Read Voices from the Grave: Two Men's War in Ireland Online
Authors: Ed Moloney
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
Although more secretive and much smaller in size than its often bitter rivals the UDA, the UVF was undoubtedly the most deadly Loyalist outfit in Northern Ireland. Between 1972 and 1977, the worst years for Loyalist bloodshed, the UVF outkilled the UDA by 3 to 2. Of the 1,050 deaths caused by Loyalist violence between 1966 and 1999, the UVF was responsible for 547, over half, while the UDA killed 408, or just under 40 per cent.
21
It was this sort of track record that lured David Ervine into its ranks after ‘Bloody Friday’.
The UVF that David Ervine joined was, by his own description, somewhat more casual and laid back, even haphazard, than the IRA that Brendan Hughes became part of. While Hughes was sent to training camps across the border, the UVF gave Ervine ‘a bit’ of weapons training and ‘basic’ explosives training and was only
beginning to put together a systematic training regime for new members when Ervine was arrested, over two years after he had joined the organisation. Hughes and his colleagues in D Company spent their days in call houses in the Lower Falls ready to launch attacks on the British Army or police at any moment. But in the UVF there was no daily routine; you turned up for active service when you were summoned by the local leadership, otherwise you could be idle ‘for long enough’. All this was ‘confusing’, Ervine admitted, especially when the UVF remained inactive during the greatest crisis for Unionism since 1912, when Protestants went on strike to bring down the Sunningdale power-sharing Agreement. Despite all this Ervine was an enthusiastic UVF man, eager to impress his superiors and most reluctant to jump off the ‘hamster wheel to hell’ that constituted life as a Loyalist paramilitary. But in one respect he and the IRA were inseparable and that was in their opposition to the Sunningdale Agreement of 1974. To the IRA it was an internal settlement that would copper-fasten partition; to Ervine and his colleagues the Council of Ireland created by Sunningdale had the potential to end the Union.
[The UVF] was broken up into what they described as units or
teams and you would have only ever realistically known your own
unit’s members, [but] of course, tittle-tattle again, a nod and a wink,
you knew who others were in different teams. But in the main you
kept to your own group, [and] they functioned and operated internal
to themselves. Each unit had a Commander and they … liaised
with a Battalion Commander who had … overall authority, but
you wouldn’t have spent too much time in their company. I remember
meeting in the back room of various bars, and there probably
were no more, at any given time, than twenty of us. I was given a bit
of weapons training and very basic explosives training, well, a fair
bit of weapons training, mostly on pistols, so it was quite interesting.
I actually think that just before I got arrested they were setting in
train a whole programme of training, but I missed that
.
I remember saying to the guy who was in charge of our wee
group, ‘I won’t do armed robberies’, and he says, ‘You’ll do what
you’re told’, but he never ever asked me to do an armed robbery;
whether he ever asked others to do armed robberies I don’t know,
because you wouldn’t have been told; it was a need-
to-
know basis. I
think that some groups ran better than others, and some groups had
a greater discipline than others, but essentially you were expected
to do exactly what you were told, but in the main there would have
been enough cognisance by those in authority that … said, ‘Well,
horses for courses’, you know. On a day-
today basis it was all a bit
confusing in some respects. I remember going through the Ulster
Workers’ Council strike, and never being asked to do anything, and
I wondered, ‘What’s happening here?’ You could have been called
upon to move weapons, and I was a few times. You could have been
called to a meeting … at that time, it seemed to me there were
eighty UVF people to about eight thousand UDA in East Belfast;
there was always tension between them, and you could have been
called together to be given information about UDA threats. I
remember one time being called to a meeting where everybody was
told to be very cautious, because they believed that we were about to
be attacked. There were quite a number of UVF homes attacked that
night in the Woodstock Road area, so the UVF must have had intelligence
on the UDA. I lived in the Woodstock area and my house
was one of the very few UVF houses that wasn’t actually attacked,
which probably meant they didn’t know I lived there. But day-to-day
stuff depended on what was going on, but in the main, you’d
have been called on expressly for specific reasons, and you could
have been doing nothing for long enough. That didn’t mean to say
nobody else was doing anything. And then all of a sudden somebody
could get in touch with you and say, ‘Be here at such and such a
time’, or whatever, and that’s the way it worked. It wasn’t a case that
you had a day-
today routine or a day-
today job. You were called
on when required. Although, mind you, I think the issue of intelligence
was something that you were always expected to be dealing
with always … anything that was strange or anything that you
stumbled across, you would have been expected to let somebody
know right away. That would have been, I think, the only day-to-day
thing that you would have been expected to be involved in
.
