by Ed Moloney
Although the doorstep assassination of IRA activist Larry Marley at his home in Ardoyne, North Belfast, in April 1987 is sometimes thought of as marking the start of the UVF’s more selective targeting campaign, it properly began more than eighteen months later at a lonely bungalow between Ardboe, a strongly Republican village on the County Tyrone shore of Lough Neagh and the Loyalist town of Coagh further inland. On the night of 24 November 1988, twenty-eight-year-old Phelim McNally was playing traditional Irish music on an accordion in the kitchen of his brother’s home on the Derrychin Road when one or more UVF gunmen fired bursts of automatic gunfire through a window killing him instantly. Phelim McNally was a member of a strong Republican family; one brother, Francie, was a Sinn Fein councillor in Cookstown while another, Lawrence, was in the IRA and would be killed in an SAS ambush some three years later. Ardboe was in the heart of one of the IRA’s strongest Brigade areas, East Tyrone. The McNally killing is an appropriate start for any examination of the UVF’s campaign during these years because it was also the first carried out by its Mid-Ulster units, which played by far the greatest role targeting Republicans. Although there is evidence of Belfast participation in some of the killings, the Mid-Ulster UVF was involved in half of the some twenty-six UVF operations against Republican targets that resulted in fatalities during these years. The operations took place in County Armagh, County Derry and most of all in County Tyrone. Between 1988 and August 1994, 86 people died violent deaths in the East Tyrone operational zone and the UVF was responsible for 40 of them, nearly half the slaughter.
The Mid-Ulster UVF was headquartered in Portadown, County Armagh, once described by the SDLP’s Brid Rodgers as ‘the citadel of Orangeism’ and was dominated by two figures, both infamous for their violence. One was Robin Jackson,† dubbed ‘The Jackal’ by the tabloid media, who has been blamed for two of the UVF’s worst atrocities: the 1974 bombing of Dublin and Monaghan and the Miami Showband massacre in 1975. The other was Billy Wright, the Mid-Ulster Commander during this time who went under the soubriquet ‘King Rat’, another a tabloid invention. Which of the two was more responsible for the Mid-Ulster violence is debatable. Wright got most of the public blame and notoriety and became a greatly hunted target for the IRA, which attempted to kill him five times.‡ The UVF prefer to credit Jackson but the claim must be set alongside the fact that Wright turned against the UVF ultimately and formed a rival group opposed to the peace process that feuded with its former colleagues.
The McNally killing might have been the starting point of the UVF’s campaign but its origins in a bout of tit-for-tat retaliatory killings shows how much local conditions shaped the campaign and might even have inspired it, at least as far as County Tyrone was concerned. In April 1988, Edward Gibson, a binman who was also a soldier in the UDR, was shot dead by the IRA as he collected garbage in Ardboe. He was from Coagh and his death affected most of the village where inter-marriage over the years meant that many of its inhabitants were related. The McNally killing was thus an act of revenge and in response the IRA killed three Coagh Protestants, one of them a suspected local UVF member, the other two unfortunate innocents, and the spiral of violence gathered speed. It is possible that by the time the PUP and UVF leadership devised the selective killing campaign, it was already happening.
In February 1989 the UDA killed the Belfast solicitor Pat Finucane in his North Belfast home and claimed that he was an officer in the IRA. That allegation has been denied by his family, the RUC and the British government but he had two strikes against him: he was one of the Provisional IRA’s regular lawyers and the go-to solicitor for the Belfast Brigade, and some of his brothers were deeply involved in the IRA. The following day, the UVF shot dead the Sinn Fein councillor and IRA veteran John Joe Davey as he returned to his home near Magherafelt in County Derry. Davey had been named under privilege in the British House of Commons by the DUP MP for Mid-Ulster, the Reverend William McCrea, as being involved in IRA murders. The next UVF victim in the area was a publican, Liam Ryan, who was shot dead at the doorway of his bar, the Battery Bar on the shores of Lough Neagh near Ardboe in November 1989. The gunmen are thought to have made their way to the bar by boat and then escaped in a waiting getaway car. Ryan, a former United States Commander of the IRA, was the East Tyrone Brigade’s Intelligence Officer. A year later, a Sinn Fein worker, Tommy Casey, was killed by the UVF in Cookstown, County Tyrone, in mistake for a former Tyrone Commander. In March the following year, the UVF struck its most deadly blow against the IRA to date when it shot up an IRA meeting taking place in a bar in Cappagh, County Tyrone, killing three of its members. The Tyrone Commander of the IRA was supposed to have been at the meeting but escaped death. However, in November the UVF caught up with the former Commander, Sean Anderson, near his home in Pomeroy.
