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2

HELL SLAP IT INTO THEM

Shots were fired of plenty, some say even twenty,

Were fired that warm June night in Malvern Street,

Three taigs lay on the ground, and a fourth was wisely bound,

From a fate the others thought they’d never meet.

Anon, Ambush (1966)

Conway Bar, West Belfast, Evening, 27 May 1966

‘I am going to get it tonight. I’m going to get a hiding,’ said the heavyset man sat at the bar. John Patrick Scullion, a twenty-eight-year-old labourer from Oranmore Street in Belfast, was out for a few drinks on a Friday evening after work. He was employed at the textile machine manufacturers James Mackie and Sons on the Springfield Road. It was said of Scullion that he was a man of intemperate habits. Described by his workmates as a ‘good comrade’, he was a popular figure on the factory floor. A large man of eighteen stone, Scullion had earlier dressed in a smart dark suit, white shirt and sensible tie when he decided to pay a visit to his local bar near the bottom of the Springfield Road. As he sank pint after pint of Double X Guinness, Scullion would become increasingly distraught. The landlord of the pub, Frank Kelly, knew Scullion well, and was keenly aware that he could be prone to bouts of paranoid delusion the more alcohol he drank. Kelly later recalled how Scullion would frequently talk about how he expected to die before his thirtieth birthday.

As Kelly called last orders at the bar, Scullion rose from the stool he had been perched on for much of the evening, staggered across to the toilets to relieve himself, before leaving for the home he shared with his aunt Alice. Minutes later, he was spotted by eyewitnesses stumbling in a southerly direction, down the Springfield Road, then hanging a left along an entry near the junction of Falls Road and Clonard Street.

As Scullion made his way onto Clonard Street, he burst into song, drawing the attention of a small number of people still out and about. It wasn’t long before he tripped and fell over. Watching him hit the road with a hefty thump, four local men rushed over to help him up. A local police officer on the beat also caught a glimpse of Scullion as he fell. He had even contemplated arresting him on the charge of being drunk and disorderly, though resisted the temptation and, reassuring himself that Scullion would continue on his way, let the matter drop. A few moments later Scullion turned from Clonard Street onto Oranmore Street, where he was spotted by two young girls. It was 11:30 p.m. when the girls registered the drunk man shuffling across the street. Seconds later, they heard two loud bangs pierce the still, night air. One of the girls thought it was the sound of gunfire, while the other believed it was a car backfiring in the direction of Oranmore Street. As they ventured along the pavement, a car came racing out of Oranmore Street, before turning left into Clonard Gardens and then right into Waterville Street, a few yards from Bombay Street. The vehicle accelerated onto Cupar Way and slipped away into the heart of the Shankill. Moments later, it vanished. As the car passed the girls, they recalled how the occupants stared straight at them, their faces those of strangers. Inside the vehicle were several young men, one of whom had blonde hair.

Oblivious to the injuries he had sustained by the gunshots, John Scullion continued on home. As he reached the front door, he paused for a moment while he fumbled in his pockets for his keys. After finding the right key, he thrust it into the lock. He staggered into the hall and slammed the door behind him. A few minutes later he slouched into an armchair in the living room noisily exhaling breath as he did so. His aunt, who had been asleep upstairs, woke to the sounds of her nephew’s groans. Just as Alice Scullion came to her bedroom door, she was met by John who had forced himself upstairs, before collapsing at her feet. ‘When he left me after tea, John was in good form’, she later said. ‘He was not injured in any way.’ Realising her nephew had indeed been injured in some way, she promptly telephoned an ambulance and John was rushed to the Royal Victoria Hospital, a short distance from his home. Two weeks later John Patrick Scullion died from the wounds he received that night; wounds which doctors mistakenly attributed to him having been stabbed in an altercation. The reality had been much more serious. John Scullion had been deliberately shot by an organisation calling itself the UVF.

