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LIQUIDATING THE ENEMY

‘WE ARE LOYALISTS, WE ARE QUEEN’S MEN. Our enemies are the forces of Romanism and Communism, which must be destroyed.’

UVF Recruiting Circular (1971)1

Belfast, the capital city of Northern Ireland, grew from a small market town in the seventeenth century to become one of the major hubs for trade and industry in the British Empire by the late nineteenth century. One hundred years later its twin staple industries of shipbuilding and textile manufacturing had been joined by another, aeronautical engineering, which employed several thousand people, primarily in the east of the city. The large yellow cranes of Samson and Goliath at Harland and Wolff Shipyard, symbols of Belfast’s industrial heritage, towered high above the skyline, but were becoming increasingly exposed to the push and pull of global capitalism, now in the process of transferring its centre of gravity from North America and Western Europe to markets in the Far East. Belfast relied disproportionately on a sizeable subvention from the British taxpayer to keep its heavy industries afloat, its public services running efficiently and its social security and welfare payments pouring in amidst this transformation in its economic fortunes. At the dawn of the seventh decade of the twentieth century, this once dominant industrial city was beginning to decline.

Although Belfast had a reasonably healthy economic base when the troubles broke out in the late 1960s, it was a system which overlay a sectarian distribution of jobs. The workforce in the staple industries was divided between the majority Protestant and the minority Catholic communities. Up until 1972, such division was not always reflected in political terms, along unionist–nationalist lines on the shop floor. Sectarianism had waxed and waned since the formation of the local state in the early 1920s. By the late 1950s and early 1960s most working-class people were more interested in earning a crust and providing for their families than they were in the constitutional question. As a direct consequence, a third political labour tradition began to flourish, going on to command 100,000 votes in both the 1964 and 1970 Westminster elections.2

Higher rates of employment and the availability of disposable income may have ensured the dampening of sectarian tensions, but it wasn’t the only reason. Paddy Devlin, a Northern Ireland Labour Party (NILP) politician who represented the Falls constituency in the Northern Ireland Parliament at Stormont in East Belfast, observed that for ‘the first time in forty years there was a spirit of compromise in the air. People from the two communities were more prepared than ever to live together in harmony, and the old shibboleths that had for so long been sources of division were being closely questioned.’3 There was nothing inevitable about the outbreak of the troubles and, with the exception of a residual amount of loyalist and republican militancy, all signs pointed towards a relatively settled population. Even those who came from areas that would later become staunchly republican, like West Belfast, acknowledged how, in the 1960s, they were ‘conditioned towards accepting Northern Ireland and playing a part in it, rather than towards resisting it or begrudging it’.4

With the escalation of intercommunal tensions in 1969, people began to pull apart more noticeably. In the inner-city slums of Belfast, residential segregation gave birth to a patchwork quilt of sharp sectarian division between Catholics and Protestants. Street corners suddenly demarcated rigid psychological and territorial boundaries, as communities intersected along increasingly fraught tribal lines. Housing estates became the exclusive preserve of one side, or the other. Built in the 1950s, Rathcoole, on the outskirts of North Belfast, grew exponentially as sectarian confrontation escalated. Those Protestants displaced from their homes in Ballymurphy, Suffolk and other areas of Belfast flooded the estate as it became more and more Protestant in religious composition. As a direct consequence, Catholics began to move out into the areas vacated by Protestants in increasing numbers. Some of those individuals forcibly ejected from their childhood homes in Rathcoole, such as Bobby Sands, Freddie Scappaticci and Jim Gibney, left with embittered memories of sectarian intimidation. Like others, who also subsequently joined paramilitary organisations, they would point to their direct experience of intimidation and threats as a principal motivating factor in explaining their drift towards political violence.5

By the early 1970s, the garish pebble-dashed council houses in these new estates on the periphery of Belfast enveloped the tiny red-brick terrace houses of the old city. Both would sit in stark contrast alongside larger, more imposing, bungalows and semi-detached homes of the greater Belfast area. The commanding, undulating glens of Antrim, sat flush against Belfast Lough, where the Irish Sea disappeared into the Lagan River Valley. On the surface, the arteries of trade and industry gave Northern Ireland the appearance of a modern, outward-looking society. To the people who lived in increasingly ghettoised areas though, a different story was emerging, as the air became chokingly thick with the nauseating waft of bigotry and intolerance. It was amidst Belfast’s changing demographics that sectarian violence was reborn.

