for a taig’, personal grudges against a particular person who happened to be a nationalist or republican in political belief, the ‘thrill of the kill’, and because the protagonists would have become murderers even if the political conflict did not give meaning to their actions. To suggest otherwise is to abdicate responsibility for assessing the myriad causes and consequences of violent conflict in this divided society and risks foregoing the opportunity to identify and ameliorate what terrorism experts call ‘root causes’.
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In order to explain the actions of the UVF it has also been necessary to look at other illegal armed groupings like the UDA/Ulster Freedom Fighters, Irish National Liberation Army and the Provisional IRA, as well as those of the legal British State Security Forces. This is important, for without examining the phenomenon of political violence more broadly it is difficult to explain why the UVF members did what they did. Understandably, these are questions that have been asked of other armed groupings around the world and are questions I am just as likely to ask in my own teaching on Hamas, Hezbollah, ETA, the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS, known by the Arabs as Daesh) and even Al-Qaeda. Yet one would be forgiven for thinking that what has happened in Northern Ireland is sui generis, a preposterous assumption that has hampered much analysis of political violence there.
In this respect, I am more interested in the generic features of the UVF as a militant group – how it recruited, trained and organised, the disciplinary system of control exerted over its volunteers, its command structures, how it operated when carrying out its ‘counter-terrorist campaign against violent nationalism’ and everyone else, and, perhaps, most controversially of all, the forensic details of its acts of violence. It is my intention to look behind the mask of UVF terror to paint as accurate and comprehensive a picture as it is possible to give of a ruthless, organised and determined armed group.
It is my belief that the violence recorded in this book is not the only past we can attribute to the wider working-class Protestant community. In fact, for those of us who have lived with the oppressive reality of paramilitarism in our communities, there is an urgency to address the underlying conditions that give rise to these groups if we are ever to eradicate them from our midst. A good place to start – for all of us in Northern Ireland, Great Britain and Ireland – would be in resolving to adhere to the principle that what happened in the troubles should never be allowed to happen again. Only when this level of maturity and honesty is reached can we hope to transform the situation we have found ourselves living in beyond the violence that has for so long plagued our lives.
Prologue
THE TWO BILLYS
‘Only the dead are safe; only the dead have seen the end of war’
George Santayana, Soliloquies in England and Later Soliloquies.1
The blistering warmth of the summer’s day made sitting indoors uncomfortable; probably one of the reasons why people had started to mill around in the shade. As the funeral cortège passed by, throngs of burly men joined the ranks of the mourners. Six neatly turned out pall-bearers sporting black trousers, white shirts and skinny black ties clasped arms as they shouldered the pristine oak coffin, which had been carefully dressed with the familiar paramilitary trappings of the purple-coloured Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) flag, coal-black beret and shiny brown leather gloves. Progressive Unionist Party (PUP) leader David Ervine brushed past me, as he barged into the swollen ranks of paramilitary types, young and old, many of whom fell back into line briskly, with little fuss.
A sea of grimacing, solemn faces pushed silently into the light breeze as the sound of semi-marching feet trudged along keeping time to a lone piper’s lament. As the medieval noise of the pipes gathered to a crescendo, the mourners congregated outside the tiny Baptist church. Standing proud at the foot of the railway bridge, the poky little church was the focal point of the exclusively Protestant working-class housing estate overshadowed by Carnmoney Hill, a commanding, undulating feature that presides over everyday life in this part of Northern Ireland.
The funeral on this occasion was for prominent loyalist Billy Greer, who had been a leading member of the outlawed UVF and a former PUP councillor on Newtownabbey Borough Council. Greer was a popular figure, a larger-than-life character held in high esteem by his fellow councillors and by a legion of supporters in the local community. During his tenure on the local authority he had even met Prince Charles, on one of his many visits to the area; a photo of Billy bowing to the heir to the throne still hangs in the social club he chaired for over a generation. Greer lived in Monkstown all his life except, of course, for the time he spent incarcerated for UVF membership, in the compounds of Long Kesh in the 1970s. Those close to Greer admired how he had worked tirelessly for those who resided in this fiercely working-class housing estate. As a consequence of the PUP’s effective voting management, he was elected in University Ward in 1997 with 448 First Preferences votes.2 Greer was a strong believer in the community spirit that lay at the heart of the UVF’s support base in areas like this across Northern Ireland. Consequently, Monkstown was synonymous with Billy Greer and the UVF; it would now turn out en mass to give him a good send-off.
On the day of Greer’s funeral, I was enrolled as chauffeur to three UVF veterans. It was a glum occasion. As such, the car was loaded up with an eclectic mix of former gunmen and auxiliaries who counted Greer as one of their ‘team’, a comrade from ‘the old days’. As the men spoke they seemed to have captured their memories of their friend in a bubble of surreptitious remembrance. They painted a picture of a world inhabited by ‘goodies’ and ‘badies’, and they, they assured me, were firmly on the ‘right side’. ‘Ulster’, the men were at pains to tell me, ‘had then been under threat from militant republicans’, and this presaged first vigilantism, and then a military response. It meant that everyone needed to pull together for the good of the community; for the good of their country. It was also a time when almost everyone was armed and connected to one or other of the alphabetic spaghetti bowl of paramilitary organisations sprouting foot soldiers across the province. Northern Ireland became awash with weapons, blood and death during these years. Popularly known as ‘the troubles’, violence and murder had exploded onto the streets in the spring and summer of 1966, when the UVF perpetrated a handful of attacks across Belfast, Rathcoole and Carrickfergus.
Forty years almost to the day when the first UVF killings rocked Northern Ireland, the organisation was still in existence. There was nothing to indicate otherwise, in that it had murdered over thirty-two people since its 1994 ceasefire – almost all of them, bizarrely, from the Protestant community they claimed to be defending. Although the violence from all sides had wound down significantly, loyalists, it seemed, were stuck in a time warp; biding their time, and waiting for any excuse to return to war.
Over 3,700 men, women and children had tragically lost their lives over thirty years of political violence. And although the Provisional IRA murdered around 1,800 people before calling a halt to its campaign in 2005, the UVF contributed significantly to the overall body count, killing somewhere in the region of 564 people and injuring many more.3 Its founding members claimed at the time that it had originally been formed to oppose the perceived threat posed by the IRA, though they later admitted that the UVF was really a tool of political intrigue utilised by a handful of faceless right-wing unionist politicians. The irony that the UVF pre-dated the Provisional IRA and had now outlasted its old foe was not lost on me, as I watched the organisation bury one of its leading lights on that piping hot summer’s day.
As I edged my way into the crowd, which had by now assembled according to their importance inside the organisation’s hierarchy, I searched for a friendly face. Even though I had been born and reared in the area, and was known by those connected to the organisation for my voluntary work on a UVF-endorsed conflict transformation process aimed at its disarmament and eventual departure from the ‘stage’, I was a non-member – a civilian – and therefore counted very much as an outsider, at least in public.
The