It would not be long before the UVF was stalking the streets again. On Sunday, 5 June 1966, James Doherty, a middle-aged lorry driver, was sleeping at home in Abbotts Drive when his son-in-law John McChrystal called, to see him about an incident that had happened just before dawn. When both men arrived to McChrystal’s home at Innis Avenue in Rathcoole estate, they found that the living room window had been shattered by what appeared to be a gunshot. As the bullet entered his home, it narrowly missed McChrystal’s head, striking the wall above the settee where he was resting.1 McChrystal was a machinist at a local industrial plant who, some loyalists alleged, had expressed republican sympathies.2

***

Most UVF members in 1966 were working men in their late teens, 20s and 30s. Only a tiny number, like Hugh McClean, were older. They were typically recruited on the basis of their reputations as hard men. Some were singled out for their service history. The added bonus of having experienced military men in the ranks, Spence believed, meant that they could handle themselves and handle weapons, if armed conflict with republicans ever broke out. The reality was that few of them had ever fired a shot in anger. As a consequence, it was usually personal grievances, mixed with hefty doses of alcohol, which played a key role in their decision to target specific individuals. In many cases, it gave them much-needed ‘Dutch courage’ to pull the trigger on fellow human beings.3 The fact that the gunman who pulled the trigger in the drive-by shooting of John Scullion aimed low at his target is evidence of the difficulty most UVF men at this time had in killing, and probably explains why the vast majority of attacks were on property, not people. This single factor would prove crucial for RUC detectives investigating subsequent UVF attacks.

Despite Spence and several others having been sworn in by high-powered faceless men, instructions from the top of the chain of command appeared to be in short supply. Essentially, the new UVF became self-tasking insofar as Spence acted as the officer in command, who selected targets and authorised action against those suspected of being ‘republicans’ or holding ‘republican sympathies’. In most cases, Spence and the Shankill UVF were manufacturing these enemies out of their own paranoia, which made them see an IRA man under every bed. The reality of the situation was somewhat different, but it did not deter the UVF from declaring war on the IRA and its enemies on 21 May 1966. They were ‘heavily armed Protestants dedicated to this cause’ read the statement they released to the press.4

In order to give the organisation a semblance of military bearing, Spence revised the oath he had taken at Pomeroy. New recruits were now to give an undertaking that they would never ‘betray a comrade or give any information to whomsoever which could prove detrimental to my Cause’. Furthermore, they had to pledge: ‘if I fail in my obligations I shall truly deserve the just deserts befalling me’.5 For Spence, the UVF was a ‘very secretive’ organisation; everything was ‘on a kind of need-to-know basis’.6 Harry Johnston, a twenty-six-year-old electrician’s mate from Argyll Street on the Shankill, recalled the circumstances leading to his own swearing-in ceremony at the time:

I joined the Ulster Volunteer Force. It was in the Standard Bar on the Shankill Road. Gusty Spence asked me to join on Monday, 13 June, and he informed me that he was a member. Spence asked me to join in the presence of Harry Millar and Sammy Robinson. Spence told me that this was an organisation to protect Ulster and Protestants. I agreed to join and, by arrangement, I went to a meeting of the Ulster Volunteer Force in an upstairs room of the Standard Bar, Shankill Road, at about 8 p.m. on 16th June 1966. Those present were Augustus Spence, Rocky Burns, Eddie McCullough, William Johnston [unreadable] and a man called ‘Bertie’ from about Berlin Street. McCullough, William Johnston, Bertie and myself were sworn in by Spence, and we took an oath to protect Ulster and Protestants against the IRA and Cumann na hBan. The object of the Ulster Volunteer Force was to keep the IRA in their place and they were classed as our enemies.7

To reinforce the seriousness of the oath they were taking, Spence slapped each of the recruits on the face and pinched their thumbs. ‘You will have to sign this oath in your own blood,’ he barked at them. 5/- was the weekly subscription, or ‘dues’, which members were forced to pay, and would be used to buy arms. In all, the initiation lasted for an hour and a half, and included a general talk about the organisation and its aims. The group next met in the Standard Bar a few days later on Saturday 18 June. ‘We talked in general and the affairs of the UVF were not discussed,’ Johnston said. The UVF would also meet regularly in the Standard Bar every Thursday night. Spence told the manager that they were forming a social club to send money to loyalists in Glasgow. All the men would then socialise together until closing time.

Those men who formed the nucleus of the Shankill Road UVF at the time were also office bearers and members of the Orange Order’s Prince Albert Lodge, which sat in the Whiterock area. The Orange Order remained strong in places like the Shankill. Lodge meetings were an occasion to meet like-minded people.8 One of those men who spent time in the company of Spence and the others was twenty-six-year-old Hughie Smyth.