***

Shankill Road, West Belfast, Evening, 4 December 1971

Christmas decorations began to spring up along the Shankill Road as people prepared for the festive season. There was a chill in the air, but the weather was more wet and windy than wintry. Robert James Campbell, known as Jimmy to his friends, joined the UVF in the summer of 1971. On 4 December, he was summoned to a meeting with his superior officer in a bar off the Shankill Road, where he was told to accompany two other men on an operation and not to return until ‘the job’ was done. Accepting the task without knowing the full picture of what he was about to become involved in, as many other UVF men did at the time, Campbell walked outside and climbed into the back seat of a car. He sat quietly as the driver moved off towards the city centre. After a few moments, he broke the silence by informing his companions that they were ‘going to do a bar in North Queen Street’. The full significance of the task which lay before them had still not sunk in by the time the men reached their intended target, just under a mile from where their journey began.

As they sat in the vehicle alongside the pavement opposite McGurk’s Bar, the men caught a glimpse of the silhouettes of patrons moving around inside the premises. Men and women were busy enjoying themselves. The party was in full swing. Outside, the UVF men watched their prey. Calmly, deliberately, they checked every move, noted every outbreak of laughter, registered the happy revelry going on inside. Allowing the engine to tick over for a few minutes, the driver slowly slipped the car into gear and drove off around the block, before returning to the street, this time pulling up just outside the side door of the bar. One of the men picked up a taped parcel at his feet and climbed out of the car. He walked with purpose across to the bar door, before slipping inside to deposit his device in the narrow hallway. ‘That’s it’, he shouted as he hurriedly returned to the car. The men drove off down a side street and onto York Street. The driver accelerated, not too sharply, for he didn’t want to draw the attention of any passing Army patrols. As the UVF men rounded the corner a huge explosion sent their pulses racing. As calmly as he could, the driver pulled up at the kerbside and turned off the ignition. The doors opened and the men got out, making their way towards Donegal Street, where they were collected by another vehicle and driven the short distance to an Orange Hall on the Shankill.

Campbell was first to appear from the vehicle, walking inside the hall to the small bar where he reported back to the man who had sent him out on the bombing mission only half an hour earlier.6 His commander appeared pleased with the result. The two men enjoyed a drink together before calling it a night.7 Both men rounded off the evening with mixed emotions. In the eyes of the UVF commander, a blow had been struck against the enemy. Campbell was much more sanguine. He took no pleasure from his actions that evening, or on any other. He was later described by Gusty Spence as someone who was ‘non-sectarian, someone who not only worked happily alongside Catholics, but associated with them through his membership of the Grosvenor Homing Pigeon Society’, which was situated off the Falls Road. Campbell had joined the UVF in the aftermath of sectarian rioting in Penrith Street, near Dover Street, on the Shankill.8 A few months later he was participating in the first major armed attack by the UVF. At one time, Campbell had glimpsed the humanity in the faces of his Catholic work colleagues. That empathy now evaporated with every new job he was handed down by his UVF superiors.

