Voices from the Grave: Two Men's War in Ireland (49 page)

When Gusty Spence was convicted and sentenced for the Malvern Street murder, legend has it that he complained bitterly, ‘So this is what you get for being a Protestant!’ It was a refrain that would be repeated by hundreds of Loyalists after him and it reflected an anger that far from Loyalists being jailed for taking up arms to defend a common cause, the Unionist establishment – RUC, polit-icians and judicial system – should instead praise them. David Ervine was no different.

The British government did not start treating Northern Ireland’s Loyalist paramilitaries in the same way as the Provisional IRA, as terrorist threats whose members needed to be removed from the streets, until February 1973, when the first two Loyalists, both leaders in their way, were interned and sent to Long Kesh. Loyalist violence had really escalated in the wake of the internment swoop aimed at the IRA in August 1971, not only because, far from dealing the IRA a fatal blow, it had boosted Republican violence and greatly increased Nationalist alienation. The moderate SDLP had walked out of the Stormont parliament a month before over some controversial killings carried out by the British Army and after internment it spearheaded an angry campaign to boycott Northern Ireland’s institutions and to withhold public rent and rate payments to the state. The one-sided nature of the operation, which ignored Loyalists, fuelled Nationalist anger. The UVF was already there, albeit hidden inside the folds of Tara, and in September that year the various Protestant vigilante groups set up in Loyalist districts in and around Belfast during the year came together to form the Ulster Defence Association (UDA), which acted partly as a mass protest movement and partly as a deadly paramilitary force. By February 1973, well over a hundred and twenty people had been killed by either the UVF or the UDA. By 1973, Edward Heath’s government in London was beginning to seek a political exit from the morass of Irish politics and had turned its mind to constructing a widely based deal around the concept of power-sharing between Unionists and Nationalists, and some form of relationship with Dublin, the so-called ‘Irish dimension’. Exploratory meetings had been held in late 1972 but the SDLP, the major Nationalist party, was playing hard to get, raising demands that internment be ended.
The decision to intern Loyalists was thus seen as a sop to Nationalists and a one-day protest strike, a precursor of the UWC strike a year later, was called by hardline Unionists and led to confrontations between Loyalists and the British Army, during which one UVF member and one UDA member were shot dead.
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The first two Loyalists interned also came, one each, from the UVF and the UDA. The UDA internee was Edward ‘Ned’ McCreery who led a gang in East Belfast notorious for the viciousness of its killings. One of its victims was kidnapped, stripped, hung by his heels and repeatedly stabbed and beaten before being shot dead. Another had the shape of a cross and the letters ‘IRA’ branded on his back.
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A grenade attack on 1 February 1973 by members of McCreery’s gang on a bus carrying Catholic workers to a building site in East Belfast was the trigger for his internment. The UVF leader chosen for detention was not really a UVF member at all, but the founder of a small paramilitary group that aligned itself, to the point of virtual absorption, with the UVF. John McKeague founded the Red Hand Commando in 1972, and had a storied track record in the world of Protestant politics. Once a close associate of the Reverend Ian Paisley, he had been charged but acquitted of involvement in the 1969 bombings that ended Terence O’Neill’s political career. He went on to found the Shankill Defence Association, which played a major role in the violence of August 1969 in West and North Belfast, then broke with Paisley, ostensibly over money but also because rumours about McKeague’s sexuality – he was reputedly a paedophile – had become rampant amongst Loyalists.
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The decision to intern Loyalist paramilitaries, along with the burgeoning moves by the Heath government towards what became the Sunningdale Agreement, acted as a stimulus both to para military recruitment and their violence. By the middle of 1974 the UVF and the UDA, in their different and often conflicting ways, had become major actors in the story, serious obstacles in the way of British policy. They had, for instance, played an important role
in the UWC strike that brought Heath’s efforts to nought in 1974, although by David Ervine’s account it seemed the UDA, rather than the UVF, was more active, more ready to expose its members at street barricades and the like. By the time David Ervine was caught with a bomb in the boot of his car, the memory of that victory was beginning to fade and with it the central place the Loyalist paramilitaries had created for themselves in the Unionist political firmament. And by then the British, led now by Labour’s Harold Wilson, were frying different fish. A month after Ervine’s arrest the first moves were made towards a truce between the British and the IRA and while Loyalists assumed the worst, that the British would sell them down the river, they were mistaken. None the less, the consequences of the IRA’s lengthy ceasefire would be serious for the UVF. The change in British security strategy, fashioned during the ceasefire and introduced towards the end of 1975, criminalised Loyalists as much as it did Republicans and soon RUC holding centres such as Castlereagh in East Belfast were churning out UVF men whose admissions during interrogations would earn them convictions and often lengthy jail terms in the juryless Diplock courts.