Smyth grew up in a working-class home on the Shankill Road. His father, Jimmy, worked in McGladdery’s and Parkview, two brickworks in West Belfast. Like most working-class men who worked as labourers, his shifts were long. For twelve hours a day, five days a week and then seven hours on a Saturday, Jimmy worked tirelessly to put food on the table for his family. When work was scarce, the local pawn shop became a regular haunt. A life-long supporter of the Northern Ireland Labour Party (NILP), Jimmy drilled into his family a sense of pride in work. His favourite motto was ‘In order to better ourselves we must rise ourselves.’ At elections, Jimmy Smyth would often comment that all a politician needed to do to get elected on the Shankill was to ‘traipse a donkey in a union jack up the Road and people would vote for it’. There was some truth to this well-worn adage. Unionist Party politicians in the area had been regularly re-elected without much opposition, save from the occasional breakthrough coming from Independent Unionists or NILP politicians.

Jimmy Smyth would frequently express his frustration at what he believed was an unfair system, which made all working-class unionists third-class citizens. It was a view of politics that would greatly influence his son, Hugh, a committed Christian who would go on to become a respected Sunday School teacher in the neighbouring Mayo Street Mission Hall. Hugh carried his strong, faith-based beliefs into the Orange Order and Royal Black Preceptory, where he met several men who were to become the UVF’s leading lights, including Gusty Spence, Dessie Balmer Snr, Norman Sayers, Harry Stockman Snr and Jim McDonald. Stockman and McDonald were also members of the NILP. In joining the UVF, these men found an avenue by which to hit back at the establishment, ‘as well as the IRA threat’.9

***

Belfast City Centre, Daytime, 16 June 1966

A medieval crescendo of flute band music carried far and wide along the Shankill Road as Ian Paisley headed a large parade, which was steadily making its way to the Ulster Hall in Belfast city centre. Heading up the Shankill Road from the Peter’s Hill direction was Willie Blakely, who was accompanied by twenty-one-year-old Leslie Porter, a dumper driver from Beltoy Road in Kilroot. Porter had expressed keen interest in joining the UVF in the days leading up to the parade, and was anxious to become involved in their activities. Blakely and Porter had arranged to meet Gusty Spence in the Standard Bar on the Shankill. They were told to come armed, and so brought with them an automatic handgun and a Smith and Wesson revolver. Not long after they had arrived at the bar, Spence summoned Blakely and Porter to the toilets to examine Porter’s gun. After clearing it by ejecting the magazine, Spence handed the weapon back and left the bar to join the parade. The two East Antrim men remained in the bar and carried on drinking as the bands marched past.

As the final columns of the parade disappeared down the Shankill, Blakely and Porter joined the last of the marchers as they made their way towards the city centre. There they met Geordie Bigger, who was intoxicated. He became giddy with excitement at the prospect of handling Porter’s revolver. The East Antrim man became somewhat uneasy by the prospect of having to produce the pistol in broad daylight and, at first, refused. Bigger continued to badger him until Porter gave in and invited him over to a dark corner, where the gun was produced. Bigger promptly snatched it from him, unclipped the chamber and loaded three bullets into it. ‘I’m getting off side,’ Porter told both men. Blakely asked Porter to carry his automatic in his holster, which he did. The three men then headed to a pub on May Street, passing on the opportunity to attend the Paisley speech. Once the rally had finished and men began to disperse from the hall, the three UVF men left the pub and joined with others from their unit on the march back up the Shankill Road.

‘On the way up there was five of us; that was myself, Reid, McClean, Porter and Blakely,’ Bigger said later in a confusing recollection of the events of that day. ‘We got up the Shankill allright [sic]. We broke off at Crimea Street and I got the gun off Porter. I know Porter had a gun but I can’t remember what way the talk about it came round.’ It seemed that the men had hastily hatched a plan to attack premises in Crimea Street that, they alleged, ‘was doing business with tinkers and the like’. Bigger now had Blakely’s automatic handgun, or, ‘at least I was told afterwards by Dezzy [sic] Reid that was what it was’. Once they got to the ‘wee electrical shop’ Bigger fired one shot at the rear door and, he claimed, Blakely then fired two shots. ‘The gun Blakely had was a small one. I kept my gun and after the next morning I took it down to Des Reid at his home. What he did with it I do not know. After we fired the shots I went up Meenan Street. I ran. I don’t know what way Blakely ran ...’10