***

When the dust settled from the explosion at McGurk’s bar, local people ran to the scene to see if they could help the injured. They were greeted by the horrific cries for help from their friends and neighbours, who had been pulverised in the bomb attack. When it exploded, the device ripped through the two-storey building, causing it to collapse in on itself. Panic spread, as people desperately picked through the rubble to rescue survivors. Body parts peppered the debris, some still smouldering from the intense heat of the explosion. This was a slaughter of innocent people, out for a drink in their local pub. They now lay dead, their bodies mangled by the callous acts of members of another community. It transpired that fifteen people had been killed in the attack, and another thirteen injured.9 Shortly afterwards, a caller to the Belfast newsroom claimed that the ‘Empire Loyalists’ group had carried out the attack. In reality it was the UVF, which, in 1971, killed seventeen people. All but two of their victims died in this single atrocity.

Although RUC and British Army intelligence on Protestant armed groups at this time was limited, they were subsequently able to intern two loyalists for terrorist offences, including the bombing of McGurk’s bar. However, it was the Unionist government’s spread of disinformation about the explosion being the result of an IRA ‘own goal’, which led to a botched handling of the case.10 That bias crept into the follow-up police investigation had even deadlier consequences, for it was the UVF, not the IRA, which had already honed its bomb-making skills at the time, the only loyalist organisation to have this capability.11 Consequently, more death and destruction would follow unchecked.

The warning signs that the Security Forces were ignoring the threat posed by loyalist paramilitaries to civilians were apparent many months earlier. Paddy Devlin, a local Stormont MP, had been handed a secret military intelligence dossier from a constituent, who had picked it up after it was dropped by an army officer in Andersonstown. Devlin found its contents ‘so hair-raising and inaccurate’ that he felt compelled to raise the matter at Stormont. Importantly, Devlin believed that the document exposed the Army’s ‘partiality … for there was little mention of the UVF or any other loyalist paramilitary organisations, even though they accounted for a significant proportion of violence at this time.’12

That said, for anyone reading the newspapers or listening to news bulletins in the closing months of 1971, the McGurk’s Bar massacre was undoubtedly part of a broader pattern of tit-for-tat attacks on pubs in Protestant and Catholic areas across Belfast. Patrons only narrowly escaped with their lives in an IRA attack on the Bluebell Bar, in the Protestant area of Sandy Row on 20 September. Two Protestant men, sixty-year-old Alexander Andrews and thirty-eight-year-old Ernest Bates, weren’t so lucky when an IRA bomb exploded in the Four Step Inn in the Protestant Shankill area on 29 September. Retaliation came just over a week later, with the UDA’s bombing of the Fiddler’s House Bar on the Falls Road on 9 October, which killed a forty-five-year-old Protestant, Winifred Maxwell. Some weeks after the attack, the IRA bombed the Red Lion Pub on the Ormeau Road on 2 November, which led to the deaths of three Protestants.13 A further attack on the Toddle Inn in York Street on 9 November heralded a new low in the armed conflict. By targeting McGurk’s Bar, the UVF was sending a message to republicans that any further attacks in the Shankill would meet with stiff opposition from loyalists.

In their targeting of premises frequented by civilians, paramilitary organisations on both sides were demonstrating a flagrant disregard for their communities, who were by now bearing the brunt of the violence. Predictably, the UVF attack on McGurk’s Bar invited swift retaliation from the IRA, which bombed the Balmoral Furniture Company on a busy Saturday on the Shankill Road a week later. Four civilians were killed instantly, including a seventeen-month-old baby and a two-year-old child. If the UVF had been seeking to increase the safety of Protestants by its actions, it failed miserably. More carnage was to follow as young people flocked to join paramilitary groupings.

***

Violence now escalated quickly across Northern Ireland. The reintroduction of internment without trial for terrorist suspects on 9 August 1971 was a strategic blunder, serving as a ‘recruiting sergeant’ for the IRA.14 Although the policy failed to decapitate the Provisional IRA, whose leaders had escaped the clutches of the Security Forces, it was based on reasonably good intelligence provided by RUC Special Branch. The military, which had been given the task of rounding up suspects, had a poor intelligence organisation and, consequently, relied disproportionately on the RUC, despite it having assumed responsibility for overseeing security policy at the operational level.15 Senior army commanders at their headquarters in Lisburn grew more and more concerned at the escalation of violence, and this made them prone to knee-jerk reactions.