The policy of ‘criminalisation’ officially came into effect on 1 March 1976 when special-category status for all paramilitary prisoners was scrapped. The accompanying emphasis on confession-based convictions was soon felt by the UVF. Less than a year after Ervine had been removed from the scene, in October 1975, the bulk of the UVF in South-East Antrim – based principally around the towns of Carrickfergus and Larne – was arrested and charged with a series of murders, attempted murders, bombings and robberies. In February 1977, after a trial that lasted seventy-six days and at the time was the most expensive in Northern Ireland’s legal history, twenty-seven South-East Antrim UVF men were convicted, twenty-one on the basis of verbal or written statements they had made to detectives in Castlereagh. Among the murders they were convicted of were those of two UDA members, shot and buried in a secret grave in the spring of 1975 during vicious feuding between the two
groups. When the new policy picked up momentum, Long Kesh began filling up with UVF prisoners.

One of those imprisoned was thirty-five-year-old Billy Mitchell, the former Paisleyite turned UVF leader. Many early UVF figures had imagined the Troubles would be sharp but short; by mid-1973 it was clear that they could last a lot longer. Against a background of growing paramilitary impatience with Unionism’s political leaders, Mitchell persuaded the UVF to call a ceasefire, which began in mid-November 1973, in an effort to prompt a Republican response. The ceasefire was enforced with impressive discipline and the UVF did not kill anyone for over five months, until the end of February 1974. During the cessation, Mitchell also met members of the Official IRA, who had been on a ceasefire against the British since 1972, and more controversially with leading Provisional IRA members, Daithi O Connail and IRA Quarter Master General Brian Keenan, for exploratory peace talks. The dialogue stumbled on the predictable issue of Northern Ireland’s constitutional status and the violence resumed. Even so, the British took heart from these developments and in April 1974, just as the UWC strike was building, the Labour Northern Ireland Secretary Merlyn Rees announced that the ban on the UVF would be lifted, a move that reflected British hope that this might encourage the recent signs of moderation.
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A similar ban on Sinn Fein was also ended for the same reasons.

Mitchell’s move was supported by Gusty Spence from his compound
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in Long Kesh. By that stage Spence had almost completed his remarkable journey away from violence and hardline, inflexible Loyalism but the first sight of Spence in Belfast since his arrest in 1966 was of the old, diehard Spence. In July 1972, he was granted forty-eight hours’ compassionate parole to attend his daughter’s wedding but as he was being driven back to the jail his car was blocked and Spence was ‘kidnapped’ by fellow UVF members. He spent the next four months or so of this contrived freedom
helping to reorganise and restructure the UVF; he also designed a uniform for the organisation, the main feature of which was the black leather jacket that became the UVF’s daunting hallmark. A British television interview with Spence made during his spell of liberty featured a taciturn, uncompromising figure whose answers came in unsmiling monosyllables. He was re-arrested in November 1972 but by the spring of 1974, some eighteen months later, he had performed a political U-turn, now advocating a peaceful, negotiated settlement to the Troubles. Before long he would also be quietly preaching the merits of power-sharing with Nationalists, a far cry from his adamant opposition to Terence O’Neill’s mild reformism.
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Spence also encouraged the UVF to create a political party, the Volunteer Political Party (VPP) which had a brief if unsuccessful existence contesting for the votes of Shankill Road Loyalists. Like Billy Mitchell, Gusty Spence opened dialogue with Republicans, reaching out to IRA prisoners of both Official and Provisional stripes, helping to set up a Camp Council to negotiate issues of common concern with the prison governor, on which sat the Commanders of UDA, UVF, Official IRA and Provisional IRA inmates. In these developments, along with an influx of hardline prisoners to the jail, can be found both the source of Gusty Spence’s eventual estrangement from the mainstream UVF outside the jail as well as the influences that shaped David Ervine’s later political odyssey in the Progressive Unionist Party, the VPP’s successor.

The internment of Loyalists and a swelling conviction rate meant that by late 1973 the UVF’s prisoners had to be moved from Crumlin Road jail in Belfast to Long Kesh. Spence was one of the first to be transferred. He was the natural choice for Commander of UVF prisoners and introduced a regime strongly influenced by his years in the Royal Ulster Rifles, as he told BBC journalist Peter Taylor many years later: ‘The compounds were run on British Army lines with made-up beds, highly polished boots, pressed uniforms, etc. There was a daily regime. Reveille was at eight o’clock in the morning, followed by showers, breakfast, and then a parade. Then the day was laid out.’
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By November 1974, when David Ervine was
driven through the gates of Long Kesh, Gerry Adams, Ivor Bell and Brendan Hughes were beginning their battle with the IRA’s Camp Commander, David Morley, another British Army veteran whose idea of prison discipline, while more eccentric than Spence’s, was similarly derived from his days as a squaddie. This was the Long Kesh that would be Ervine’s home for the next six years, first as a remand prisoner then as a sentenced man.