A couple of days later, with this initiation ritual over, McClean informed Porter that he had been accepted as a member of Shankill UVF, and that both men were to be officially sworn in. Porter said that the ceremony had taken place in a house on the Shankill. Also in attendance was McClean, Spence, Frank Curry and his wife Cassie, who was Spence’s sister, and one other man. ‘Robinson, Reid, Blakely and myself were then brought into the back kitchen,’ Porter recalled. ‘I was there, together with Blakely, Reid and McClean, [and we were] sworn in as members of the Ulster Volunteer Force. This was done by Spence. After this, Spence produced my 45 Smith and Wesson revolver and asked me if he could hold on to it. I told him that he could keep it. He then asked me if he could keep the revolver, and I said that he could. That was the last I seen of it.’11

A few days later, on 20 June, Alexander McClean, a young joiner from Carrick, was at home watching television with his daughter. The curtains and blinds were open, though the living room was in darkness. Only the flickering of the light from the TV could be seen outside. McClean was startled by a loud bang before seeing the whole front room window of his house come flying into the room. He panicked, jumped up and ran outside onto the street to see what had caused the window to shatter. The streets were empty. He couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary.12 In the shadows, though, someone, somewhere bore a grudge for something. McClean went back inside and began to clear the glass. He heeded the warning. The UVF in East Antrim had carried out its first attack. They were gearing up for many more.

***

Watson’s Bar, Malvern Street, Shankill, 2 a.m., 26 June 1966

The noise of the crash and whistle of the bands echoed around the streets of West Belfast as Orangemen made their way from the Shankill Road, along Workman Avenue and onto the Springfield Road. The annual Whiterock parade would later become one of the most contentious in Northern Ireland, but in 1966 it would pass by predominantly Catholic houses without so much as a murmur from the residents. Later that evening the men returned from the centre of Belfast, some a little worse for wear with drink. Gusty Spence and other members of the Shankill UVF decided to call into Watson’s Bar after they broke from the parade. They spent the whole evening drinking, which had, by now, become a predictable pattern of behaviour for the gang.

As the moon rose high in the night sky four young friends made their way up from where they worked at the International Hotel in the city centre to Watson’s Bar on the Lower Shankill, one of the few bars that stayed open after licensing hours. It was 1 a.m. Having consumed a fair amount of alcohol, Spence returned to the bar for more, where he caught a glimpse of the four young men entering the premises. When he returned to the table, he told the men in his company what he had seen, namely that ‘four IRA men’ had entered the premises. Spence left after a decision had been made to fetch a sack of guns from his sister Cassie’s house. Within an hour the UVF men had taken up firing positions on the corner of Ariel Street and Malvern Street. As eighteen-year-old Peter Ward and his three friends exited the bar, they were shot at by the UVF men. Three of the young friends were wounded, two seriously. Peter Ward tragically died at the scene, after being shot through the heart.13 It was a cruel sectarian act brought about as a direct result of Spence’s unit being unable to kill a well-known republican, Leo Martin, who lived in the Falls Road area. Frustrated by their failure, the UVF men resorted to Spence’s base philosophy of ‘If you can’t get an IRA man, get a Taig.’14

Robert Williamson, one of the UVF men involved in the shooting, later explained how events unfolded that night:

I went around to Watson’s Bar. I had a Luger gun in a shoulder holster with me. It was loaded with six rounds of small calibre ammunition. I think it was .79 ammunition. I joined two comrades, who I don’t want to name. I was told that there was [sic] four IRA men in the bar. There was [sic] instructions given by one of my comrades to scare them. I took up a position at the corner of Malvern Street and Ariel Street. My comrades took up their own positions. The four IRA men came out of Watson’s Bar through the Ariel Street door. I moved out towards the centre of the road. I drew my gun and fired towards the men, but low. Everybody was told to fire low. I mean my comrades. My gun jammed twice and I had to ‘cock’ it, and a round was ejected each time. That’s how I know that I fired four rounds. We all ran down Longford Street and made our way to a certain place where we all put our guns in a sack. I went home after that. This was not a deliberate attack, it happened on the spare [sic] of the moment. I think that the one who got away had a gun on him. We did not know that these IRA men were going to be in Watson’s Bar that night.15

In the twilight of the night, one local boy living across from Watson’s Bar witnessed the aftermath of the shooting. As he looked out of his bedroom window, he could see the body of one young man, Peter Ward, slouched against the wall of the bar. He had been shot in the chest. His white shirt was plastered in blood. Nobody in the area witnessed the actual killing, only its aftermath.16