The Republican reaction to these killings is an important part of the story, one that arguably amplified the effect of the Loyalist campaign and encouraged the UVF and the UDA to intensify it. The IRA had traditionally responded to Loyalist attacks such as these with disproportionate intensity. When Bernadette McAliskey and her husband were badly wounded by the UDA, for instance, the IRA retaliated by killing two high-level Unionist figures, the eighty-six-year-old former Stormont Speaker Sir Norman Stronge and his merchant banker son James (aged forty-eight) and burned their mansion near the Armagh–Monaghan border to the ground. But the peace process had changed priorities for the Sinn Fein and IRA leadership. Sensitive to accusations of sectarianism from the media and politicians south of the border, the Army Council had ordered an end to reprisal political assassinations and stipulated that Loyalist targets could be chosen solely on the basis of accurate intelligence. Only those who could be shown to have had direct involvement in such killings, such as Billy Wright, could be singled out for reprisal. In the wake of the attack on the IRA meeting in Cappagh, the Provo leadership ordered that the three victims’ IRA membership should not be acknowledged, nor should they be given Republican funerals.47 Similarly the Republican leadership refused to acknowledge the IRA ties of Sinn Fein figures, including councillors, assassinated by Loyalists. All this was partly done to stir sympathy in the South but another effect was to dampen pressure for retaliation. By the early 1990s it become open season on Republicans. Sinn Fein members and workers, councillors, IRA members, ex-IRA members and relatives of Republicans, including in one gruesome instance the heavily pregnant wife of a former IRA prisoner, were all targets.
The UVF campaign in Mid-Ulster indisputably shattered Republican morale. In these years a small industry grew up in County Tyrone and in Belfast devoted to making Republican homes secure against attack. Heavy grille doors would be installed in homes to deter intruders, often placed at the bottom of the staircase so that when the family retired to bed at night they could lock themselves upstairs, hopefully out of harm’s way. The presence of such precautions was a sure sign that the house was a Republican one. In Tyrone the precautions could be even more elaborate. In one home visited by the author at the time there were a number of such doors downstairs preventing access from several directions, each one strengthened by heavy steel girders which could be lowered through holes in the floor of the master bedroom above last thing at night. Republicans lived in terror in such areas, fearful of strange cars driving past in the middle of the night and constantly on the outlook for a violent attack. Some moved home regularly. During one night-time visit made by the author to a Tyrone IRA member’s home, the host’s sleeping wife was having a nightmare upstairs. Her moans were clearly audible from the bottom of the staircase: ‘Please don’t shoot!’ The impact of all this was captured by another local Republican interviewed by the author in 2000: ‘As the killings grew, the demand grew to do something. People were afraid because it seemed the Loyalists had a free hand. People were afraid to be identified with Sinn Fein, not just the IRA. You could be shot for having the same name as a Republican or for being a Sinn Fein councillor. Meanwhile the IRA was doing nothing to protect people.’48
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A key feature of the UVF campaign in Tyrone, and the wider Loyalist effort, is that the assault on Republicans was being paralleled by the British Army in two ways. In Tyrone, ambushes set by the SAS became an accepted way of taking on the IRA. Starting with the ambush in Loughgall, which wiped out the cream of the East Tyrone Brigade in May 1987, through to February 1992, when an IRA unit was similarly ambushed near Coalisland, the SAS killed twenty IRA activists. British Military Intelligence also gave the Loyalists a helping hand. In 1987, a British Army outfit known as the Force Research Unit (FRU) recruited and placed an agent at the top of the UDA’s Intelligence Department in order to ensure that ‘proper targeting of Provisional IRA members [took] place prior to any shootings’.49 Brian Nelson worked for the FRU until 1990, when he was exposed during a British police inquiry into British military collusion with the UDA. Whether Nelson’s recruitment was just a coincidence and unconnected to the wider Loyalist strategy – or whether the UDA was not alone in being infiltrated in this way by the British and that a similar agent or agents had been placed inside the UVF – are among the great unknowns from the Troubles. But there can be little doubt that the combined effect of the Loyalist assault was to sharpen the general Republican appetite for ending the conflict and, in the key area of Tyrone, to ensure that the expected Republican opposition to the peace process there would be minimal.