The urgency to curtail disorder was felt most acutely in Londonderry, the second major city in Northern Ireland. On 28 January 1972, the RUC’s senior officer there attended a Security Forces planning meeting in the city that had been convened to deal with the possibility of a mass protest march by civil rights campaigners in defiance of a government ban.16 Although the RUC and army were jointly responsible for security in the city, the Army was to take the lead in dealing with the march when it took place on 30 January 1972. On the day, as anticipated, protestors defied the ban and left the Creggan estate for the Guildhall in the city centre. The military responded with aggressive tactics aimed at halting the march as it passed through the nationalist Bogside area. Poor tactical leadership by the commanding officer of the 1st Battalion, the Parachute Regiment, Lieutenant Colonel Derek Wilford, led to him failing to comply with an order issued by his superior officer, Brigadier Pat MacLellan, and deploying a company of his soldiers into the Bogside area where they opened fire on protestors.17 Thirteen people were massacred, and another died of his wounds two weeks later. The day became known as ‘Bloody Sunday’ and it transformed the political and military situation in Northern Ireland.

Meanwhile, in London, at the very highest levels, senior civil servants at the Ministry of Defence (MoD) began to scope out contingency plans for a united Ireland in the event that civil war broke out in the province. The Deputy Under Secretary of State at the MoD, Pat Nairne, sat down to write a letter to Sir Stewart Crawford at the FCO about what he judged to be ‘an extremely remote contingency’.18 Both men nonetheless gave serious thought to the unlikely sequences of events, should the worst happen, with the MoD tasking several staff officers to assess the effects it would have for defence. ‘The need no longer to garrison Ulster, nor to provide for its reinforcement would reduce overstretch in the army and increase the credibility of GB’s contribution to NATO,’ wrote Nairne. ‘On the other hand the probable loss of the five Irish regiments and the Ulster TAVR, and the reduction (perhaps loss) of the Irish recruiting intake would be of major concern to the army. It would be necessary to replace much, possibly all, of this loss within GB [Great Britain].’19 A full inventory of Britain’s national security assets was subsequently compiled and quietly filed away.

Across from the MoD building, in Number 10 Downing Street, Prime Minister Ted Heath was facing a major fall out from the shootings on Bloody Sunday. Huge protests got underway in Dublin, where the British Embassy was promptly burnt to the ground by demonstrators. Across the world, international opinion now shifted to London’s handling of the security situation in Northern Ireland. Much would depend on what the British government did next.

***

Dublin, 13 March 1972

A few months before Bloody Sunday, in September 1971, Ted Heath had reached out to the leader of the Labour Opposition, Harold Wilson, to see if he could use his influence with the SDLP to ensure they participated in talks aimed at reshaping the political future of Northern Ireland.20 In the wake of Bloody Sunday, Wilson sought to extend his remit to try and persuade the IRA to resist the urge to use the massacre in Derry as a justification for a renewed campaign. He made contact with an Irish Labour Party TD, Dr John O’Connell, to scope out the opportunities of getting a message to the IRA leadership. O’Connell, a respected Dublin physician, sounded them out and reported back to Wilson that they wished to meet him. Losing no time, Wilson flew to Dublin for secret talks, accompanied by his chief spokesman on Northern Ireland, Merlyn Rees, and Labour’s Chief Press Secretary Joe Haines.21