The Stormont government reacted swiftly to the Malvern Street shootings, promptly proscribing the UVF under the Civil Authorities (Special Powers) (Northern Ireland) Act (1922), where it was to remain alongside the IRA as an unlawful organisation. Speaking in a rare debate on Northern Ireland at Westminster, Prime Minister Harold Wilson reassured his fellow MPs, who were concerned with the security implications of the Queen’s proposed visit. ‘With regard to this organisation,’ Wilson told the House, ‘I do not think that the hon. Member overstated the position in the words he used; it is a quasi-Fascist organisation masquerading behind a clerical cloak.’17 Following hot on the heels of Prime Minister, Gerry Fitt, a Republican Labour MP who won a seat at Westminster a few weeks earlier, made his first determined breach of the convention that prohibited discussion of Northern Ireland affairs in the chamber. He asked Wilson if he was ‘further aware that there are Unionist extremists and murder gangs operating in the streets of Northern Ireland?’ Demanding that Whitehall ‘take action and not the Government of Northern Ireland’,18 he was interrupted by heckling from Unionist parliamentarians. The Speaker of the House then took steps to censor Fitt. The debate ended abruptly.

At the Stormont Parliament on the same day, Fitt’s Republican Labour colleague, Harry Diamond MP, told those in the Belfast chamber that the attacks were not the work of an ‘isolated crackpot’ but a resolute armed conspiracy against Roman Catholics. Diamond illustrated his point by highlighting an incident in which police discovered that a bullet had been fired through the back window of a house on the Glen Road in West Belfast, something that had received ‘no publicity’ but was duly noted in the minds of Roman Catholic residents in the area.19

Before panic could set in further, the perpetrators, including Spence, were quickly apprehended by the RUC and charged with Ward’s murder. Detective Sergeant Robert Agar, based at Leopold Street, interviewed the men for several hours but couldn’t get them to admit their respective roles. In an interview with Spence, the Shankill man remained deeply evasive. ‘Was Hugh McClean, or a man named Porter from Carrickfergus, in your company last Saturday night?’ asked the detective. ‘I don’t know anyone named Hugh McClean, and I don’t know Porter,’ Spence told him flatly.20 Despite Spence’s ardent refusal to give details, some of the other men did begin to break after further, much harsher, questioning, and after threats were allegedly made against them by the detectives.21 According to McClean, Detective Constable Leo McBrien told him, ‘Once your name is in the paper, the IRA will shoot you and your family.’ McClean also reported that Detective Constable Robert Crockett had struck him on the side of the head with a rolled-up sheaf of paper. Both detectives denied making the remarks, that they had coerced a confession out of him or that they had said ‘Give us Spence and you can get out.’ Curiously, the only evidence the detectives had against Spence and his co-accused were ‘verbal’ statements, supposedly made to the police, which the witnesses refused to repeat in court. McClean later denied making the statement,22 confirmed by the fact that he was admitted into what became the UVF wing at Crumlin Road gaol.

While McClean was being questioned, the RUC had arrested Dessie Reid. He broke after only a short spell in interrogation, and voluntarily took Detective Constable George Thompson to a place known as Cherry’s farm in Ballyboag in Mallusk, where the UVF had secreted the two glass sweet jars of gelignite in an outhouse. Beside the jars, Reid showed Detective Constable Thompson six detonators wrapped in cotton wool and a length of fuse.23 Once the RUC officers obtained further evidence of the type and calibre of weapons used in the attacks from their suspects, their forensics team worked to link spent cases to several shooting incidents, including one in Carrickfergus and another found in the doorway of 2A Oranmore Street.24 They were found to be a match for the same gun, a .455 calibre Webley revolver. It did not take detectives long to piece together the conspiracy, involving men from Belfast, Glengormley, Carrickfergus and Loughgall.

The suspects rounded up by the RUC were quickly charged. After spending the summer on remand, they appeared in court on 5 September 1966. As Billy Millar, Geordie McCullough and Gusty Spence stood solemnly in the dock awaiting news of their fate, the presiding judge, Lord Chief Justice MacDermott, took his seat. Looking across at the three defendants, he read out the charges against them, which included the murders of John Scullion and Peter Ward. The judge told them he believed they had committed these acts ‘in the course or furtherance of a dangerous conspiracy and, or alternatively, or, in the course of furtherance of the activities of an association or organisation which is an unlawful association’.25 Sentencing each of the men to at least twenty years’ imprisonment, Lord MacDermott said the murder of Peter Ward had been especially ‘brutal, cowardly and cold-blooded’.26

As the wives of the defendants wept openly in the courtroom, one of them collapsed and had to be helped from the public gallery.27 Wracked with emotion, all three men did their best to look composed as they stood to attention, facing the judge. In chorus they replied ‘No Sir’ to the charges. With the exception of Spence, all of the men who appeared in the dock had broken under interrogation.

