to have been able to revisit other people’s memories of them and their interactions with me many years ago. Thanks also to Johnny Adair, Liz Bingham, Robert Niblock and Clifford Peeples, as well as a range of interviewees – some are named and others are not – who have taken the time to talk to me over very many years.
Others who have helped enormously include Stephen Bloomer, a close friend and confidant, Dr Sean Brennan, Dr Paddy Hoey, Dr Martin McCleery and Dr Connal Parr. Without their support, this project would have floundered in its later stages. Prof. Arthur Aughey, Prof. Lord Bew, Joe Bowers, Glenn Bradley, Ian Cobain, Prof. Richard English, Harry Donaghy, Nigel Gardiner, John Greer, Phil Hamilton, Prof. Tom Hennessey, Hugh Jordan, Joe Law (sadly missed by his friends and comrades), Prof. Jim McAuley, Lyra McKee, Brendan Mackin, Les Mitchell, Dr Gareth Mulvenna, Dr Tony Novosel (and his late wife, Alice, also sadly missed by us all), Niall O’Murchu, Prof. Henry Patterson, Derek Poole, Dr Richard Reed, Dr Andrew Sanders, Prof. Jon Tonge, Iain Turner, Prof. Graham Walker and Ian S. Wood all helped to clarify my thinking on a range of matters. As ever, Malachi O’Doherty has been an outstanding source of ideas and inspiration.
I must also thank my colleagues at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst for supporting my continuing research on Northern Ireland. Tim Bean, Dr Christopher Duffy, Dr Ed Flint, Lieutenant Colonel (Ret’d) Peter McCutcheon MBE, Sean McKnight, Dr Martin Smith, Simon Taylor and Alan Ward were always on hand, while Colonel (Ret’d) David Benest OBE has challenged my thinking on the military and strategic dimensions of the ‘troubles’.
Thanks also to the hard work of the team at Merrion Press. My publisher Conor Graham has been astounding in his support of this project and my editor Fiona Dunne has kept me right when I began to veer off the beaten track. It was Lisa Hyde who first encouraged me to submit the proposal to Merrion and I want to thank her for doing so. The advice given by John Greer at Reavey & Company in Belfast has helped put my mind at ease on some of the more challenging legal aspects of a book like this.
I feel it is important at this stage to state that I am solely responsible for the analysis presented in this book.
In closing, I would like to put on record the enormous support from my family over the years – my mother and father, Barbara and Jim; my brother and sister, Ryan and Stephanie; and the wider Edwards and Graham clans – who all helped sustain me throughout some very challenging times indeed. This book would just not be possible without their forbearance. I am also indebted to the love and direction provided by my late grandparents, May and Jackie Graham, who kept us all safe during the troubles. This book is dedicated to their memory. As my grandfather was fond of telling me, ‘Always be a good listener.’ I hope this is reflected in the book you now hold in your hands.
FOREWORD
BY MARTIN DILLON
Sometimes when I begin reading a book, I sense that I was wise to have opened it. This was the case with UVF: Behind the Mask by Aaron Edwards. From the first chapter I was persuaded that he has a genuine grasp of a very complex topic at the heart of the ‘troubles’, namely the significant political and violent roles of the highly secretive Ulster Volunteer Force.
With an eye for detail and an intimate knowledge of political nuances at work in Northern Ireland’s tribal environment, he succeeds in unpacking the genesis of the UVF. He takes his reader on a journey to a genuine understanding of an organisation that created an aura of mystery while its members engaged in organised crime and terror, often displaying a propensity for the most grotesque violence, especially in the multiple killings by the Shankill Butchers. Aaron Edwards weaves his personal knowledge and experiences of having grown up in Belfast into his explanations about the origins of the separateness of the two communities and the violence they inflicted on each other.
Like any good historian, he strips his findings back to basics for the reader, making expert use of the eyes and memories of witnesses. He offers a fine analysis of the inherited prejudices, fears and dreams of his subjects. He skilfully avoids the trap of succumbing to oral history distortions of the past. Instead, he confronts head-on the UVF’s adoration of the cult of the gunman, its glorification of violence, and its tendency to manufacture history while often ignoring facts.
Always remaining true to the data and to his sources, Aaron Edwards questions the truthfulness of sources, while maintaining his focus on the broader context and parameters of the conflict and its impact on society as a whole. His research skills are impressive in his outlines of the re-emergence of the UVF against the fast-evolving landscape of protest, tribalism, sectarianism, paranoia and fear in 1960s Northern Ireland. He cleverly navigates a path through the violence emanating from both communities, displaying an intimate knowledge of the shorthand for the political machinations of all the players. He also explains the ways the UVF often denied its role in terror and how it came to realise that making peace came with a cost to its unity and existence.
Great historians are good storytellers and Aaron Edwards belongs in this class. His account of the modern UVF’s history is told without embellishment. Facts are carefully woven into the troubles’ historical tapestry. He is aware that UVF supporters will not see the UVF as he does. For them, it will always be the last line of defence in a loyalist community that continues to embrace a siege mentality on an island with unresolved divisions and a violent past. UVF: Behind The Mask is an excellent addition to the written history of the troubles.
Martin Dillon,
California, May 2017
PREFACE
For much of the afternoon of Tuesday, 11 September 2001, I was engrossed in conversation with veteran members of the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), an illegal Northern Ireland-based terrorist group responsible for hundreds of deaths and thousands of injuries during the ‘troubles’. We were meeting in a neatly refurbished working man’s social club, which served as the powerbase of the organisation’s East Antrim Battalion, situated in Monkstown, a working-class estate on the outskirts of North Belfast. As we sat discussing the finer points of English premiership football and horse racing, we were suddenly interrupted by news from one of the bar stewards that two planes had crashed into the World Trade Center in New York. I vividly remember standing transfixed as the images were beamed onto the club’s huge projection screen. The irony was not lost on me as I watched these events unfold on the other side of the Atlantic. Mass-casualty terrorism was unleashing its devastating killing potential across the most iconic skyline in the world while I sat quietly and comfortably opposite men who had probably been responsible for sustaining one of the longest-running campaigns of terror in British history.
The new UVF was reconstituted in 1965 as a preemptive defence mechanism against a perceived Irish Republican Army (IRA) threat, though its main purpose was as an instrument to put pressure on the ruling Unionist Party that was seen as weak on Irish republicanism and far too liberal in its views on northern Catholics and the Republic of Ireland. In a world of half-truths and paranoia, the reality was somewhat different, of course. The IRA would remain moribund until the outbreak of serious intercommunal violence between Protestants and Catholics in August 1969. While Al-Qaeda could now claim to have killed more innocent people in one day than any other terrorist organisation in history, the UVF could certainly claim the dubious title of being one of the world’s oldest and most resilient terrorist groups, which, on 11 September 2001, was still very much in existence.
The UVF has cast a long, dark shadow over life in Northern Ireland. During the troubles it killed 564 people, mostly Catholic civilians, and injured thousands more Protestants and Catholics between its first killing in 1966 and its most recent in 2010. Its violence – like that perpetrated by the IRA and its nearest rivals in the loyalist Ulster Defence Association (UDA) – has left behind a bloody legacy of almost 4,000 deaths and ten times as many injuries in a relatively small region of only 1.8 million people.
