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4

THE BEGINNING OF THE END

‘Anarchy will not defeat anarchy. Lawlessness will not defeat lawlessness. The only way in which this movement can be put down is by the Forces of the Crown, who must be supported by all law-abiding citizens in the duty that lies before them.’

Ian Paisley, speaking at Westminster on 24 July 1972.1

Oxford Street Bus Station, Belfast City Centre, 2:45 p.m., Friday, 21 July 1972

The depot manager of Oxford Street bus station heard the crash and thud of the bombs as he sat in his office. One explosion nearby shook the building and sent shards of glass flying inside. ‘Due to the bomb on the bridge going off some of my staff in the general office were in hysterics, so I calmed them down and then left the office to see if there was any more damage to the offices,’ he later recalled. It was about then that his telephone started ringing. ‘A caller from the Ulsterbus head office rang the Oxford Street bus station general office saying that a bomb had been left in a car outside the station.’ Two soldiers came in and asked if he could identify the car. A few minutes later the depot manager took the soldiers outside to a Morris 1100 car. Curiously, he noticed that it had one of the company’s official passes on it, a sign perhaps of how well-organised the attacks were that day. Just as the depot manager put his hand on the vehicle, a bomb inside the vehicle exploded. ‘I was thrown up into the canopy outside the offices and when I fell one of the steel beams pinned me down,’ he told the police. ‘I was conscious and knew that I was badly injured and a lot of my clothes were blown off. I saw a fire starting in the rubble near me and tried to get closer. There was smoke and dust everywhere and someone eventually pulled me clear.’2

A few moments earlier, thirty-nine-year-old Tommy Killops, fifteen-year-old Billy Crothers and eighteen-year-old Billy Irvine were searching the yard for suspicious vehicles. They too were caught in the explosion, their bodies were incinerated by the blast. Thirty-two-year-old soldier Stephen Cooper, who had arrived on the scene with his patrol, was also killed after dismounting from his vehicle. The warning that was passed to the depot manager was completely inadequate and received too late to evacuate the premises. It was the same story throughout the city as the IRA blitzed key infrastructural targets.

Nineteen-year-old David Ervine was sat in the top lounge bar of Clancy’s Tavern on the corner of the Albertbridge Road and Castlereagh Road across the Lagan in East Belfast when the explosions started. He was enjoying a quiet pint with some friends at the time. Glancing out across the city, he could see the puffs of smoke rising over the Belfast skyline, as one bomb after another detonated before his eyes. ‘I think it was the beginning of the end,’ he recalled. ‘It was so brutal, so raw.’ The day would go down in infamy as ‘Bloody Friday’. Resolving then to ‘hit back’, the young Ervine took up a ‘long-standing invitation’ to join the UVF.3 It was in this context that scores of young men began to flock to loyalist paramilitary groups, many of whom later recalled that Bloody Friday had pushed them ‘off the fence’, thinking that ‘the best means of defence was attack’.4

The noise of the explosions carried far and wide across Belfast. A group of children playing on waste ground overlooking the city in the Turf Lodge estate watched on in disbelief as the puffs of smoke went up. ‘We thought the world was going to end’, one of them recalled. Down below, the children could see the city centre, knowing it was packed with shoppers.5 Men, women and children strolling happily through its streets, basking in the beautiful sunshine, were soon running in blind panic and screaming for their lives as the buildings around them shook with the sheer force of the bomb blasts. RTÉ journalist, Kevin Myers, was standing on top of one of the tallest buildings in Belfast. ‘Smoke rose from almost a score of spiralling columns. The city was a bedlam of sirens, of loosened sheets of glass exploding on the ground,’ he wrote in his memoirs, ‘and most of all, of the wailing and the shrieking of the maimed and the hysterical, rising above the streets in a chorus of atonal dementia.’6

Remarkably, for the ferocity of the attack, only eleven people were killed and a further 130 were injured in the IRA’s indiscriminate terrorist attacks on the city centre that day. Some twenty-two bombs were detonated within a one-mile radius. ‘The figures,’ wrote Myers, ‘do not begin to capture the horror of that long-lost era. Nothing can.’7 What did stick in the minds of most people who watched the drama unfold on television screens across the world were the pictures of firemen shovelling bits of bodies into bin bags. It was imagery that became seared in memory of the teenage David Ervine.