The leaders Wilson had come to meet were the Provo top brass, Dáithí Ó Conaill, John Kelly and Joe Cahill. Ó Conaill was the Provo’s lead spokesman. A tough character, he had risen to prominence with the IRA in the 1950s, and remained so. He began the meeting by reiterating the IRA’s position, which appeared, at first glance, more flexible than it had been only a year earlier. Wilson’s own position had also softened, he told the IRA delegation. In a speech he gave in November 1971, the former Prime Minister set out his 15 Point Plan for Irish unity. ‘I said fifteen years. The way your friends are going on it will be a longer period. If it could be cut down to eight or ten years I would be delighted,’ he informed the IRA leaders. Wilson’s naïvety was clearly getting the better of him. He believed that he could persuade the IRA to abandon its violence, if the British government set out a concrete timetable for withdrawal. Wilson was also convinced that he could also persuade the Provos to turn to the SDLP for political guidance. The IRA rebuffed the idea of striking a deal with the SDLP. There was no love lost between them and SDLP figures like Gerry Fitt and Paddy Devlin, they said. The IRA commanders told Wilson that they believed the SDLP had lost touch with its support base. Happy to have the IRA defend them in 1969 against loyalist attacks, the SDLP leadership now came to utterly reject the violence. The IRA delegation nevertheless maintained the façade that they hadn’t the authority to speak on behalf of the rest of the army. They could, however, sound out the Labour leader on his own position, and report back.

Veteran Belfast IRA leader Joe Cahill, who had served a prison sentence for his role in the murder of an RUC officer in the 1940s, then proceeded to reiterate the IRA’s three demands of the British government. First, he informed the Labour Party delegation, the British Army should withdraw to its barracks. Second, Stormont should be prorogued. Lastly, Cahill demanded that the British announce a total amnesty for all of its political prisoners. ‘The three demands,’ Cahill told Wilson emphatically, ‘cannot be watered down.’

It was clear from the meeting between Wilson and the IRA leadership that they wanted the British government to get tough with the Unionist regime at Stormont, which had begun to stoke fears of a ‘Protestant backlash’ in the event of security powers being taken out of its hands.22 Republicans were concerned about what that would mean for ordinary Catholics as much as for themselves. Unionist leaders were becoming more and more unpredictable, a sentiment echoed in the public speeches of most republicans at the time. Malachy McGurran, the press officer for the Republican Clubs, had been the first to publicly inquire whether Bill Craig’s Vanguard movement might embark on ‘a campaign of selective assassinations and bombings in Northern Ireland, with the possibility of certain activity in the border counties’. A day before the meeting between Wilson and the Provo leadership, IRA Chief of Staff, Sean MacStiofain, claimed that guns were being imported by Protestant extremists without much difficulty.23 Ironically, the Provisionals had also imported large numbers of weapons themselves, principally from the United States,24 and in the preceding twelve months were responsible for several hundred shootings and bombings.

Curiously, rather than find a way to disarm loyalist and republican armed groups, Wilson chose the path of least resistance. The biggest single issue for him at the meeting with the Provisional chiefs was the presence of 112,000 legally held guns, the vast majority to be found in the hands of law-abiding Protestants. Rees shared his leader’s concerns, believing that the prospect of civil war was not far off. To head it off at the pass, the IRA needed to be talked down and the loyalists disarmed. Both Wilson and Rees were of the view that the Protestants were behaving unpredictably, telling the IRA leaders they were terrified ‘that there would be massive atrocities and attempts to charge the IRA account with what came from Orange sources’.25 British opposition politicians, it seemed from this meeting, were happy to agree with the Provos that Protestant extremists were the main source of the violence. Ironically, this was not reflected in the higher echelons of the Stormont and London administrations, in large part because they may not have wanted to fight a war on two fronts. Despite having intelligence on loyalists, the British government was not to act on it until February 1973, when the first loyalists were interned.26

