Read Voices from the Grave: Two Men's War in Ireland Online
Authors: Ed Moloney
Voices from the Grave: Two Men's War in Ireland (55 page)
The ‘Ulster Says No!’ campaign was just three or so months old when the Loyalist paramilitaries received an object lesson from mainstream Unionism about their perceived role in life and place at the bottom of the food chain. The Unionist political leaders, Jim Molyneaux and Ian Paisley, had put away their differences and joined forces to oppose the Hillsborough Deal. On the eve of the one-day strike they journeyed to Downing Street, having agreed with their parties to put a take-it-or-leave-it offer to Margaret Thatcher: agree to suspend the Agreement and hold talks on its replacement or face mounting Unionist protest action and even a general strike. But, with Molyneaux nervous about the impact the strike would have, the pair reneged on their pledge. Instead they proposed an all-party conference that would take place ‘unconditionally’; that is the Anglo-Irish Agreement would be functioning as it met, a de facto acquiescence in Britain’s ‘deceit and treachery’.
Thatcher eagerly accepted the offer but the two men arrived back in Belfast to face a rebellion from their second-tier leaderships and rank and file who were privately accusing them of selling out. Later that night Molyneaux and Paisley performed U-turns, rejected the deal worked out earlier with Thatcher and backed the impending one-day strike. The hard men of Loyalism were drafted in to give them the necessary cover.
The 1986 experience was fundamental. Paisley and Molyneaux were
at Downing Street, and I heard in the lunchtime broadcasts that
there was a potential deal between Paisley, Molyneaux and
Thatcher. Paisley and Molyneaux spoke on the radio live, I heard it,
and there was an indication of a deal all right. So we were all summoned
as part of the 1986 Committee to a meeting in the DUP’s
headquarters in the Albertbridge Road. How did we get the invitation,
did they not know who Billy Elliot [UDA’s East Belfast
Brigadier] was representing that night, not know who I was representing
that night? Of course they did. Strangely enough Sammy
Wilson and Peter Robinson came into the room, no Paisley or
Molyneaux – they’d been delayed – but what we got from them was
‘We put backbone into them’, and I’m listening to Robinson and
Wilson talk about how ‘they put backbone’ into that great charismatic
figure, Ian Paisley, who in the view of the Unionist community
is all backbone. Then the next thing, they announced that the
meeting would have to be in Glengall Street [the Official Unionist
headquarters] that there had been a change of plan, so we were all
dispatched to the Europa [hotel] to be summoned over to Glengall
Street. We eventually got into Glengall Street and —— was coming
down the stairs, and he says, ‘Put a bit of backbone into them’, and
we were shown into a room where we sat for a while and —— left
and then down came Paisley and Molyneaux and they said they
would support the strike, and the people from the ’86 Committee
asked, ‘Well, let’s make it very clear. Is this a joint call for a strike,
Mr Molyneaux?’ Because it was clear that Paisley was never getting
a strike on his own, and Molyneaux said, ‘Yes.’ The interesting thing
is that it was supposed to be a private meeting, some would say a
secret meeting, and when the door of Glengall Street opened and we
were leaving, we were met by banks of cameras, and the headlines in
the
News Letter
the next morning was ‘Hard men change minds’,
and it was a total fucking fabrication to … give the impression that
our politicians were trying to do a deal with Mrs Thatcher but look,
these hard men wouldn’t let them. It was absolutely shameful,
totally designed and orchestrated by the Democratic Unionist Party
and the Ulster Unionist Party
.
I wish I had a pound for the number of times Ulster Unionists
would say, ‘Oh, watch for the Protestant backlash. Oh, I don’t know
how we’re going to sell this to the hard men.’ Meanwhile, back at the
ranch … us hard men were the people who had the policies that
were twenty years ahead of their own. I mean, it was incredible, it
was cynical, manipulative and dishonest
…
I can only speak in relation to my understanding of the UVF’s
attitude and really for the first time it started to listen very carefully
to the idea that we needed to learn how to speak for ourselves, we
really did need to force our way into the political arena, and that
began for sure in 1986 … I can never forgive the Unionist leaders
because the way they behaved was not for the good of this community,
it was not for the good of our people, it was for themselves, it
was about their own fortunes, it wasn’t about anybody else, it was
about frightening the British government or the Catholic community,
and they haven’t tried it since, haven’t quite tried it since,
maybe they’ve realised the game was up
.