UVF leaders now faced a dilemma in the wake of Bloody Friday. On the one hand, they were swamped by the influx of new members, many of whom, like Ervine, were eager to ‘hit back’ at the IRA. On the other hand, several influential community leaders, such as West Belfast Methodist minister and NILP activist Reverend John Stewart, were trying to wean the UVF away from violence and towards politics. Billy Mitchell, who led the powerful East Antrim UVF, was one of those senior UVF commanders who regularly met with Stewart. He said that Stewart ‘encouraged them to think in terms of bread and butter politics as well as the constitutional issue’.8 This was a crucial development, especially since other NILP activists, like Jim McDonald, had now entered the ranks of the welfare component of the UVF and were keen to develop its political awareness.9 Stewart believed that the UVF should ‘respond to republicanism through non-violence and dialogue’.10 It was to be a case of too much too soon, as the UVF faced internal calls from younger members to respond in kind to republicanism. Despite his failure to persuade the UVF to unilaterally halt its violent campaign, he was able to plant the seeds that would later re-emerge in a political form as the UVF sought to establish a class-based challenge to the Unionist Party, VUPP and DUP.

In response to the devastating bomb attacks on Belfast on Bloody Friday, British politicians in Whitehall ordered the army to retake so-called ‘no-go’ areas, which had been established primarily in republican areas. They were determined to smash the power the IRA had now come to hold over some communities. It was in these areas that people turned a blind eye through loyalty, fear and intimidation by paramilitary organisations. It was in these communities that terrorist bomb-makers could operate with impunity in constructing their instruments of destruction, where they could train their members and where they could plan for their renewed offences. London was not prepared to allow this to go unchallenged. Launched on 31 July, the army’s Operation Motorman, one of its biggest surges of troops since the ill-fated Suez intervention in 1956, successfully dismantled no-go areas and reasserted British government control over nationalist areas. Though government officials hoped for the best, loyalists confirmed their greatest fears, using the Security Forces’ offensive against the IRA as an excuse to lay firm roots in areas where loyalist paramilitaries held sway. It would draw the police and army closer towards conflict with Protestant armed groups, particularly with the UVF.

On 16 September 1972, twenty-six-year-old UVF activist, Sinclair Johnston, was shot in a confrontation between loyalists and the Security Forces during a riot at St John’s Place in Larne. Newspaper reports at the time described Johnston as a UVF sergeant working in the intelligence section of the organisation. On the day of his funeral, over 3,000 mourners turned out to pay their respects. ‘The first unit behind the coffins were the girls dressed in white,’ recalled Billy Mitchell, Johnston’s superior officer at the time. ‘Then the unit of the Command Staff in full black uniform and then civilians behind – although many of them would have been UVF. It would have been the first public showing of the UVF on parade.’11 Ranks of volunteers dressed in black leather jackets, Sam Brown belts, cap comforters and sporting dark glasses followed in military fashion behind the cortège.

Minutes before Johnston’s remains were interred, a colour party of three gunmen emerged to fire a volley of shots above the coffin. The carefully stage-managed event announced the UVF to the world, in a way that the Vanguard rallies had done for the UDA.

***

Glenvarlock Street, East Belfast, Afternoon, 28 September 1972

It was mid-afternoon when a young man with long curly black hair and blue eyes called at the door of thirty-two-year-old Ted Pavis, an unemployed paint sprayer, who lived with his parents in the east of the city. Ted rose early at 8 a.m. and spent the morning lazing around his parents’ house, when his father came home from the local shops where he had gambled some of his wages in the bookmakers. It was a normal routine for thousands of working-class men across the city at the time. Meanwhile, Ted’s mother was busy in the kitchen, peeling the spuds for her son and husband, leaving late morning to go to the shops to pick up some butter for their tea. The smell of cooking wafted through the family home as Mrs Pavis left the kitchen to answer a knock on the front door. When she opened the door, she saw a young man standing there. ‘Would you come in a minute?’ she inquired, inviting him in. As he crossed the threshold of the family home, Mrs Pavis called out to Ted to let him know he had a visitor.

