Christianity and give up his coveted Special Category Status to enter the newly constructed H Blocks as a Conforming Prisoner in the early 1980s. There was little Billy conformed to. He had been a senior UVF commander who had been responsible for leading the organisation through its darkest years, when it was responsible for murdering several hundred people, thirty-three of whom were killed in a single day in bomb attacks on Dublin and Monaghan. He had even talked to the highest-ranking members of both wings of the Official and Provisional IRAs. It was part of the UVF’s twin track of ‘talking and killing’ he told me thirty years after those turbulent events. Yet, by 1979, he had given all of that up.
When he emerged from prison in 1990, Billy dedicated himself to rebuilding the communities the UVF had helped to shatter with their violence. He was committed to this and, as one of his friends would remark in his funeral oration, not only did he ‘walk the walk but he demanded that people walked with him’. This was the Billy Mitchell I knew. The man who could in one room bring together sworn enemies from across a deeply divided community. IRA members, UVF members, Irish National Liberation Army (INLA) members, even some from the so-called dissident hinterland – all had come into contact with him in his years as a peace-builder. It is little wonder, therefore, that as people gathered to pay their final respects to Billy Mitchell at his funeral service, they represented the broad spectrum of Northern Irish society.
As we look back on its fifty-year history, we see that the history of the UVF is a very rich and complicated one. It is at its heart a story of ordinary men like the two Billys, Greer and Mitchell, who became involved in paramilitary activity for a variety of reasons. They both rose to prominence through their ability to get the men and women under their command to do things they wouldn’t have otherwise done. Yet, their stories also demonstrate why some individuals remain involved in militarism, while others go against the grain and ask serious questions of what had brought them to the point where they advocated, planned and participated in violent acts.
This book charts the shifting contours in Ulster loyalism, and explains how and why men like these came to make the choices they did and what the consequences were for the world around them.
1
THE BISHOP
‘In such cases, where law and justice fail him, the Ulster Protestant will infallibly take his own measures for his protection. He is built that way. His resolution and his courage are unshakeable. He has all the unflinching determination of his border ancestors and by a question of principle he will stand to his last gasp.’
Lord Ernest Hamilton, The Soul of Ulster, 1917.1
It was a stormy night in mid-November 1965. Snow was forecast, as gale-force winds continually battered Northern Ireland. A car carrying four men steadily made its way from the Shankill Road in Belfast, south-west via the towns of Lisburn, Moira, Lurgan and Dungannon to the outskirts of the rural County Tyrone village of Pomeroy, some eighteen miles from the Irish border. It was a long and slow journey, as the roads got increasingly narrower and the bad weather made it difficult to navigate as the driver turned off the main A-road out of Dungannon. While Pomeroy was overwhelmingly Roman Catholic in religious composition in the mid-1960s, it had a long association with Protestant militancy that stretched back to the late eighteenth century. The Orange Order was formed not far away at the Diamond near Portadown, in 1795. It had been established at a time of great uncertainty. Revolution abroad, sectarianism at home and debates over constitutional issues and the fear of invasion brought the Order together.2 It was also a time when militia-based organisations flourished, with the predominantly Presbyterian United Irishmen raised a few years earlier to agitate for religious freedom for Catholics and dissenters. Both organisations had a resemblance to earlier, agrarian-based secret societies, like the Peep O’ Day Boys and their rivals, the Defenders.
As the antagonism between these revolutionary and counter-revolutionary groups developed, the United Irishmen became imbibed with a culture of popular radicalism common in Britain and America at the time. Meanwhile, Orangeism became more aggressively anti-Catholic and reactionary. Opposing social and political outlooks soon triggered conflict between both organisations. To Protestant vengeance groups, ‘the entire Catholic population became defined as the enemy’.3 Portadown, in North Armagh, was the epicentre of the trouble and would remain so for the next two centuries.
As the carload of Belfast men made their way along the rolling countryside, with its narrow country lanes, prominent hedgerows and wide-open emerald green fields, they passed workers’ cottages and farms scattered along the side of the roads. This was farming country and, on the surface at least, places like Pomeroy appeared all but immune from the modernisation programme gripping Northern Ireland in the 1960s.4 Some Protestants, in fact, harboured a deep-seated feeling of bitterness, anger and fear as the winds of change blew through their land. What would they usher in, other than the creeping hand of Irish nationalism, which had always aspired to gain a foothold in their beloved Ulster? To the more militant-minded Protestants, change of any kind pointed towards dark days ahead for their homeland.
The terrible weather conditions on that November night in many ways matched the foreboding that had been percolating down to the Protestant grassroots who resided in the surrounding rural hamlets of Cappagh, Carrickmore and The Rock. Chief amongst these was the feeling that the Unionist government at Stormont was far too liberal and soft on those who, hardliners believed, were dedicated to the destruction of the Northern Ireland state. Evidence of this existential threat came in the form of a summit a year earlier between the Northern Ireland Prime Minister Terence O’Neill and the Irish Taoiseach Seán Lemass. The meeting was held in private, but did not escape the prying eyes of a thirty-nine-year-old lay preacher Ian Paisley, the rabble-rousing leader of the Free Presbyterian Church, a fundamentalist Christian sect formed in 1951. Born in Armagh in 1926, another citadel of Orangeism, Paisley burst onto the scene in the late 1950s when he formed Ulster Protestant Action (UPA), a sectarian-based organisation that lobbied against unemployment within the majority Protestant population.5
By 1964, Paisley was threatening to lead a Protestant mob to the offices of Irish Republican election candidate and Irish Republican Army (IRA) leader Liam McMillan in West Belfast. McMillan had placed an Irish tricolour in the window of his office on Divis Street. It caused uproar amongst Protestant extremists in the neighbouring areas. In a bid to quieten tensions, the RUC intervened in the dispute and removed the flag. When it appeared back in the window a short time afterwards, Paisley brought a Protestant mob back onto the streets, provoking a three-night riot with local Catholics and the police.
Paisley had always made sectarianism the leitmotif of his political protests. Apart from agitating on exclusively Protestant issues, he opposed attempts by the Roman Catholic Church to reach out to other Christian denominations in a spirit of harmony. Paisley and his followers found ecumenicalism abhorrent and, as a result, set themselves against it just as firmly as they had done the rapprochement between the two governments north and south of the border. Underpinning this acrimony was an undercurrent of violence, a spectre that continually haunted politics and society in this part of the world. Paisley warned that the IRA, which had dumped arms in 1962 after its six-year border campaign fizzled out, was still waiting in the wings. McMillan’s defiance in West Belfast proved as much, Paisley told his supporters, despite IRA guns having fallen silent amidst widespread apathy from the northern nationalist community.6 With the approach of the fiftieth anniversary of the failed Easter 1916 rebellion against British rule in Dublin, further impetus was given to militant Protestants who feared the ‘unholy alliance’ between the Irish government, Roman Catholic Church and the IRA.
A propensity for regular elections in Northern Ireland – there were seventeen local government, Stormont and Westminster parliamentary elections between 1945 and 1965 – gave Paisley the opportunity to test his paranoid claims on the voting public. Something was stirring amongst Ulster Protestants, and Paisley erroneously tapped into it. He was fast becoming the midwife in the rebirth of a noxious strain of militancy that was prepared