In giving the fullest consideration to the Provisional IRA’s three demands, Wilson told the leadership that he felt the British Army should be deployed in a defensive, peacekeeping role, an impossibility now that IRA gunmen insisted on engaging them in intense gun battles on the streets. Running in parallel with this plan, Wilson said that Protestants would be relieved of their legally held guns. The British would also simultaneously move against loyalist paramilitaries, thereby creating breathing space for negotiation between the British government and the IRA. On the question of suspending Stormont, Wilson believed that Heath was close to doing so anyway, regardless of the opposition from within the unionist community. The IRA would get their wish. With regard to the IRA’s third demand for a total amnesty for political prisoners, Wilson was considerably more guarded. ‘No British Government could accept point three after Aldershot,’ he told the stony-faced IRA leaders. ‘I would not accept it, nor would any British Government,’ he said flatly. Ó Conaill was quick to respond. ‘Not even after Bloody Sunday?’ he inquired. Wilson did not appreciate being interrupted. ‘No. An amnesty comes at the end of a political settlement. Makarios, Kenyatta … the amnesty followed the political settlement. I do not think this is out (indicating the IRA document). I would put three and two on the agenda of all-party negotiations. At the end of the day, an amnesty is on. At an appropriate point I will send a message through John O’Connell and say, “For God’s sake, give us a truce”.’

In closing the secret talks, Rees addressed the IRA leaders directly. ‘What we want out of the Government are internment and security. The question is this: What can all of us do to get it out of the Government?’27

When news of Wilson’s clandestine talks with IRA leaders leaked, the Labour leader came under a barrage of criticism. He remained undeterred. His personal view was that it was the right thing to do. By engaging in these exploratory talks, Wilson misjudged the threat posed by Protestant paramilitaries who were showing little sign of halting their violence.

Support for a united Ireland was not only confined to the opposition benches. On the day that Wilson met with the IRA in Dublin, Foreign Secretary Alec Douglas-Home wrote a letter to Prime Minister Ted Heath in which he professed his dislike for the option of imposing Direct Rule on Northern Ireland, ‘because I do not believe they are like the Scots or Welsh and I doubt if they ever will be’. For Douglas-Home, the ‘real British interest would I think be served best by pushing them towards a united Ireland rather than tying them closer to the United Kingdom’. He copied the letter to other senior Cabinet ministers, including the Defence Secretary, Chancellor of the Exchequer, Lord President of the Council and the Cabinet Secretary.28

At the highest reaches of power, loyalists had become friendless. Caught between a duplicitous British government on the one hand and their enemies in the IRA on the other, the UVF leadership resolved to carry on its campaign until such times as their republican enemies were bowed.

***

Ravenhill Road, East Belfast, Evening, 13 March 1972

A few hours after Harold Wilson concluded his talks with the IRA, loyalist paramilitaries were on the streets once again stalking their prey.29 Nineteen-year-old Patrick McCrory was at home with his mother, getting ready to go out to meet some friends. He was in good spirits as he washed and dressed himself, pulling on his brand-new rust-coloured Canada jumper and slipping on his smart black shoes. His routine was interrupted by the sound of the doorbell ringing. Thinking it was one of his friends, he trundled downstairs, stopping to pick up his jacket from the living room as he went, closing the living room door behind him. ‘I heard a loud crack,’ his mother later told police. It quickly dawned on Patrick, as he answered the door, that the caller was a gunman and not a friend. As he turned to run back into the house, a bullet was discharged from the pistol, hitting Patrick on his right shoulder blade and leaving his body by his left jaw bone. Understandably, the shot startled Patrick, sending him falling backwards. He managed to regain his balance for a few seconds before staggering into a dressing table in the hallway, knocking over an ornament with a loud crash in the meantime. The young man who had appeared from the shadows to fire the fatal shot at Patrick McCrory was Frankie Curry, a young volunteer belonging to the Red Hand Commando (RHC), which had aligned itself to the UVF. Curry was a year younger than his victim when he pulled the trigger.30