Ted had been looking out of the living room window at the time and spotted the caller, someone who he had been expecting. ‘Thanks ma,’ he said, as his visitor entered the living room.

‘Here’s a fellow who has come to borrow the mini bus,’ he added.

‘Sure we have no mini bus.’

The young man with the long curly hair sat down on the sofa and made himself at home, unimpressed by the attempt to fob him off. Ted fidgeted, then turned to his father. ‘How long is that old van of ours away?’ he asked. ‘It’s been away a long time,’ replied his father. The man looked over to Ted’s father, noticing a small dog resting under the table. ‘That’s a brave lump of a dog you’ve got,’ he said. ‘It’s not a bad un’,’ Ted’s father responded, as he folded his newspaper in half and placed it in front of him. As he rose from the kitchen table, Ted’s father walked into the hall, where he slipped on his shoes and lifted the dog lead from a coat hanger. A few minutes later he had gone, leaving the house by the back door. As Ted’s father walked down the side entry and onto the street, he caught a glimpse of another young man sitting astride a red Honda motorcycle. He had a helmet on and the engine was still running. He thought nothing of it as he carried on walking down the street until he neared the main Castlereagh Road.

A few minutes later, the young man with the long curly hair got up and made his excuses to leave. As he did so, he approached Pavis and put his arm around him, before walking with him down the hallway towards the front door. Ted had no sooner opened the door than the other young man pulled out a pistol from his waistband, shooting Pavis at point-blank range. Ted’s mother was busying herself in the kitchen when she heard the shot. ‘I looked out of the inside front door and saw Ted lying in the hallway near the doorstep,’ she later told detectives.

The young man with curly hair lost no time in running out of the house and climbing onto the back of the motorcycle. ‘Come on, get out of here quick,’ he shouted to his accomplice as they made good their escape. Ted’s father was halfway up Glenvarlock Street when he heard the shot ring out. ‘I then heard squealing so I ran up the road to [redacted] where I saw of the body of Ted lying in the hall. There was an awful mess of blood and I knew Ted had been shot,’ he said.

In his statement to the police, Ted’s father described the suspect as being ‘twenty-five years to thirty years, 5'6" or 7", well built, dark longish hair with long sidelocks, swarthy complexion or unshaven, thick lips, wearing a black leather shorty jacket which seemed to have a belt on it’. Ted’s mother also gave a very similar description of the main suspect, who, she said, was ‘approximately thirty years, 5'5"–5'6", black curly bushy hair with long side locks, scruffy appearance, very thick lips, he was wearing a black coloured motor cycle type coat with a belt’.12 Ted’s father also gave a further description of the man driving the motorcycle, who he recalled was ‘twenty years, 5'3" or 4", light build, good-looking and tidy appearance, light or gingery hair, shortish, wearing a light coloured jacket’.13

It was not immediately obvious why Pavis had been shot, though it soon emerged that word had been passed to him during an earlier spell in prison that he ‘would be out, but you wouldn’t be back’.14 The UVF leadership, journalists believed, had ordered Pavis’ killing because they suspected that he had been selling guns to the IRA.15

It took several months for the police to establish who was responsible for the killing. Eventually their inquiries led them to two young men, Hugh Leonard Murphy, a twenty-year-old lorry driver, and John Mervyn Connor, a nineteen-year-old apprentice motor mechanic. Both were arrested and charged with the murder of Ted Pavis on 25 January 1973. Connor refused to reveal the name of his accomplice in the first round of questioning. After a follow-up interrogation, he gave a full statement to police about the incident:

I now want to tell you who done the shooting over in Glenvarlock Street, it was [Lenny Murphy] who comes from Percy Street and who you have in custody at the present. On the day we went over to Pavis’s house I did not know what [Murphy] wanted to see him about. When they were talking outside I was fiddling about with the bike to keep it going and I did not see [Murphy] produce a gun, but I heard the shot and saw Pavis slump to the ground. [Murphy] ran over and got on the back of the bike. He put his arms around my waist and I noticed a gun in his right hand, pointing up in the air. [Murphy] took the gun away from my waist when he stopped at the bottom of the entry.16

The RUC also established that, when the two men returned to the Shankill, Murphy ordered Connor to torch the motorcycle and hide the weapons they had taken on the job with them.

