDA said that their campaign was directed at what they called the IRA’s ‘cheerleaders’ and it was notable that three of the victims had been active in the H-block campaign, supporting the IRA claim of political status for prisoners. The UDA killings were an effort to strike fear in that section of radical Nationalist politics which gave valuable support and guidance to some of the IRA’s causes.

  It wasn’t for another seven years or so that the UVF went down a similar path. That it did so was in no small way the result of a new relationship between the UVF leadership and the PUP, one that gave the PUP influence over the gunmen’s strategy. It was during these years that Ervine also became active again in the UVF as its ‘Provost-Marshal’, responsible for internal discipline, a move that seemed calculated to reassure the rank and file that he was one of them.45 The change came about in the confused aftermath of the first moves in what would soon become known as the peace process. The story began, in public at least, on 11 January 1988 when a political earthquake shook Northern Nationalism. Delegations from the SDLP and Sinn Fein, led by their respective leaders, John Hume and Gerry Adams, met for the first of six meetings, the last one taking place in September that year. The contacts were extra ordinary simply because the Establishment orthodoxy for many years had been that the Provos, elected or not, were pariahs, fit only to be shunned by respectable society. Such an approach was a matter of faith for some politicians in the South, especially Garret Fitzgerald, the Fine Gael leader and twice Taoiseach. If anything the sentiment was stronger south of the border, particularly in sections of the media, than it was in London and so Hume was seen as bucking his allies in Dublin by meeting Adams & Co. – or at least that is how it looked. More than that the SDLP and Sinn Fein had fought one election a year against each other since 1982 and by now they were bitter and sometimes physical rivals. The fact that they were now prepared to meet and discuss their different analyses of the problem suggested something unusual was afoot.

  No matter what they really thought in private, the bulk of mainstream Unionist leaders responded to the SDLP–SF talks with suspicion, scorn and hostility, assuming that they were just part of another cunning Nationalist plot to undo the Union. With the exception of the UVF and the PUP that is. Seemingly alone of all the pro-Union groupings, the UVF/PUP realised that neither the SDLP nor the Irish government, which had to have approved the meetings, would entertain the Sinn Fein leadership in talks unless the IRA’s use of violence was somehow on the negotiating table. This piece of astute reasoning shaped a sophisticated response, which had two major features. One was an open-minded approach that did not dismiss the possibility that the talks were aimed at ending the violence. The second was to assume the best, that the Provos were looking for a way out of the conflict and, to encourage them to move faster down that road, the UVF set about trying to kill as many known Republicans as it could. Like the UDA seven years before, the UVF set out to kill a specific set of targets, only their targets would be in the IRA, Sinn Fein and those around them. So intense was the campaign unleashed by the UVF and other Loyalists that, according to Ervine’s interview with Boston College, an alarmed IRA sued for peace via intermediaries. The offer was rejected.

  … the PUP was a tiny and a very core group. It would have met on a fairly irregular basis at first with the leadership of UVF and hot-housed the political vista with them, if you like, but that changed over a period of time. I think the biggest change came in, it had to be about 1989, with the creation, at the behest of the UVF, of a kitchen cabinet. Out of that hot-house process came our understanding of the much talked about Republican strategy of pan-Nationalism. When the concept became public, Unionism was apoplectic, but the leadership of the UVF were not, and neither were the small nucleus of PUP people. The view that they had was no matter how much we disliked the SDLP or the Irish government, they were not going to get into bed with Sinn Fein as long as the IRA was using violence. So that was an indicator to the UVF that something was going on. The questions were: ‘What is it that they’re t
alking about?’ ‘What’s [Gerry] Adams offering here to his own community?’ And I and at least one other were then sent out to try and find out.

  … part of that kitchen-cabinet discussion was about how you escalate the war to end the war, which again was an indication … that there were people in the leadership of the UVF who believed this war could end, unlike many of their foot soldiers for whom the war was just a way of life. There was a change, a mindset change … and the focus switched to a more acute political analysis of every word, of everything that was being said, everything was being done … and more fundamentally asking what the hell was going on within Republicanism. There had always been attempts by the UVF, for as long as I remember, to try and understand what was going on with the Provos. In some cases it was done through relationship with priests, and I’m certain that from 1989 onwards the relationship with priests and then eventually other clergymen substantially intensified, but that was never taken on its own. There were little soirées in Dublin and places like that where, as a community worker, one could suggest something more visionary … that hadn’t previously ever been suggested, so there were those type of little things going on.

