the political situation now descending into anarchy by late 1969, Mitchell quickly drifted into the ranks of TARA, a religious fundamentalist group led by the aggressive homosexual and paedophile William McGrath.
Hence, when the Troubles finally did escalate into open-street warfare I was a natural candidate for paramilitarism, and quickly joined TARA [an Orange Order based group] and, later, the Ulster Volunteer Force. It is interesting to note that the TARA leadership opened and closed their meetings with prayer and had other religious trappings, and that most of them claimed to be evangelical Christians. Another interesting point – they were mainly from the middle-class strata of society, or, at least, from the upper working class. ‘Could these cultured and respectable folk be wrong?’ I wondered. I always answered in the negative. ‘No, of course not. They were only following our traditional Protestant way of resisting the enemy’. My brief experience of TARA reinforced my belief in the legitimate right of Protestants to use violence.41
As TARA became more of a ‘talking shop’, than a conservative armed group, Mitchell sought refuge alongside like-minded individuals, many of whom had decided to leave and join the ranks of the Shankill UVF.
The tragic irony of UVF violence was that it actually prompted republicans to rejuvenate the IRA to defend the Catholic community against militant loyalist attacks. One of the IRA’s new recruits was Tommy Gorman, who would later rise to prominence in its ranks. He recalled how intercommunal rioting intensified in August 1969, and prompted the return of the IRA, which:
… was in a pretty bad state. I think in Divis Street that night [in 1969] there were a couple of short arms and a sub-machine gun. But … at that time it was moribund. And it was in the influx of new recruits and all these older people who had been retired and had gone out back to their farms or something and had suddenly reappeared again and gave us some sort of structure.42
There has been some dispute amongst republicans, academics and journalists over the exact size of the IRA in the 1960s. Estimates vary from 30–120 members in Belfast.43 In early April 1966, Scotland Yard intelligence reports placed the numbers at 1,000, which would explain why the RUC’s Crime Special Branch believed they were facing a concerted subversive campaign. In reality, the IRA only had 1,039 members in the Republic, 251 of whom were Border Campaign veterans. Around 300 members were concentrated in Dublin.44
***
More than anything else, UVF activity between 1966 and 1969 fed intercommunal fears and whipped up emotional reactions from hardline republicans and their supporters. The IRA may have remained somewhat inert in this period, but unionists believed that it had been plotting subversion and the appearance of the NICRA marches served to confirm as much in the minds of hardline unionists at the time.
Roy Garland was one of those who believed the dire warnings. Garland was second-in-command of TARA at the time. ‘I mean, you didn’t know what to make of some of this stuff,’ he said. ‘There was talk of a coming doomsday situation and “You’re going to have to defend Ulster.” And the politicians, the sort of moderate accommodating politicians, were prepared to “sell out” so we would have to defend Ulster.’ Garland, like Mitchell, believed that the ‘doomsday situation’ was just around the corner. Paisley’s predictions were coming true. ‘I went to Paisley’s church and so on – but I didn’t find him inspiring,’ said Garland. ‘The whole leadership of TARA though did. But … to me he wasn’t an inspiring person. He didn’t inflame me with zeal or anything. But it was just the idea.’ The idea, as Garland, put it, was like an unquenchable thirst, which the fall of O’Neill in April 1969 did little to satisfy.
By the summer of 1969 violence became more organised and widespread. ‘James Chichester-Clark at one stage said it was an insurrection, referring to republicans on the Falls Road, and others talked in that sort of terminology, and if they were saying it, [we said] “look, well, obviously it’s true”.’ For Garland and other Protestant extremists, the UVF and TARA were hardline groupings with only one objective – defending their beloved Ulster from all enemies, from wherever they came. ‘That was centrally important from where I was coming from. Coming from the sort of religious background ... that can’t be underestimated. There were doubts in your mind about things.’ Garland believed that his faith was being ‘sold out’.45 Recognising an easy way to get hold of arms, the UVF under Samuel ‘Bo’ McClelland, began to infiltrate TARA. ‘When TARA came along,’ reported Irish Times journalist David McKittrick, ‘these men eagerly seized the opportunity for organised action again, but it was not long before they became restive. The main reasons for this disquiet were the religious fanaticism of the TARA leadership and the organisation’s reluctance to engage in “procurement activities” – a common euphemism for robberies.’46
In McClelland and the UVF, Billy Mitchell saw great promise. When he was given the opportunity, Mitchell jumped ship and, along with other UVF men, took ‘much of the equipment with them’, later to be interpreted by informed observers as the UVF’s strategy all along.47 Roy Garland admitted that the real reason why McClelland ordered his men to leave TARA was triggered ‘when evidence was received … of McGrath’s homosexual abuse of young men, along with rumours of his reliability’.48 It has been said that McClelland was so infuriated by McGrath’s transgressions that he burnt the TARA membership book, which included the names of many of his own men.49 Among this cadre of UVF men, what McKittrick called the ‘tougher and brighter element in the seceding group’, was Mitchell. The UVF would allow him to fulfil his deep-seated desire to fight by force of arms for God and Ulster.
3
LIQUIDATING THE ENEMY
‘WE ARE LOYALISTS, WE ARE QUEEN’S MEN. Our enemies are the forces of Romanism and Communism, which must be destroyed.’
UVF Recruiting Circular (1971)1
Belfast, the capital city of Northern Ireland, grew from a small market town in the seventeenth century to become one of the major hubs for trade and industry in the British Empire by the late nineteenth century. One hundred years later its twin staple industries of shipbuilding and textile manufacturing had been joined by another, aeronautical engineering, which employed several thousand people, primarily in the east of the city. The large yellow cranes of Samson and Goliath at Harland and Wolff Shipyard, symbols of Belfast’s industrial heritage, towered high above the skyline, but were becoming increasingly exposed to the push and pull of global capitalism, now in the process of transferring its centre of gravity from North America and Western Europe to markets in the Far East. Belfast relied disproportionately on a sizeable subvention from the British taxpayer to keep its heavy industries afloat, its public services running efficiently and its social security and welfare payments pouring in amidst this transformation in its economic fortunes. At the dawn of the seventh decade of the twentieth century, this once dominant industrial city was beginning to decline.
Although Belfast had a reasonably healthy economic base when the troubles broke out in the late 1960s, it was a system which overlay a sectarian distribution of jobs. The workforce in the staple industries was divided between the majority Protestant and the minority Catholic communities. Up until 1972, such division was not always reflected in political terms, along unionist–nationalist lines on the shop floor. Sectarianism had waxed and waned since the formation of the local state in the early 1920s. By the late 1950s and early 1960s most working-class people were more interested in earning a crust and providing for their families than they were in the constitutional question. As a direct consequence, a third political labour tradition began to flourish, going on to command 100,000 votes in both the 1964 and 1970 Westminster elections.2
Higher rates of employment and the availability of disposable income may have ensured the dampening of sectarian tensions, but it wasn’t the only reason. Paddy Devlin, a Northern Ireland Labour Party (NILP) politician who represented the Falls constituency