An associate of Murphy and Connor, who was not involved in the killing, said that after killing Pavis, he was travelling in a car along the Shankill Road with both men. ‘The car hit a pigeon, or something like that,’ the man recalled, ‘and Mervyn Connor stopped the car. He got out and Murphy wasn’t far behind. Mervyn picked up the pigeon but Murphy just snatched it out of his hand and twisted its neck. I knew then that he was not a person you should ever cross. He was just cold. The way he spoke about the murder of Ted Pavis was not something you would expect. I’ve heard guys in hysterics, hitting the drink, crying after they’ve done a murder. The way Murphy talked about the murder was just not normal.’17

Despite his best attempts to cover his tracks, Murphy and Connor were remanded in custody and transferred to the remand wing of Crumlin Road Prison.

***

Conlon’s Bar, Belfast City Centre, 9 p.m., Saturday, 28 September 1972

John J. Conlon’s Bar in Francis Street, Smithfield, was alive with the sounds of revellers enjoying themselves. Twenty-one-year-old James ‘Jimmy’ Gillen and twenty-four-year-old Patrick McKee, two young unemployed men from Ballymurphy, had come down into the city centre for a night out with friends. The group sat perched on a long bench in front of the window of the pub, watching Saturday Variety on the TV along with other customers. Laughter filled the air, and the alcohol kept flowing. There were up to thirteen people in the bar at the time. At around 9:05 p.m. an old man with a dog walked into the bar. No sooner had he ordered a drink than an explosion ripped through the building, collapsing the front wall. Patrick McKee was killed outright. His friend, Jimmy Gillen, died two weeks later from the injuries sustained in the blast. ‘I do not remember hearing a bang or explosion and just felt myself spinning and I was buried below a lot of rubble,’ an eyewitness told police. ‘I was pulled out into the street to the corner of the markets and a soldier bandaged my head and an ambulance brought me to hospital.’18 The survivor who gave the statement had been sitting beside Jimmy Gillen when the bomb went off. His injuries included a fractured skull, deafness, shock and concussion. Moments before the explosion, a policeman had been passing the Conlon’s on a routine patrol. He became suspicious of the vehicle parked across the street from the bar. His partner halted the patrol car and the officer got out to investigate. As he closed in on the suspicious vehicle, he smelt something unusual and immediately realised it was a bomb. As the officer turned around to relay his discovery to his partner, the bomb exploded, sending him flying over his vehicle.19 This was one of a number of car bombings by the UVF at the time.

Despite having now perfected its bomb-making skills, the UVF was chronically short of weapons. On 23 October the Mid Ulster UVF staged a massive raid of the local UDR barracks. Armed men overpowered the sentry and gained access to the armoury, where they stole 85 SLRs, 21 SMGs, 1,300 rounds of ammunition, flares and flak jackets. Those who gained access to the camp knew exactly where to find the weapons.20 Most of the weapons, however, were later recovered. The UVF would continue to seek out other avenues, especially as its ranks began to swell further. A satellite organisation had also been formed in 1972 by William ‘Plum’ Smith, Winston Rea and twenty-year-old Stevie McCrea. On Halloween night, 1973, McCrea, a young gunman belonging to the Red Hand Commando (RHC), shot and killed seventeen-year-old James ‘Jiffy’ Kerr on the Lisburn Road in Belfast. A police officer standing nearby heard the fatal shots. When he arrived, he found McCrea stood over the body of a man. He tried to escape, but was later caught red-handed with a Webley revolver stuck in his waistband. When asked why he targeted Kerr, McCrea said it was ‘because he was a fenian bastard’. It seems that Kerr’s close association with IRA man John Rooney sealed his fate in the eyes of the RHC, though he was never claimed by the Provisionals as a member.21 McCrea was later charged with murder and sentenced to sixteen years in prison.

