to falsified overtime claims for each month between 27 October 1963 and 4 November 1964 – were put to the court.28 The Post Office Investigating Officer put the allegation to Spence, who claimed that, ‘Any overtime that I have claimed on the forms P1. 21B has been performed, and if you think otherwise you will have to prove it.’29 When questioned under caution, Spence told the investigating officer Detective Constable Leonard V. McConaghy at Queen Street RUC Station that he had ‘nothing to say to all the charges at this particular time’.30 He had been released on bail, but was later recalled and convicted of theft.
As Spence and the other UVF men began their lengthy prison sentences in Crumlin Road prison, the police released a statement to reassure the wider community that the threat of IRA violence had vastly diminished. The Easter Rising jubilee commemorations, which the IRA hoped would stimulate recruiting and draw more youths into the ranks, ‘fell far short of expectations’ an RUC spokesmen told the Belfast Telegraph. ‘In the few months before the celebrations there was a slight rise in recruiting, but interest since has waned. It is known that there is a swing towards a much more cultural approach, and that the militants are having a poor show.’31 Militant Protestants, like Spence, were now being exposed as having manufactured enemies out of the unfounded paranoia that had temporarily gripped the darker recesses of the Ulster Protestant psyche.
That an armed republican campaign had not materialised did not deter UVF supporters from believing that the imprisoned men had been right to take the actions they had taken. As he languished in his Victorian-era prison cell, one UVF member composed a poem called ‘The Man in the Soft Black Hat’ to celebrate the murder of Peter Ward:
The Peelers came and the ambulance too and took the three men away, ‘Three taigs they were’ said ould Liza Jane, ‘and one of them’s dead they say.’ ‘I don’t know what they were doing up here, especially the Shankill Road,’ ‘Hell slap it into them,’ big Joe declared, ‘You’d think they wouldn’t have knowed.’32
Such sentiment played straight into the hands of Protestant extremist opinion on the Shankill, and in other places throughout Northern Ireland. If the IRA threat did not exist, they would continue to manufacture it.
***
The incarceration of the UVF’s ‘leading lights’ in 1966 may have decapitated the organisation, but the genie of violent sectarianism was now well and truly out of the bottle. The liberal unionist editor of the Belfast Telegraph, Jack Sayers, a close ally of Prime Minister Terence O’Neill, warned of the growing ‘dangers of Paisleyism’, which he found ‘are not only that it provokes communal strife, but that the belief in its leader’s “fundamentalism”, in politics as well as religion, colours as much as half of the working class backbone of unionism’.33 For his part, Paisley refused to acknowledge the consequences of his rampantly sectarian sermons and speeches, with Spence’s co-accused Hugh McClean, admitting under interrogation that he was ‘terribly sorry I ever heard of that man Paisley or decided to follow him’.34
Unlike Doherty, Billy Mitchell stayed the course with Paisleyism. If the ‘bishop’ warned of dangerous times ahead, then that was something the Protestant people should take as gospel. Privately, though, he began to harbour some doubts. ‘Despite all the rhetoric I never consciously felt that there was going to be this all-out war where loyalists and republicans would be in the field fighting,’ he later said. ‘We always assumed that if there was [going to be] anything like that … it would be the B-Specials and the police [who] would have dealt with it … But, at that time, Paisley was whipping us up into believing it.’
For Mitchell, dangers did lie ahead, but he wasn’t quite sure what they were. ‘The object of our wrath was more O’Neill and liberal unionism than it was the republicans, because, being honest with you, we wouldn’t have known an IRA man from a man on the moon,’ Mitchell said. ‘Most of the big rallies we attended, all the rhetoric of Paisley at that time – ok the IRA came into it – but the main object of his attention was O’Neill and liberal unionists, ecumenical clergy … So, I never consciously felt to myself that we would be lining up with guns to go and fight the IRA. The object seemed to bring O’Neill down, and to establish a strong government that would deal with any threat.’35
The imprisonment of leading UVF men did little to take the wind out of the sails of the challenge now underway against O’Neill, nor did it stop the growth of the organisation. In late 1966, the UVF had ‘a nucleus of about thirty men on the Shankill Road’, though the more rural parts of the organisation became moribund.36
O’Neill was facing a conflict on two fronts. From the Protestant grassroots who were angered by the Stormont government’s refusal to ban Easter Rising parades, and by Catholics who remained unconvinced at the pace of reform O’Neill had put in motion. It was the latter who took to the streets, first, by forming the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA) in January 1967. This protest movement had its roots in the agitation of a husband and wife team, Con and Patricia McCloskey, from Dungannon who had been highlighting discriminatory policies by the local unionist-dominated council since 1963. The Campaign for Social Justice gained considerable support amongst the backbenchers of the British Labour Party and soon a Campaign for Democracy in Ulster was formed which gave political backing to NICRA. On 5 October 1968, a civil rights march was met by heavy-handedness from the RUC and B-Specials in Londonderry. Northern Ireland was moving closer to the precipice of major civil unrest.
As a means of upping the ante, the UVF and its allies in the UPV stood-to again, deciding to bomb a number of key installations around the province. Two explosions on 30 March and 21 April 1969 destroyed water and electricity sub-stations in Castlereagh, Belfast, and at the Silent Valley reservoir in the Mourne Mountains, County Down. The bomb attacks were designed to exaggerate the threat posed by the IRA and, hopefully, to bring down O’Neill.37 In response, O’Neill mobilised the B-Specials to protect key installations. By then it was too late. O’Neill looked weak. The UVF–UPV plot worked, with even O’Neill coming to believe that the UVF had ‘literally bombed me out of office’.38 He resigned as Prime Minister on 28 April.
UVF subversion was not without its dangers. One volunteer, Thomas McDowell, was found badly burned on 19 October, having been electrocuted by 5,600 volts as he attempted to fit a bomb to a hydroelectric power station near Ballyshannon in County Donegal. McDowell had been pulverised by the extremity of the electric charges surging through his body; succumbing to his wounds in hospital two days later. A committed Paisleyite, McDowell was a close associate of Billy Mitchell. Mitchell later explained his thinking at this time:
In the years leading up to the outbreak of civil unrest, which erupted in August 1969, I had come to believe that the Ulster Protestant had a traditional and unalienable right to resist ‘by any means under God’ the supposed enemies of our Ulster heritage and distinctive protestant way of life; and I felt that my views on this were adequately confirmed by the public and private pronouncements of many ‘pillars of society’ and by ‘men of the cloth’. The much-loved phrase – ‘by all means under God’ – was simply a synonym for ‘by force of arms’ but with the added thought that God himself would approve of such action. In the early days of the troubles, and for several years before, threats of armed resistance together with a ‘holy war’ philosophy was put across in religious phraseology, in traditional slogans linked to the old 1912-UVF, and in sermons based on the warfare of the Old Testament. [Sermons which could be taken literally or figuratively – whichever way you wanted to take them].39
For Mitchell, the piety of religious fundamentalism fused with his new-found militant mindset:
It was this carefully insinuated idea that the Ulster Protestant was a modern-day Israelite and the Irish Roman Catholic was a modern-day Philistine that gave me, and many more like me, the firm conviction that force of arms was legitimate in the struggle for Ulster’s continued existence as a Protestant state for a Protestant people. The only real difference between the battle plans and weaponry of the Old