Notes – 5
35 McKittrick et al., Lost Lives, p. 1475.
36 Irish Times, 9 August 1977.
37 Ibid., 25 November 1977.
38 Ibid., 2 December 1981.
39 Principles of Loyalism.
40 Irish Times, 18 July 1977.
41 Ibid., 12 November 1977.
42 Principles of Loyalism.
43 Moloney, Paisley, p. 303.
44 McKittrick et al., Lost Lives, p. 1475.
45 Belfast Telegraph, 15 September 2006.
46 Moloney, A Secret History, p. 578.
47 Ibid., chapter 11.
48 Interview with Tyrone Republican, April 2000.
49 Sunday Telegraph, 29 March 1998.
* A pro-power-sharing policy document published by the UDA in 1987.
† He died of natural causes in June 1998.
‡ Wright was shot dead by INLA prisoners inside the Maze prison in December 1997.
6
Those in the UVF and the PUP including David Ervine who had the task of trying to unravel the mysteries of the emerging peace process in the late 1980s and early 1990s had two main problems. The first was that the process was a bit like an iceberg; only the tip was visible above the waves while the rest, the bulk of the ice, was hidden from public view. The second problem was that it was difficult to judge the bona fides of those involved. The Provos were sending out mixed signals; one day Gerry Adams would talk of peace and the next day the IRA would commit an outrageous act of violence to balance the scales. Then there was the British government. A long and often difficult history of dealing with various administrations in Britain had taught Unionists to distrust their overlords in London and always to suspect the worst. If the Provos were genuine about seeking peace would British self-interest ensure that it would happen on Nationalist terms and at the expense of Unionism? Some Unionists, Ian Paisley being the prime example, had made a career out of predicting precisely this sort of betrayal and he always had a receptive audience. The peace process, he maintained, was a Republican plot to destroy Ulster, a view largely echoed, at least initially, by his mainstream rivals in the Ulster Unionists. The irony about this phase of the Troubles was that it was the hard men of Loyalism, the UVF and UDA, who had spent years slaughtering Catholics and sending bombs south of the border who had the more open minds about the matter and who took the time and trouble to investigate whether or not the peace process really presented the threat assumed by Paisley and others.
The process had its origins in the 1981 hunger strikes. Although the protest was best remembered for the deaths of ten IRA and INLA prisoners and the hostility provoked between Nationalist Ireland and the British prime minister of the day, Margaret Thatcher, its significance lay in one of its unintended consequences. Thanks to the untimely death of Frank Maguire, the sitting Independent Republican MP for Fermanagh–South Tyrone, the hunger strikers’ leader and former Maze O/C, Bobby Sands, was able to stand in the subsequent by-election and, to the delight of the Provos and the alarm of nearly everybody else, he won. By June, four prisoners had died and that month hunger strikers or their supporters stood in the Irish general election where they won two seats in the Dail. Local council elections in Northern Ireland meanwhile saw significant victories for candidates supporting the hunger strikers and then Owen Carron retained Bobby Sands’s seat, giving the SF leadership a real, live MP to tour around the country. After these successes, going fully political seemed the logical next step for Sinn Fein even though it marked a real fork in the road for the Provisional movement. After all, one of the breaking points with the Officials in 1969–70 was the then Republican leadership’s obsession with electoral politics to the exclusion of military methods. Elections equalled sell-out to the new Provisionals and it is against this yardstick that the U-turn of 1981–82 should be seen. The move was significant for another reason, the impact of which took several years to manifest publicly. Securing support at the hustings meant that the political leadership of Sinn Fein had been offered both an alternative to violence and the possibility of exercising real political influence and power in both parts of Ireland. But there was a downside for the IRA. As time wore on the contradictions between electoralism and violence grew, the reality that IRA violence often cost votes harder to deny. This brought closer the day when the Provo leadership would have to choose between one and the other.