This was not the first time Spence had found himself in court. Eighteen months earlier, he had been working for the Post Office in Belfast when, on 11 March 1965, he was arrested and charged with the offence of ‘Obtaining money by false pretences contrary to Section 32(1) of the Larceny Act, 1916’. It transpired that Spence had claimed overtime that, it was alleged by his employers, he did not undertake. Twelve separate charges – relating to falsified overtime claims for each month between 27 October 1963 and 4 November 1964 – were put to the court.28 The Post Office Investigating Officer put the allegation to Spence, who claimed that, ‘Any overtime that I have claimed on the forms P1. 21B has been performed, and if you think otherwise you will have to prove it.’29 When questioned under caution, Spence told the investigating officer Detective Constable Leonard V. McConaghy at Queen Street RUC Station that he had ‘nothing to say to all the charges at this particular time’.30 He had been released on bail, but was later recalled and convicted of theft.

As Spence and the other UVF men began their lengthy prison sentences in Crumlin Road prison, the police released a statement to reassure the wider community that the threat of IRA violence had vastly diminished. The Easter Rising jubilee commemorations, which the IRA hoped would stimulate recruiting and draw more youths into the ranks, ‘fell far short of expectations’ an RUC spokesmen told the Belfast Telegraph. ‘In the few months before the celebrations there was a slight rise in recruiting, but interest since has waned. It is known that there is a swing towards a much more cultural approach, and that the militants are having a poor show.’31 Militant Protestants, like Spence, were now being exposed as having manufactured enemies out of the unfounded paranoia that had temporarily gripped the darker recesses of the Ulster Protestant psyche.

That an armed republican campaign had not materialised did not deter UVF supporters from believing that the imprisoned men had been right to take the actions they had taken. As he languished in his Victorian-era prison cell, one UVF member composed a poem called ‘The Man in the Soft Black Hat’ to celebrate the murder of Peter Ward:

The Peelers came and the ambulance too and took the three men away, ‘Three taigs they were’ said ould Liza Jane, ‘and one of them’s dead they say.’ ‘I don’t know what they were doing up here, especially the Shankill Road,’ ‘Hell slap it into them,’ big Joe declared, ‘You’d think they wouldn’t have knowed.’32

Such sentiment played straight into the hands of Protestant extremist opinion on the Shankill, and in other places throughout Northern Ireland. If the IRA threat did not exist, they would continue to manufacture it.

***

The incarceration of the UVF’s ‘leading lights’ in 1966 may have decapitated the organisation, but the genie of violent sectarianism was now well and truly out of the bottle. The liberal unionist editor of the Belfast Telegraph, Jack Sayers, a close ally of Prime Minister Terence O’Neill, warned of the growing ‘dangers of Paisleyism’, which he found ‘are not only that it provokes communal strife, but that the belief in its leader’s “fundamentalism”, in politics as well as religion, colours as much as half of the working class backbone of unionism’.33 For his part, Paisley refused to acknowledge the consequences of his rampantly sectarian sermons and speeches, with Spence’s co-accused Hugh McClean, admitting under interrogation that he was ‘terribly sorry I ever heard of that man Paisley or decided to follow him’.34

Unlike Doherty, Billy Mitchell stayed the course with Paisleyism. If the ‘bishop’ warned of dangerous times ahead, then that was something the Protestant people should take as gospel. Privately, though, he began to harbour some doubts. ‘Despite all the rhetoric I never consciously felt that there was going to be this all-out war where loyalists and republicans would be in the field fighting,’ he later said. ‘We always assumed that if there was [going to be] anything like that … it would be the B-Specials and the police [who] would have dealt with it … But, at that time, Paisley was whipping us up into believing it.’