In a state of shock, Patrick stumbled into the living room holding his neck, desperately trying to stem the flow of blood now seeping from the open wound. He managed to make his way to the kitchen where he picked up a facecloth. ‘What happened son?’ asked his mother, as fear gripped her. ‘A gang,’ replied Patrick, before fainting. As he fell to the floor, Patrick’s mother ran out onto the street to raise the alarm. ‘Phone an ambulance! Phone an ambulance!’ she cried out. Lights flickered on in other homes in the street, as the McCrorys’ neighbours appeared at their front doors to see what the commotion was about. The first people to arrive on the scene found Mrs McCrory in a hysterical state. ‘Patrick has been shot,’ she told them as she went into shock. When the ambulance arrived, the paramedics found Patrick lying face down on the living room floor where he had collapsed from his wounds. ‘Don’t worry Mum, I’m alright,’ he told his mother, as he was lifted out on a stretcher from his home. A few minutes later, Patrick began to complain of not being able to breathe properly. As the ambulance screamed its way from one side of the River Lagan to the other, the paramedics fought desperately to save Patrick’s life. It was no good. Before they had even reached the Royal Victoria Hospital, Patrick suffered cardiac arrest and died a short time later.

In the days and weeks after the death of Patrick McCrory, growing resentment was being reported across Protestant areas of Belfast. Bill Craig, who was by now leader of a self-styled, right-wing organisation known as Ulster Vanguard, held a rally in Belfast’s Ormeau Park, attended by up to 100,000 people. ‘We must build up a dossier of the men and the women who are a menace to this country,’ he told those gathered on 18 March, ‘because if and when the politicians fail us, it may be our job to liquidate the enemy’. Loud cheers went up from the crowd.31

Less than forty-eight hours after Craig’s dire warning, the IRA detonated a car bomb without warning on Lower Donegal Street, killing four Protestant civilians, two RUC officers and an off-duty UDR man, and injuring a further nineteen people. Paranoia gripped huge sections of the Protestant working class. The suspicions many of them harboured of British politicians brokering secret deals with the IRA became rife. Craig’s words of warning gained further traction when the Heath government prorogued the Stormont Parliament on 24 March 1972. ‘The Shankill Road and Sandy Row, probably the strongest loyalist areas, have remained outwardly calm’, reported Times journalist Robert Fisk, ‘but plans have been made for a campaign of civil disobedience similar to that by the civil rights movement.’32 Even moderate Protestants seethed with anger. Loyalist paramilitary groups mobilised their members to take part in a planned two-day strike.

The biggest and most powerful of the loyalist groups that had attended Craig’s Ormeau rally was the Ulster Defence Association (UDA). Originally established in the Woodvale area of West Belfast, likeminded vigilantes soon formed larger associations in East Belfast, East Antrim and Londonderry. By January 1972, the UDA had come together under the control of a thirteen-member ‘Security Council’, with Charles Harding-Smith, Tommy Herron and Jim Anderson taking up leading positions. The UDA was first and foremost a mass movement, ‘democratic to a degree, recognising merit in men’s abilities to fight, or organise or commit offences for which they could expect long terms of imprisonment’.33 Like the UVF, the UDA’s membership was fiercely working-class, but its paramilitary activities were initially limited in the sense that it orientated principally around defence and street disturbances.34 As the organisation grew in size, it began to structure itself along British Army lines – into platoons, companies and, eventually, brigades. UDA leaders were usually elected on the basis of tough reputations as hard men in local areas, others if they had prior military training. In Rathcoole, the South East Antrim’s power base, leaders were elected by free vote.35

The UDA opposed any constitutional weakening of Northern Ireland’s position within the United Kingdom, and initially led opposition to attempts to undermine the Stormont government.36 Like it had done on 20 March, the UDA led its men to another huge Vanguard rally outside Belfast City Hall on 27 March, attended by around 10,000 people. Craig denounced as ‘traitors’ anyone who willingly sided with the British government’s policy of suspending the local Parliament. In perhaps the most visible sign of a rightward shift towards talk of independence for Ulster, a young man scaled the front façade of the City Hall and tore down the Union Jack that fluttered in the breeze, unmolested, all year round. A few moments later he raised the red, white and gold Ulster Flag emblazoned with a red hand in its centre. The crowd roared with approval.37