  There would be many people within the UVF who had always felt that the only way to carry out a campaign was incisively and with stealth and absolute precision. They didn’t always have their way and the emotion and anger and opportunities sometimes mitigate against that, but they seemed to have their way and there was a diligent attempt [made] to identify very expressly specific targets. It was about trying to damage the Republican movement. For many years Loyalism simply believed that a Catholic, any Catholic, would do. The UVF, in fairness to them, even though some of the statistics don’t indicate that their ideas always bore fruit, it’s clear that they felt that it was counter-productive, that sectarianism, wounding the Nationalist community in order that it stop harbouring the IRA, was absolutely counter-productive. So they became much more incisive and I think it did create a huge fear factor in Republicans, forcing them behind their steel doors, and really for the first time the Republicans felt themselves being hounded.

  … there was a single-mindedness that at times one felt the UVF had lacked [in the past] and there are periods of course where that wasn’t the case … [but] one would have never expected that the Republicans would have been screaming from the rooftops and admitting weakness, but it was clear through, shall we say, conduits and messages … that it was getting home because they were suing for peace, but suing for peace in very pathetic and irrational terms like ‘You don’t kill us and we won’t kill you’ and ‘We’re not fighting ye’, you know. That type of thing. ‘You’re not really the enemy’, which betrayed a huge misunderstanding about what the UVF may or may not have been about from their point of view. The UVF were insulted by suggestions that in order to save their own skins they should make deals with the IRA and I think it [so] infuriated them the kill rate may well have gone up.

  It would be wrong to conclude from David Ervine’s remarks that the UVF and its associated group, the Red Hand Commando, were the only Loyalist groups trying to kill Republicans. The UDA was doing exactly the same thing and from the spring of 1991 onwards the three groups – the UDA, UVF and Red Hand Commando – worked together, co-ordinating strategies, not least of which was the idea that killing Republicans could encourage the IRA to embrace peace more urgently. Given the history of bloody feuding between the UVF and the UDA, it was remarkable that they could come together in this way and a measure of the level of Protestant unease caused by the peace process. David Ervine claimed that it was the UVF’s idea to create the Combined Loyalist Military Command (CLMC) to take on that task but, whatever the truth, the existence of the CLMC did ensure that when the peace process became serious, the hard men of Unionism were more or less singing from the same hymn sheet.

  … the UVF leadership, conscious of the need to have a very clear political understanding of (1) what was going on, and (2) what the hell they were going to do about what was going on, realised there was the need to ask, ‘Right, what’s the first item on the agenda?’ Well, if you’re going to move within Loyalism then you need to try and move on with all of Loyalism because to move separately is very, very dangerous and leaves you ripe for plucking. So the UVF leadership, not the PUP, were of a mind that the way to do that was through some kind of overarching process of interaction between the Loyalist paramilitaries. There’s no doubt about it, that the creation of the Combined Loyalist Military Command was the UVF’s baby, but that did not go down universally well within the UVF. I mean, there were a lot of UVF people who were very opposed and felt that they didn’t want to get into bed with people who they felt were dubious. That of course didn’t mean every UDA person, but there were elements in the UDA who were strange animals, to say the least, on the basis that they were supposed to be defending their community, and yet were employed more in running nefarious businesses. That’s not meant simplistically to be a criticism; it’s meant to give an understanding of the backdrop against which the UVF leadership moved. Not only did it have the problem of the enemy, the IRA; it had the problem of the enemy within, in terms of the potential objectors within the UVF. It was one of those times where you watch [people’s] status grow and when I had immense appreciation for the deftness of footwork which was practised at that time by the UVF leadership. The one single thing that Republicans did not want was a thinking Loyalism, and we saw that from their actions; they weren’t ready for a ceasefire, they weren’t ready for the moment for whatever reasons, at that time, but clearly they wanted to derail Loyalism.