…
once I crossed the Rubicon my job was to do something about
it; whether I was effective or not, that is for others to judge, but I
certainly wanted to be, and I was committed to it, there was no
going back. There was never a moment when I said, ‘Have I done
the right thing here?’ That never happened … My sense would have
been that I had no regrets other than probably not being as effective
as they needed me to be, or felt they needed me to be … It was a
hamster wheel to hell, and, you could argue, well out of control.
Once you’re on that hamster wheel, not only does there seem even
with hindsight no way off, [but] I didn’t want to get off. I wanted to
get on with it, and we were embroiled in a battle and the battle was
getting ever bigger and ever more brutal, ever more deadly. I didn’t
imagine that it could run for thirty years but, having said that, I
don’t know that anybody ever knew how it was going to all end. We
were just locked into it and that was why I call it the hamster wheel
to hell; it just goes on and on and on. I don’t know that anybody in
1972 was thinking that this was sustainable for a very long time. But
if you think back there was eventually an IRA ceasefire in 1974;
there were negotiations between [the] government and the IRA
around that time, and the UVF knew it and … went on a substantial
bombing campaign to do one of two things, either stop the
discussions between the government and the IRA or be part of them,
so that rather indicates that there were people thinking, ‘When is
this going to end?’ But it took a long, long time
.
My view at the time [of the Sunningdale Agreement and the
UWC strike] was that the Unionist community were being asked to
sign up to something that was unfinished business, that had no
bottom line. I don’t think the theory of power-sharing was totally
alien to all Unionists, but the … Council of Ireland was, especially
when it was ill defined, in fact not defined at all and not a settled
issue. The Unionist community had the right to feel that the world
and its dog had gone over their head, and even though in the pressure
cooker of Sunningdale, the Unionist political leadership seemed to
sign up to it; they were always on a hiding to nothing on the basis
that there was unfinished business. The ill-defined nature of the
Council of Ireland was the death knell for the Agreement. The
Unionist community are an extremely literal people, how do you get
a literal people to sign up to things that have no basic parameters, or
when the parameters weren’t there?
I absolutely supported the anti-Sunningdale campaign and so did
most Unionists … I lived in very Protestant working-class East
Belfast, and I didn’t see the intimidation that is supposed to have
taken place; it didn’t happen where I lived. People didn’t go to work
because they didn’t think that they should go to work because …
the withdrawal of their labour was as good an argument as any to
say to the government, ‘Catch yourselves on.’ But the weird bit of
this is that the UVF never used me during that period. I can
remember that quite a number of fellas who were UVF with me
weren’t used either, so if there had been a great campaign of paramilitary
muscle-flexing [during the UWC strike], I think I would
have been involved in it, but that wasn’t the case. I don’t think that
the UVF became expressly active, [although] in some areas there
may have been more activity than others, but where I was – and I
don’t know what was in their mind – it was a period of immense
inactivity. I wasn’t asked to man barricades; I wasn’t asked to do
anything. There were UDA people on the barricades, and I don’t
remember seeing UVF people there. I never ever asked the leadership
whether this was a deliberate decision, because I was arrested
relatively soon afterwards and I never got the chance … but talking
to other UVF people I discovered that I wasn’t the only one, quite a
number weren’t used at all
.