For Mitchell, dangers did lie ahead, but he wasn’t quite sure what they were. ‘The object of our wrath was more O’Neill and liberal unionism than it was the republicans, because, being honest with you, we wouldn’t have known an IRA man from a man on the moon,’ Mitchell said. ‘Most of the big rallies we attended, all the rhetoric of Paisley at that time – ok the IRA came into it – but the main object of his attention was O’Neill and liberal unionists, ecumenical clergy … So, I never consciously felt to myself that we would be lining up with guns to go and fight the IRA. The object seemed to bring O’Neill down, and to establish a strong government that would deal with any threat.’35

The imprisonment of leading UVF men did little to take the wind out of the sails of the challenge now underway against O’Neill, nor did it stop the growth of the organisation. In late 1966, the UVF had ‘a nucleus of about thirty men on the Shankill Road’, though the more rural parts of the organisation became moribund.36

O’Neill was facing a conflict on two fronts. From the Protestant grassroots who were angered by the Stormont government’s refusal to ban Easter Rising parades, and by Catholics who remained unconvinced at the pace of reform O’Neill had put in motion. It was the latter who took to the streets, first, by forming the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA) in January 1967. This protest movement had its roots in the agitation of a husband and wife team, Con and Patricia McCloskey, from Dungannon who had been highlighting discriminatory policies by the local unionist-dominated council since 1963. The Campaign for Social Justice gained considerable support amongst the backbenchers of the British Labour Party and soon a Campaign for Democracy in Ulster was formed which gave political backing to NICRA. On 5 October 1968, a civil rights march was met by heavy-handedness from the RUC and B-Specials in Londonderry. Northern Ireland was moving closer to the precipice of major civil unrest.

As a means of upping the ante, the UVF and its allies in the UPV stood-to again, deciding to bomb a number of key installations around the province. Two explosions on 30 March and 21 April 1969 destroyed water and electricity sub-stations in Castlereagh, Belfast, and at the Silent Valley reservoir in the Mourne Mountains, County Down. The bomb attacks were designed to exaggerate the threat posed by the IRA and, hopefully, to bring down O’Neill.37 In response, O’Neill mobilised the B-Specials to protect key installations. By then it was too late. O’Neill looked weak. The UVF–UPV plot worked, with even O’Neill coming to believe that the UVF had ‘literally bombed me out of office’.38 He resigned as Prime Minister on 28 April.

UVF subversion was not without its dangers. One volunteer, Thomas McDowell, was found badly burned on 19 October, having been electrocuted by 5,600 volts as he attempted to fit a bomb to a hydroelectric power station near Ballyshannon in County Donegal. McDowell had been pulverised by the extremity of the electric charges surging through his body; succumbing to his wounds in hospital two days later. A committed Paisleyite, McDowell was a close associate of Billy Mitchell. Mitchell later explained his thinking at this time:

In the years leading up to the outbreak of civil unrest, which erupted in August 1969, I had come to believe that the Ulster Protestant had a traditional and unalienable right to resist ‘by any means under God’ the supposed enemies of our Ulster heritage and distinctive protestant way of life; and I felt that my views on this were adequately confirmed by the public and private pronouncements of many ‘pillars of society’ and by ‘men of the cloth’. The much-loved phrase – ‘by all means under God’ – was simply a synonym for ‘by force of arms’ but with the added thought that God himself would approve of such action. In the early days of the troubles, and for several years before, threats of armed resistance together with a ‘holy war’ philosophy was put across in religious phraseology, in traditional slogans linked to the old 1912-UVF, and in sermons based on the warfare of the Old Testament. [Sermons which could be taken literally or figuratively – whichever way you wanted to take them].39

For Mitchell, the piety of religious fundamentalism fused with his new-found militant mindset:

It was this carefully insinuated idea that the Ulster Protestant was a modern-day Israelite and the Irish Roman Catholic was a modern-day Philistine that gave me, and many more like me, the firm conviction that force of arms was legitimate in the struggle for Ulster’s continued existence as a Protestant state for a Protestant people. The only real difference between the battle plans and weaponry of the Old Testament Israelites and the Ulster Protestants being that of modern technology and military strategy.40

With the political situation now descending into anarchy by late 1969, Mitchell quickly drifted into the ranks of TARA, a religious fundamentalist group led by the aggressive homosexual and paedophile William McGrath.

Hence, when the Troubles finally did escalate into open-street warfare I was a natural candidate for paramilitarism, and quickly joined TARA [an Orange Order based group] and, later, the Ulster Volunteer Force. It is interesting to note that the TARA leadership opened and closed their meetings with prayer and had other religious trappings, and that most of them claimed to be evangelical Christians. Another interesting point – they were mainly from the middle-class strata of society, or, at least, from the upper working class. ‘Could these cultured and respectable folk be wrong?’ I wondered. I always answered in the negative. ‘No, of course not. They were only following our traditional Protestant way of resisting the enemy’. My brief experience of TARA reinforced my belief in the legitimate right of Protestants to use violence.41

As TARA became more of a ‘talking shop’, than a conservative armed group, Mitchell sought refuge alongside like-minded individuals, many of whom had decided to leave and join the ranks of the Shankill UVF.