  … the UVF’s theory about escalating the war to end the war came before the creation of the CLMC.

  Q. Would it have been a factor in terms of the CLMC?

  A. Oh, big style, but you’ve got to remember where I think the dynamic was introduced was that we were all trying to understand what the Republicans meant by pan-Nationalism. That indicated there was a ‘game on’, [but] we needed to try and find out what the ‘game on’ was, and if there was going to be a ‘game on’ we needed to be playing in it and that therefore the creation of the Combined Loyalist Military Command was a requirement in order to make Loyalism able to move at all. The CLMC was an interesting vehicle because also set up around the CLMC was the Combined Loyalist Political Alliance. One, you could argue, was military and the other one was political. This was a discussion process between the UDP [the Ulster Democratic Party, the UDA’s political wing] and the PUP, and indeed the UVF and the UDA attended it as well …

  Q. What would have been the make-up of that?

  A. It would have been two PUP, two UDP and the Military Commander of the UVF and the Military Commander of the UDA.

  Q. And same sort of things on the table but more expressly about the political direction?

  A. Yes, very clearly, yeah. I think we would have been talking about the same things, maybe from different directions, but were actually talking about the same things. There was only one show in town, what was going on in the Republican movement …

  Perhaps one reason why the two groups were able to work together is that they both began targeting Republicans in a serious way at around the same time. Indeed one could argue that the pathfinder in this regard was a thirty-three-year-old, self-described freelance Loyalist, a gunman from East Belfast called Michael Stone who had done much of his previous killing on behalf of the UDA as a roaming hitman. In March 1988, Stone attacked the funeral of three IRA members who had been shot dead by the SAS while on a bombing mission in Gibraltar, Britain’s quaint colony and military garrison perched at the southern tip of Spain. Attacking the crowd of mourners inside Milltown cemetery in West Belfast with grenades and firing pistol shots at his pursuers, Stone killed three people, one of them an IRA member. He later said that his real targets had been the Sinn Fein President, Gerry Adams; the Derry IRA leader, Martin McGuinness, and Danny Morrison, the Provos’ chief propagandist cum publicity officer. He also claimed to have stalk
ed McGuinness once before, as well as the former Fermanagh–South Tyrone MP, Owen Carron, and the leading County Derry Republican, John Joe Davey. When he went to trial it emerged that he had killed three times before the Milltown attack; two of his victims were Catholics and a third a Sinn Fein member. Stone immediately acquired cult status among the Loyalist hardliners in Northern Ireland and, because of that, became something of a role model as well. It was not that Loyalists had never killed or tried to kill top Republicans before or that Stone was the first to come up with the idea. In 1984, the UDA came close to killing the Sinn Fein leader when they ambushed his car in the centre of Belfast and they tried again in 1988, although this time the security forces frustrated the attempt before it became serious.46 Nor did the UDA need the then three-month-long talks between Sinn Fein and the SDLP to act as an incentive. But as the peace process gathered speed and diplomacy of this sort with Sinn Fein intensified and expanded beyond the SDLP, it became increasingly clear that the Provos were seeking a way out of conflict. Republican vulnerability to pressure from the Loyalists accordingly grew and so, therefore, did the killing.

  It would be wrong to think that in the years of the peace process the UVF turned its guns exclusively against Republicans and spared Catholics from death. Nothing could be further from the truth. According to figures culled from Lost Lives, the exhaustive and widely respected record of Northern Ireland’s victims of violence, 58 of the 115 people killed by the UVF between 1988 and the IRA ceasefire of 1994 – almost exactly half – were innocent, largely uninvolved Catholics chosen for death, like so many before, entirely randomly or by mistake. Some of the worst indiscriminate sectarian slaughter carried out by Loyalists during the entire Troubles, such the public-house killings at Greysteel in 1993 or at Loughinisland in 1994, took place during the peace-process years. But, equally, it was a significant break from past behaviour that so many of the remaining victims – perhaps a quarter of the total – were associated in one way or another with Republicanism. By contrast only 4 of the 44 people killed by the UVF between 1982 and 1987 were in that category.