Voices from the Grave: Two Men's War in Ireland (56 page)

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.

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 stalked 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.
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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.

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,
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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.
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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.
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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.