I think that the Anglo-Irish Agreement threw Loyalism and
Unionism into a state of flux but the debates within paramilitarism
were quite interesting, certainly those within the UVF … quite a
number believed that the responsibility for the political conditions
that led to the creation of the Anglo-Irish Agreement lay with the
Westminster MPs. They had singularly failed, and that whilst there
were many UVF people who felt, ‘We’ll react because it’s the …
thing to do’, there were others who were saying, ‘Hold on a wee
minute, really this is a political problem and these people have not
done their job. Why didn’t they warn society, why didn’t they agitate,
why didn’t they create conditions which allowed the population to
really know what was coming?’ So there was some confusion, and
maybe lack of clarity about where we were going because Loyalists
didn’t have any of the cards. The one card … they knew they had
was the capacity to inflict violence and … rather than a reactive
response in the Loyalist leadership, they seemed [instead] to be
much more politically attuned in the use of violence
.
The graph of Loyalist violence, as measured by their killings, takes the shape of an inverted U between the years 1971 and 1976, the years of greatest political instability and therefore of Unionist insecurity. After that the line becomes a straight line, more or less, bumping along at the bottom of the horizontal axis, each year’s toll of death a mere fraction of what it had been in the mid-1970s. Of the two, the UVF’s killing rate declined at a slower pace than the UDA’s but even so the change was dramatic: there were, for instance, more people killed by the UVF in 1976, a total of 71,
44
than in the entire next ten years, between 1978 and 1987. Even the two years of the Anglo-Irish Agreement, 1985 and 1986, saw no great variance from the new lower norm. By and large the two groups continued to do what Loyalist paramilitaries had done ever since Gusty Spence’s killing spree in 1966. When they wanted to kill they targeted uninvolved Catholics, often at random, and, like Gusty Spence’s victims in 1966, many met an unintended death due to sheer incompetence. It was not that the Loyalist paramilitaries did not have intelligence on the IRA or that they did not know where IRA activists lived or what they looked like. Lack of such information was never a Loyalist problem. It was an open secret, in the early years of the Troubles especially, that departing British troops would stuff UVF and UDA letterboxes with photomontages of IRA ‘players’ culled from intelligence files. If the UVF or the UDA had wanted to, they could have gone for real IRA targets but they mostly didn’t. It seemed that killing Catholics randomly with the gun or bomb was a lot easier to do.
That started to change in 1980 when Loyalists began choosing their targets more carefully and strategically. The first such victim was a Protestant Republican politician and landowner called John Turnly who lived on the North Antrim coast. At one time in his life an officer in the British Army, Turnly had joined the moderate SDLP, but left to join a radical splinter group, the Irish Independence Party, from where he later supported the IRA hunger strikers. In June 1980 he was shot dead as he sat in his car with his Japanese wife and their two children. The assassins were members of the UDA and the Turnly killing marked the start of the most directed and coherent campaign to date organised by any Loyalist group. Their next victim was Miriam Daly, a former Sinn Fein activist, who along with her husband James had become a leader in the Irish Republican Socialist Party, the political wing of the INLA. She was shot dead in her Andersonstown home. In October the UDA killed Ronnie Bunting, the radical son of Paisley’s former aide who had become a leader first in the Official IRA and then the INLA. He was shot dead by gunmen who used a sledgehammer to break down the door of his Andersonstown home, and alongside him was killed Noel Lyttle, a member of the Red Republican Party. The following year, in January 1981, UDA gunmen shot and seriously wounded the former civil rights leader Bernadette McAliskey and her husband Michael in their isolated home in County Tyrone. Other activists from the civil rights days were targeted, some fleeing Belfast for the safety of Dublin. The UDA said that their campaign was directed at what they called the IRA’s ‘cheerleaders’ and it was notable that three of the victims had been active in the H-block campaign, supporting the IRA claim of political status for prisoners. The UDA killings were an effort to strike fear in that section of radical Nationalist politics which gave valuable support and guidance to some of the IRA’s causes.
It wasn’t for another seven years or so that the UVF went down a similar path. That it did so was in no small way the result of a new relationship between the UVF leadership and the PUP, one that gave the PUP influence over the gunmen’s strategy. It was during these years that Ervine also became active again in the UVF
as its ‘Provost-Marshal’, responsible for internal discipline, a move that seemed calculated to reassure the rank and file that he was one of them.
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The change came about in the confused aftermath of the first moves in what would soon become known as the peace process. The story began, in public at least, on 11 January 1988 when a political earthquake shook Northern Nationalism. Delegations from the SDLP and Sinn Fein, led by their respective leaders, John Hume and Gerry Adams, met for the first of six meetings, the last one taking place in September that year. The contacts were extra ordinary simply because the Establishment orthodoxy for many years had been that the Provos, elected or not, were pariahs, fit only to be shunned by respectable society. Such an approach was a matter of faith for some politicians in the South, especially Garret Fitzgerald, the Fine Gael leader and twice Taoiseach. If anything the sentiment was stronger south of the border, particularly in sections of the media, than it was in London and so Hume was seen as bucking his allies in Dublin by meeting Adams & Co. – or at least that is how it looked. More than that the SDLP and Sinn Fein had fought one election a year against each other since 1982 and by now they were bitter and sometimes physical rivals. The fact that they were now prepared to meet and discuss their different analyses of the problem suggested something unusual was afoot.
