60s and 70s, sharply drawn frowns and rugged faces, sloped in behind the family circle of their fallen comrade. All the top brass had turned out – from the leader of the organisation, the so-called Chief-of-Staff, known to his close confidants as ‘The Pipe’, through to his headquarters staff and a sprinkling of local commanders from across the province. There seemed to be more chiefs than Indians in attendance. All of them dressed in smart suits and sensible shoes, even if some of them insisted on the addition of not-so-sensible white socks. The sweet smell of cheap deodorant and aftershave wafted through the air, as beads of sweat dripped beneath the arms of the stockier members of the crowd. They had now formed up, ready to see off their fallen comrade.
By now the piper’s lament had been drowned out by the sobbing of Greer’s wife, family and close friends, all of whom were now emotionally gathered round the coffin as it paused under the mural painting of the iconic charge of the 36th (Ulster) Division at Thiepval Wood in the first Battle of the Somme on 1 July 1916. Billy had prided himself on the upkeep of the mural, and it would become a shrine to him when he died.
Militarists led politicos, with many of the latter having worked with the dead loyalist when he was the chairman of the PUP’s East Antrim Constituency Association, the UVF’s political associates. A member of the UVF since 1968, he was a commander of the group’s powerful East Antrim Battalion from the mid-1970s until it amalgamated with North Belfast in the mid-1990s. Prior to its amalgamation with North Belfast, Billy Greer was asked by the UVF leadership to join the PUP talks team in the mid-1990s as a means of selling the loyalist ceasefire to the organisation’s rank-and-file. Greer inhabited a place within the UVF that – in equivalent terms – was reserved only for the likes of Bobby Storey in the republican movement. In other words, Greer was a key grassroots figure, a man of stature and influence, the proverbial ‘UVF man’s UVF man’, that ranks of volunteers looked up to and followed out of a mixture of fear and adulation. When Billy Greer attended the multi-party talks in 1997/98, he was not attending as a PUP member per se but as the UVF Brigade Staff’s plenipotentiary.
When he died, Billy was no longer the deputy commander of the UVF’s East Antrim and North Belfast brigade. He had tendered his resignation to ‘The Pipe’ over the activities of some of his colleagues on the local command group who had gone against Brigade Staff policy. Following an internal investigation, Billy, his brigadier and long-time friend sixty-year-old Rab Warnock, and their team were replaced by a relatively unknown UVF man called Gary Haggarty. It was a choice that would have huge repercussions for the organisation as it sought to dismantle its paramilitary structures over the next decade.
That Greer was held in such high esteem meant that few people questioned why the organisation had not taken more stringent action against the leadership around Warnock, especially in light of the seriousness of the allegations levelled against them. He still remained chairman of the local social club, an indefatigable presence who dominated working-class life in the district, just as prominently as the Napoleon’s Nose feature jutting out of Belfast’s Cave Hill Mountain, which could be seen some way in the distance towering above the city. Billy knew everybody and everybody knew Billy. Nothing, except death it seemed, could remove him from the place he called his home for over half a century. Greer had been the quintessential community activist, frequently interviewed by local newspapers, whether it was about his campaign of dispensing free personal alarms for the elderly or urging the removal of unsightly paramilitary murals in Newtownabbey.
It was his positive contribution to returning this place to some semblance of normality that left people aghast when they learned of the extent of the actions of the area’s UVF leadership. I had heard that some of these men had joined the UVF for political reasons, while others were there to line their own pockets. Greer had been in the former category. He had joined the UVF at the very beginning, prior to the outbreak of the troubles, and he would later rise to prominence in the 1970s, when the IRA began its armed campaign. Now, three decades later, he had fallen on his sword for the men around him. In the two years after he was replaced, Billy became a different man. He stopped drinking and, though he was still the life and soul of the company he kept, he had become isolated inside the organisation he loved.
On the day of his funeral, though, he was just another fallen comrade. The UVF had put its internal squabbles aside and forged a united front. A clear signal was being sent out. Whatever had happened in the past had now been consigned to the dustbin of history, of relevance only to the naysayers who had a vested interest in derailing the accomplishments of the UVF’s internal consultation process. The strife wracking the inner circles of the UVF died with Billy Greer, or so it seemed on this occasion. In time, a different story would emerge, one more complicated than people realised. It would leave little doubt in some people’s minds that Greer’s departure from the leadership of the East Antrim UVF was seen by some as a cynical attempt to reverse the UVF’s decision to move towards a permanent disengagement from political violence.
***
Seven days after Billy Greer died, another former UVF leader passed away. His name was Billy Mitchell. At one time he had also commanded the East Antrim UVF and, subsequently, became a member of the group’s ruling Brigade Staff. Like Greer, I knew Billy Mitchell very well. He had been a mentor to me as we worked together on peace-building projects in the divided communities across Belfast and East Antrim in the last years of his life. If Billy Greer imbibed the UVF’s militaristic ethos throughout his entire life, Billy Mitchell embodied the political dynamism of a far-reaching catharsis that took him on a personal odyssey from militarist to politico.
‘How could you not like Billy,’ said ‘The Craftsman’, said to be one of the top two most senior UVF Brigade Staff officers. Like Mitchell, The Craftsman became involved in militant loyalism sometime in 1966 in the belief that the IRA were about to launch an armed coup to take over the government of Northern Ireland and subsume it into an all-island republic. It was astonishing to think that in the same year Beatlemania was sweeping the world, when Carnaby Street represented a new departure in British culture and when the world was changing dramatically amidst a Cold War, old shibboleths were returning with great vigour in Northern Ireland. Mitchell’s route to embracing extremist views began when he came under the spell of Reverend Ian Paisley, a fundamentalist Protestant preacher, though he had already been indoctrinated into loyalism by way of other, less prominent, religious extremists who belonged to the Flute Band he joined in his early twenties. Born in Ballyduff in 1940, Billy’s father died soon afterwards and the family went to live with his mother’s parents on the Hightown Road, close to Belfast’s Cave Hill. By 1974 Mitchell was on the UVF’s Brigade Staff, the only non-Shankill man ever to have served in that capacity. ‘I couldn’t tell you what role he played on Brigade Staff,’ The Craftsman told me. ‘I remember Billy turned up to a Brigade Staff meeting in the 1970s in his overalls. I think he worked [as a truck driver] at the time. He had the air of a country man about him.’ It is likely that Mitchell served as the organisation’s Director of Operations, following the death of Jim Hanna in April 1974. That he commanded one of the most active units inside the UVF meant he had a foot in both the Shankill and East Antrim.
When Mitchell was arrested by the Security Forces in Carrickfergus in March 1976, he had ring binders full of information used by the UVF for targeting. He told detectives that there was an innocent explanation for the material found in his possession. The truth was that he was double-hatted as the UVF’s Director of Intelligence at the time, responsible for targeting his organisation’s enemies, wherever they were to be found. Unbeknown to the CID detectives who questioned him, they had arguably the UVF’s most important leader in their custody. Here was the organisation’s top strategist, its chief scribe and its quintessential man of action. It is rare for guerrilla or terrorist organisations to have men who possess both the military aptitude and the political astuteness in their ranks. It is even rarer for them to be concentrated in one person.
During his long period of incarceration between 1976 and 1990, Mitchell spent his time wrestling with his conscience and attempting to unravel the puzzle of what had propelled him into the ranks of the UVF. After a few years, he would come to reject