Despite the fiery rhetoric of a handful of unionist politicians, the Security Forces had little, if any, intelligence to suggest that this Protestant disaffection would translate into a much more concerted armed campaign. However, the army did believe that there was ‘increasing evidence that extreme Protestant organisations are trying to procure arms, but no evidence so far that any large quantity has been successfully delivered’. Security Forces commanders were of the view that Protestant resentment would manifest itself in ‘more low level, largely uncoordinated incidents of a sectarian nature’.38 By spring, military commanders were looking eagerly to moderate politicians and a nascent peace movement to take the ‘sting out of the tail’ of the violence before it worsened any further. Until such times as such violence dissipated, soldiers would remain locked in intense gun battles with the IRA in Belfast, Derry and elsewhere.

While the IRA remained active in terms of shooting incidents, it struggled to perfect its bomb-making capability. The Abercorn Restaurant bomb attack on 4 March 1972, which killed two young women and injured 130 others, was the high point of its bombing campaign. In seeking to complement the sniping activity of its volunteers, it sought to school more of its members in the deadly ingenuity of constructing home-made devices, colloquially known as ‘Co-Op mix’, because of how easily accessible the ingredients were in local shops. But it came with a heavy price. The IRA lost four members in a premature bomb blast in the Clonard area of West Belfast in early March, three members in Bawnmore, North Belfast, a few weeks later and another eight members in Short Strand, East Belfast, at the end of May. Some of those killed were Catholic civilians, who had merely been at home relaxing, as the bombers tinkered with their explosives in so-called ‘safe houses’. Nevertheless, the IRA’s strategy of targeting army mobile and foot patrols soon paid off when, in June 1972, the group killed sixteen soldiers over a four-week period.

By July 1972, the armed conflict had taken on a deadlier form in Belfast, as loyalists and republicans carried out a sectarian tit-for-tat murder spree across the north and west of the city. Civilians were the principal casualties in this mini-war of attrition. The UDA abducted, beat and shot two men at the beginning of the month. The next day the Provisional IRA killed two Protestants who had mistakenly crossed into a Catholic area after a night out in the same way. The UDA were quick to retaliate by abducting and killing two Catholics the same day. On 3 July, the UVF abducted, beat and shot John Patrick O’Hanlon. Police discovered his body with a hood over his head and his hands and ankles tied with a bootlace, which was a ritual performed by terror gangs on both sides before they shot their victims at point-blank range in the head. O’Hanlon lived in the lower Crumlin Road area, and had gone out late at night to buy chips from a local cafe. Seven months earlier, John O’Hanlon was one of those who scrambled to help victims of the UVF bombing of McGurk’s bar. He had even pulled the owner’s son, John McGurk, from the rubble, thereby saving his life.39 It was one of many dark twists of fate in the close-knit killing grounds of the troubles.

A few days later the Provos abducted and killed a Protestant, David Andrews, in North Belfast. In the south of the city they kidnapped another Protestant civilian, who did manage to escape before being killed, and they also murdered a UDA member who strayed into a Catholic area. On 9 July, the Provisionals abducted and shot three friends on a night out, one of whom, a Catholic, was serving as a Staff Sergeant in the Territorial Army. In retaliation, the UDA murdered two Catholics on 11 July, one of whom was a fourteen-year-old boy. IRA members responded by abducting a Protestant civilian, torturing him and shooting him in the head at point-blank range. He was found with a pillowcase over his head. In the remaining days of the month, the UDA abducted and killed Catholic civilians on five other occasions. All the victims were killed in the same way. At the end of the month, a fifty-seven-year-old Protestant lorry driver, William McAfee, was also abducted, probably by the same gang. He had his hands tied with cord, a hood placed over him and had been shot twice in the back of the head. It was believed that the UDA had mistaken him for a Catholic.40

According to the logic of local circumstances, the violence pulsated uncontrollably despite British government attempts to take the sting out of the IRA’s tail by suspending unionist rule at Stormont. Worse was to follow.