The Dublin and Monaghan bombs were harrowing, shocking, but
[I had] no understanding that it was the work of the UVF, I didn’t
know it was the UVF. No one was hinting to me, even within UVF
circles, that it was the UVF. The UDA always seemed to silently take
credit or should I say responsibility, depending on what side of the
argument you’re looking at. It was only later in life that I became
aware that it was expressly the UVF, although, mind you, if you
were talking about explosives, the UVF were always more proficient
and more likely to use explosives than the UDA, massively more so.
So all the logic would have said most likely it was the UVF, but the
UVF didn’t claim it, and there wasn’t a whole bucketload of UVF
activity suggesting that it was them
.
I think I probably would have been supportive of those bombings,
not so much because of the massive loss of innocent life – that’s
certainly not what I mean – but in terms of returning the serve, in
terms of saying, ‘Here, do you know what it’s like?’ and in the
inimitable words of one great Nationalist leader, ‘One bomb in
London is worth a hundred in Belfast’ – well, maybe that applies to
Dublin as well. I don’t doubt there was massive support for it in the
Unionist community, massive support. Again not because of the
individual loss of life and the horror and tragedy that goes along
with all of that, no matter who you are. But there was a sense that
yes, somebody was hitting back: ‘Now you know how we feel.’ [It was]
really simplistic and really brutal, but I have to answer the question
honestly; you’re asking me it, and I’m answering it: yes, I would
have thought that massive numbers in my community felt that it
was dead on. I’ve seen myself in circumstances where the police
messages were on [the radio] in a pub and a bomb goes off, and I
knew where the target was, and once the police message declared
that the target was clearly a Nationalist target, the bar cheered;
people who were never going to go out and do anything themselves,
maybe voted DUP, UUP, maybe went to church on a Sunday, I don’t
know, but they cheered, and little did they know that some of the
people who’d been responsible for the [radio reports] were standing
in the boozers along with them. You’ve got to remember, there’ll be
arguments that communities refuse to have with themselves, that
what you do may well be perceived to be wrong, but your simplistic
response to that is: ‘Aye, but look at what they’re doing to us’, and
that was very much the case, and that the Dublin–Monaghan
bombs were very much about saying, ‘Well, now they know how we
feel; this isn’t a one-way street, you know.’ What is it they say in a
divided society: ‘Each action has an equal and opposite reaction’?
On the allegation of collusion [with the British in the Dublin and
Monaghan bombs], there comes a point when the concept insults
me, insomuch as that a Provo could lie in bed and with a crystal
ball … could pick their targets but a Prod could only do the same
if there was an SAS man driving the car. It is sheer unadulterated
nonsense. I don’t dispute that there were probably kindred spirits in
the security services, being from the same community, and there
being individualistic degrees of collusion, but I am not aware, and
I genuinely am shocked at the notion that at that time there was a
clear and structured process of collusion. It wasn’t the fucking case.
I do get insulted by it. One of the reasons why the Loyalists have
probably not been perceived as [being as] effective as the Republicans
was dead simple: they were too tolerant of the forces of law and
order. If the Loyalists wanted to be equal to the Republicans they
should have shot peelers dead; they should have put police families
out of their communities and shut down the avenue of intelligence
that saw hundreds of Loyalists go to jail. The Royal Ulster Constabu
lary arrested me on possession of explosives; now why did they do
that if we lived in a process of collusion? When I went into jail there
were 240 UVF men in three compounds, packed in like sardines,
and the UVF were a relatively small organisation in comparison to
some of the others, but they made up a hell of a percentage of that
jail. Where’s collusion there? Is this a joke or what? And if there was
all this massive collusion, why weren’t IRA men in greater numbers
taken out by the roots? Like there’s a whole bucketload of questions
that Republicans can’t answer … I don’t think there’s any doubt
that Loyalists were capable; all the evidence was that they’d already
detonated substantial numbers of bombs in Northern Ireland, so all
they had to do was work out how you put one into a car and how
you take it a hundred miles. If you can take it ten miles you can
take it a hundred miles. To those who understand, no explanation is
necessary; to those who cannot understand, no explanation is possible.
If people choose to believe that then they’re living in cloud
cuckoo land, and they also underestimate … their enemy, massively
underestimate their enemy
.