The tragic irony of UVF violence was that it actually prompted republicans to rejuvenate the IRA to defend the Catholic community against militant loyalist attacks. One of the IRA’s new recruits was Tommy Gorman, who would later rise to prominence in its ranks. He recalled how intercommunal rioting intensified in August 1969, and prompted the return of the IRA, which:

… was in a pretty bad state. I think in Divis Street that night [in 1969] there were a couple of short arms and a sub-machine gun. But … at that time it was moribund. And it was in the influx of new recruits and all these older people who had been retired and had gone out back to their farms or something and had suddenly reappeared again and gave us some sort of structure.42

There has been some dispute amongst republicans, academics and journalists over the exact size of the IRA in the 1960s. Estimates vary from 30–120 members in Belfast.43 In early April 1966, Scotland Yard intelligence reports placed the numbers at 1,000, which would explain why the RUC’s Crime Special Branch believed they were facing a concerted subversive campaign. In reality, the IRA only had 1,039 members in the Republic, 251 of whom were Border Campaign veterans. Around 300 members were concentrated in Dublin.44

***

More than anything else, UVF activity between 1966 and 1969 fed intercommunal fears and whipped up emotional reactions from hardline republicans and their supporters. The IRA may have remained somewhat inert in this period, but unionists believed that it had been plotting subversion and the appearance of the NICRA marches served to confirm as much in the minds of hardline unionists at the time.

Roy Garland was one of those who believed the dire warnings. Garland was second-in-command of TARA at the time. ‘I mean, you didn’t know what to make of some of this stuff,’ he said. ‘There was talk of a coming doomsday situation and “You’re going to have to defend Ulster.” And the politicians, the sort of moderate accommodating politicians, were prepared to “sell out” so we would have to defend Ulster.’ Garland, like Mitchell, believed that the ‘doomsday situation’ was just around the corner. Paisley’s predictions were coming true. ‘I went to Paisley’s church and so on – but I didn’t find him inspiring,’ said Garland. ‘The whole leadership of TARA though did. But … to me he wasn’t an inspiring person. He didn’t inflame me with zeal or anything. But it was just the idea.’ The idea, as Garland, put it, was like an unquenchable thirst, which the fall of O’Neill in April 1969 did little to satisfy.

By the summer of 1969 violence became more organised and widespread. ‘James Chichester-Clark at one stage said it was an insurrection, referring to republicans on the Falls Road, and others talked in that sort of terminology, and if they were saying it, [we said] “look, well, obviously it’s true”.’ For Garland and other Protestant extremists, the UVF and TARA were hardline groupings with only one objective – defending their beloved Ulster from all enemies, from wherever they came. ‘That was centrally important from where I was coming from. Coming from the sort of religious background ... that can’t be underestimated. There were doubts in your mind about things.’ Garland believed that his faith was being ‘sold out’.45 Recognising an easy way to get hold of arms, the UVF under Samuel ‘Bo’ McClelland, began to infiltrate TARA. ‘When TARA came along,’ reported Irish Times journalist David McKittrick, ‘these men eagerly seized the opportunity for organised action again, but it was not long before they became restive. The main reasons for this disquiet were the religious fanaticism of the TARA leadership and the organisation’s reluctance to engage in “procurement activities” – a common euphemism for robberies.’46

In McClelland and the UVF, Billy Mitchell saw great promise. When he was given the opportunity, Mitchell jumped ship and, along with other UVF men, took ‘much of the equipment with them’, later to be interpreted by informed observers as the UVF’s strategy all along.47 Roy Garland admitted that the real reason why McClelland ordered his men to leave TARA was triggered ‘when evidence was received … of McGrath’s homosexual abuse of young men, along with rumours of his reliability’.48 It has been said that McClelland was so infuriated by McGrath’s transgressions that he burnt the TARA membership book, which included the names of many of his own men.49 Among this cadre of UVF men, what McKittrick called the ‘tougher and brighter element in the seceding group’, was Mitchell. The UVF would allow him to fulfil his deep-seated desire to fight by force of arms for God and Ulster.