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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. Yet the physical and psychological scars on Northern Irish society are apparent to anyone who has taken the trouble to look. Had the same violence been unleashed on the population of Great Britain, the proportional numbers killed would have stood at 100,000, and, if it happened in the United States, the losses would have peaked somewhere in the region of the astronomically high figure of 1 million.

Today, most people think that Northern Ireland is at peace. After all, a ‘peace process’ was indeed begun in the early 1990s, culminating in the signing of the Belfast Agreement in 1998 and the establishment of power-sharing institutions a decade later. Crucially, it is important that we acknowledge the limitations of this process. For one thing, it has not completely ended the conflict and removed the causes which gave rise to it in the first place. Almost twenty years on from the peace accord brokered between Unionist and Nationalist politicians, loyalist and republican terrorist groups are still in existence. What is more, they have shown a willingness to become involved in civil disturbances, intimidation, threats, physical violence, particularly within their own communities, and even murder, whenever the situation demands it.

For this reason, you will find much of what you read here shocking. It is a story of young men (and occasionally young women) who turned to violence, some in the heat of the moment and others in more premeditated circumstances. At the time and since, many of these individuals would give their motives for doing so as indicative of wanting to ‘hit back’, to ‘defend their country’ or to ‘return the serve’ against Irish republicans. Others, less troubled by the trappings of patriotism, engaged in violence because of the promise of power, money, and the status it gave them in the deprived working-class communities where they try to carve out lives for themselves and their families. No matter what the motive, the collective sum of all parts of this violence was to contribute to the continuation of the Northern Ireland conflict from its outbreak in the 1960s – via the intense violence of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s – to the present day. There were other motives, of course, and this book is aimed at uncovering what they were.

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As a professional historian, I draw inspiration from the advice passed on to future generations of writers by one of the twentieth century’s most influential historians, the French intellectual and resistance fighter Marc Bloch. Bloch was a man of action as well as a man of letters and – as a direct consequence – paid the ultimate price for his activism when he was captured, imprisoned and subsequently machine-gunned to death by the Nazis in occupied France as the Allies invaded to liberate his country in June 1944. Bloch believed history to be the study of both the dead and the living. In a line that would become synonymous with his approach to the past, he wrote, ‘As soon as we admit that a mental or emotional reaction is not self-explanatory, we are forced in turn, whenever such a reaction occurs, to make a real effort to discover the reasons for it. In a word, in history, as elsewhere, the causes cannot be assumed. They are to be looked for …’1

One of my motivations was to uncover the real causes of the ‘mental or emotional’ reactions that lead people to engage in violence. This has necessitated adopting the time-honoured historical approach of assembling evidence and scrutinising it as rigorously as possible, while placing it in its proper context. In pursuing a forensic examination of the causes and consequences of individual and collective actions, it has been necessary to recognise that the past is as hotly contested as the present and, without sounding too cynical, as the future may well be in this deeply divided society. In ethnic conflicts, like Northern Ireland, rival groups rarely agree on much, except on who they do not like. The past is an important adhesive in binding these prejudices together and giving them a meaning that, in marginalised and deprived communities, acts as an accelerant on an open fire.

Interestingly, most of those who write about Northern Ireland’s troubled past do so in a way that removes human agency from the violence. To deny that the people responsible for some of the most horrific killings of the twentieth century were ordinary men and women, with human frailties and with choices, is to sanitise the past according to the political logic of the present. I realise that my approach will not be welcomed by many who were caught up in the events narrated here. However, the findings are accurate and based on evidence, including interviews with people who were intimately involved in UVF activity, from the origins of the troubles to the present day.

The book also takes inspiration from the important work by Canadian liberal journalist and politician Michael Ignatieff, who informs us that when investigating these sorts of conflicts, ‘The very fact of being an outsider discredits rather than reinforces one’s legitimacy. For there is always a truth that can be known only by those on the inside.’2 It has, therefore, been necessary to adopt an approach acknowledging that I am ‘already native’ in this setting, by the objective fact that I was ‘born of this island’, to paraphrase the late, great Ulster poet John Hewitt, and having lived alongside people who feature prominently in this story. Unlike numerous academics who refuse to admit that their background colours their analysis, my identity has facilitated access where others are unlikely or unwilling to tread.

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I have been watching the UVF at close quarters for over two decades – even longer if we include the fact that I am from the working-class community where it has traditionally recruited its foot soldiers. However, I must make it absolutely clear that I am not a supporter or an apologist of this organisation. I refuse to seriously entertain the conceited view that ordinary working-class people who live ‘cheek by jowl’ with terrorist organisations (for that is what they are – they use terror to spread fear in a political context) are either necessarily sympathetic or supportive of, or complicit in, the actions of these people.3 Often, people are forced to live with the presence of armed groups because the state has failed to retain the monopoly over the legitimate use of force. In many respects it appears, on the surface at least, that the state has ceded authority to these malign non-state actors in some of the country’s most marginalised neighbourhoods.4

This book challenges the misguided view that people who join terrorist groups are all ‘willing executioners’, driven wholly by structural forces or cultures that give them no other choice than to become involved in violence. All human beings are endowed with a degree of free will and must choose to become involved in the enterprise of murder, or not. In much of what you read here, the motives of paramilitaries are directly attributable to a range of micro factors: peer pressure, the internal structures by which the UVF enforced discipline, or by a deep-seated hunger for revenge, all of which propel people into action just as readily as macro factors like intolerance, ideology or, as has become a fashionable explanation in certain circles, a conspiracy of ‘collusion’ with representatives of the British state and its Security Forces. The truth is much more complicated than the propagandists would have us believe.5

Whether we choose to accept it, or not, the actions of a few violent men (and women) in committing some of the worst atrocities of the troubles continue to affect the society and politics of this part of the world. That cannot be a good thing. Yet regardless of my own personal beliefs, there seems to me to be an urgent need to strip back the parochial language used to describe this phenomenon – of militancy within predominantly marginalised and deprived working-class communities – to instead ask serious questions about why, how, and with what consequences, members of the UVF felt the need to take the lives of other human beings in the way that they did.

Therefore, I am interested in depicting the violent acts perpetrated by these individuals not only according to their primary motivations but also in terms of their secondary motivations and, ultimately, tertiary motivations, which make sense only within the wider political context in which they are committed. The truth is that this is a complex story. To say that religion was always the motivating factor is empirically wrong and cannot be supported by the evidence. The fact remains that not all UVF killings were motivated by a ‘pro-British, anti-republican’ ideology either. Many members were blissfully unaware of British or Irish history and politics. Very few had a sophisticated understanding of Ulster unionism or Protestantism, never mind Catholicism, Irish republicanism or nationalism. The fact is that some of the UVF’s murders were a direct result of umbrage being taken by an acquaintance so as to save face, as a consequence of simply ‘looking 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’.

***

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.