No matter what they really thought in private, the bulk of mainstream Unionist leaders responded to the SDLP–SF talks with suspicion, scorn and hostility, assuming that they were just part of another cunning Nationalist plot to undo the Union. With the exception of the UVF and the PUP that is. Seemingly alone of all the pro-Union groupings, the UVF/PUP realised that neither the SDLP nor the Irish government, which had to have approved the meetings, would entertain the Sinn Fein leadership in talks unless the IRA’s use of violence was somehow on the negotiating table. This piece of astute reasoning shaped a sophisticated response, which had two major features. One was an open-minded approach that did not dismiss the possibility that the talks were aimed at ending the violence. The second was to assume the best, that the Provos
were looking for a way out of the conflict and, to encourage them to move faster down that road, the UVF set about trying to kill as many known Republicans as it could. Like the UDA seven years before, the UVF set out to kill a specific set of targets, only their targets would be in the IRA, Sinn Fein and those around them. So intense was the campaign unleashed by the UVF and other Loyalists that, according to Ervine’s interview with Boston College, an alarmed IRA sued for peace via intermediaries. The offer was rejected.
…
the PUP was a tiny and a very core group. It would have met on
a fairly irregular basis at first with the leadership of UVF and hot-
housed the political vista with them, if you like, but that changed
over a period of time. I think the biggest change came in, it had to
be about 1989, with the creation, at the behest of the UVF, of a
kitchen cabinet. Out of that hot-house process came our understanding
of the much talked about Republican strategy of pan-Nationalism.
When the concept became public, Unionism was apoplectic, but the
leadership of the UVF were not, and neither were the small nucleus
of PUP people. The view that they had was no matter how much we
disliked the SDLP or the Irish government, they were not going to
get into bed with Sinn Fein as long as the IRA was using violence.
So that was an indicator to the UVF that something was going on.
The questions were: ‘What is it that they’re talking about?’ ‘What’s
[Gerry] Adams offering here to his own community?’ And I and at
least one other were then sent out to try and find out
.
…
part of that kitchen-cabinet discussion was about how you
escalate the war to end the war, which again was an indication …
that there were people in the leadership of the UVF who believed
this war could end, unlike many of their foot soldiers for whom the
war was just a way of life. There was a change, a mindset change …
and the focus switched to a more acute political analysis of every
word, of everything that was being said, everything was being done
… and more fundamentally asking what the hell was going on
within Republicanism. There had always been attempts by the UVF
,
for as long as I remember, to try and understand what was going on
with the Provos. In some cases it was done through relationship with
priests, and I’m certain that from 1989 onwards the relationship
with priests and then eventually other clergymen substantially
intensified, but that was never taken on its own. There were little
soirées in Dublin and places like that where, as a community
worker, one could suggest something more visionary … that hadn’t
previously ever been suggested, so there were those type of little
things going on
.
There would be many people within the UVF who had always felt
that the only way to carry out a campaign was incisively and with
stealth and absolute precision. They didn’t always have their way
and the emotion and anger and opportunities sometimes mitigate
against that, but they seemed to have their way and there was a diligent
attempt [made] to identify very expressly specific targets. It was
about trying to damage the Republican movement. For many years
Loyalism simply believed that a Catholic, any Catholic, would do.
The UVF, in fairness to them, even though some of the statistics
don’t indicate that their ideas always bore fruit, it’s clear that they
felt that it was counter-productive, that sectarianism, wounding the
Nationalist community in order that it stop harbouring the IRA,
was absolutely counter-productive. So they became much more
incisive and I think it did create a huge fear factor in Republicans,
forcing them behind their steel doors, and really for the first time the
Republicans felt themselves being hounded
.
…
there was a single-mindedness that at times one felt the UVF
had lacked [in the past] and there are periods of course where that
wasn’t the case … [but] one would have never expected that the
Republicans would have been screaming from the rooftops and
admitting weakness, but it was clear through, shall we say, conduits
and messages … that it was getting home because they were suing
for peace, but suing for peace in very pathetic and irrational terms
like ‘You don’t kill us and we won’t kill you’ and ‘We’re not fighting
ye’, you know. That type of thing. ‘You’re not really the enemy’,
which betrayed a huge misunderstanding about what the UVF may
or may not have been about from their point of view. The UVF were
insulted by suggestions that in order to save their own skins they
should make deals with the IRA and I think it [so] infuriated them
the kill rate may well have gone up
.