In 1982, the new Northern Ireland secretary, James Prior, eager to leave a mark on British and Irish politics, launched an initiative aimed at creating a power-sharing government in Belfast. It was a cautious effort, based on the idea that powers could be transferred to local politicians slowly and gradually as trust between them grew. The first stage was the election of a new assembly to replace the old and long-suspended Stormont parliament and it offered Sinn Fein its first outing under its own name. Sinn Fein’s performance stunned the political establishment. But winning 10 per cent of the vote and five seats in the Prior assembly was only one dividend. The other was that the SDLP, the moderate, constitutional and majority voice of Nationalism, was put under considerable threat. Some 40 per cent of Nationalists had plumped for Sinn Fein and the party’s potential to overtake the SDLP was a prospect that worried in particular the government in Dublin. It was at this point that the soon-to-be leader of Sinn Fein, Gerry Adams, began discussions, first with a Redemptorist priest based in West Belfast, Father Alex Reid, and subsequently with Cardinal O Fiaich and other Catholic clerics, aimed at creating a political alternative to the IRA’s armed struggle.
By 1986–87, in the wake of the Anglo-Irish Agreement, the initiative was ready to be launched. Essentially the proposal said that in return for a place for Sinn Fein at the negotiating table, the convening of a conference involving all the parties, Unionist and non-Unionist, and a British assurance of non-interference or ‘neutrality’, then the IRA would declare a ceasefire that implicitly, if the conference reached a settlement, could become a permanent one. As a prelude to this, Sinn Fein proposed the creation of a pan-Nationalist alliance with the SDLP in the North and Fianna Fail in the Republic, which could pressurise Britain into convening the all Ireland conference and bring the IRA into ceasefire mode. Implicit in all this was that nothing would infringe the consent principle, that Irish unity could happen only with the consent of a majority of Northern Ireland’s population. It was there, unspoken and unacknowledged, at the heart of the process.
Through Father Reid, Gerry Adams, who was by now MP for West Belfast, contacted the Fianna Fail leader and soon to be reinstalled Taoiseach, Charles Haughey, and the new British Northern Ireland secretary, Tom K
ing, to outline these ideas. In the case of Haughey, Father Reid ferried messages back and forth from Gerry Adams but when Adams sought direct, face-to-face contact, the first stage in constructing pan-Nationalism in effect, Haughey baulked. His colourful history included allegations that as a government minister after the violence of August 1969 he had provided guns to the nascent Provisionals and was thus to blame for the rise of the IRA. Terrified that meetings with Adams would be leaked and his career destroyed, Haughey suggested instead that the SDLP leader, John Hume, should take his place. And so, in 1988, the SDLP and Sinn Fein leaders met to discuss and debate their respective analyses of the political situation. When the subsequent series of meetings involving party delegations ended that autumn, Hume and Adams continued to meet secretly until, by chance or otherwise, their dialogue became public in April 1993.
If the world of Northern Unionism was suspicious about this Nationalist liaison then the Irish and British governments were downright sceptical. Right from the start, and all the way through to the end of the process many years later, the Provos’ bona fides were a subject for debate and disagreement. One reason for this was that the IRA’s violence continued apace and actually was intensified during 1988. Gerry Adams’s words of peace were clashing with the reality on the ground. Tom King ended the dialogue with Father Reid when, in August 1987, the IRA was discovered reconnoitring his home in Somerset, in the West of England, presumably prior to an assassination attempt. The following year IRA violence soared, fuelled by hundreds of tonnes of recently imported modern weaponry supplied by Libya. Only when King was succeeded by Peter Brooke in 1989 did the process resume. If the British were doubtful, Haughey was worried. It was no accident that Haughey turned down Adams’s request for direct contact in the wake of the Enniskillen bomb, the November 1987 botched IRA attack on the UDR that instead killed eleven Protestant civilians in a crowd that had gathered for a Remembrance Day service. Antipathy to the IRA soared in the Republic, adding to Haughey’s nervousness.