***

HMP Crumlin Road, Belfast, 7:30 p.m., 11 February 1973

The sound of a loud siren pierced the cold wintry air that seemed to envelope Crumlin Road Prison that evening. It was a sound familiar to people who lived locally and usually signalled an attempted escape. Moments earlier, two UVF prisoners, Lenny Murphy and Ronald Waller, had sawn off the bars of the window of cell number 21 in C2 wing before throwing a rope over the thick Victorian-era walls. Cell chairs with rope tied around them had been used as grappling hooks. A prison officer walking past on a routine patrol below was startled when he saw two legs dangling from the cell window.22 As he shone the torch up on the wall he shouted, ‘Don’t bother, lads’, hoping the prisoners would give up and crawl back the way they came. He was surprised when a voice shouted back for him to ‘keep quiet’, which was followed by an appeal to his community spirit. ‘You are a Shankill Road man like ourselves,’ whispered Murphy. Without hesitation, the officer retorted with a curt, ‘No chance’. A few moments later Murphy jumped down and turned to face the prison officer. Both men eyeballed one another in a brief Mexican standoff before the prison officer felt something sharp being thrust into his stomach, causing him to double over in pain. As he did so, he tried desperately to use his radio. ‘Yankee Two …’ No sooner had the words rolled off the officer’s tongue than Waller moved to grab him. ‘For fuck’s sake keep quiet,’ he said in a hushed voice. There was a brief struggle as the prisoners tried to grab the radio receiver off the officer. He resisted, and was kicked in the balls. As he fell to the ground, a loud siren warbled into action. Realising their chances of escaping had been dramatically reduced, the men beat a hasty retreat back up the rope into their cell. They were going nowhere.

Nine weeks later, as prisoners enjoyed a musical concert in C Wing, Murphy was putting a new and more daring escape plan into operation. Sometime on 24 April, he visited Mervyn Connor, his accomplice from the Pavis murder, for a chat. The two men had since been separated to prevent them from getting their story straight and, in the meantime, Connor had taken the opportunity to give evidence to detectives who visited him that Murphy had killed Ted Pavis. What happened next is unclear, but it appears that either Murphy slipped a vial of cyanide into Connor’s drink or forced his mouth open and poured it down his throat before clamping his jaws shut and holding them closed, until Connor swallowed the poison. As the afternoon wore on, Connor complained to his cell mate of feeling unwell and lay down on his bunk. He even skipped his tea in the canteen. At 6:20 p.m. Connor roused himself from his cell and approached a prison warden patrolling the landing to ask for hot water. It was the last time anyone saw him alive. Twenty minutes later his cell mate returned from the concert to find Connor lying prostate on his bed face up, his mouth full of bloody foam. The floor around him was soaking wet with urine. Relaxing music played on the radio in the background but the scene was one of utter chaos. Connor’s right arm and leg were dangling off the bed and his other leg was outstretched where he had undergone spasms from a nasty, violent death. A prison officer on the wing quickly entered the cell to administer first aid when the alarm was raised. He managed to get a faint pulse. Connor had been revived momentarily, turned violently before vomiting onto the floor. A doctor from the Mater Hospital was called and, when he arrived a few minutes later, applied external cardio massage and administered oxygen. Connor was unresponsive, then, suddenly, his pupils dilated and his heartbeat became even fainter. Despite the best efforts of the doctor, Mervyn Connor was pronounced dead at 7:30 p.m.23

Like other prisoners facing long days in the Crum, Mervyn Connor had suffered from bouts of depression. Initially, it was thought that he had committed suicide. A note addressed to the prison governor and discovered on the small desk in his cell, supported this theory. It read:

To whom it may concern,

During my time in prison I have done nothing but think about what I have done to the fellow called [name redacted] I have told lies and made false statements against him. I would not have done this only for the pressure the police put on me most of all [name redacted]

So I can not live with this on my mind

I hope you will understand

[name redacted]

In a short, unremarkable report on the incident, the prison authorities noted how, ‘During the previous couple of days Mervyn took a craze for drawing crosses on sheets of paper.’ The prisoner who had shared a cell with him for three weeks said that Connor had never said anything against the police. He seemed fine, and his request for some letter writing paper gave nobody any cause for concern.

C Wing had originally housed the execution chamber. Now it would become synonymous with Lenny Murphy’s ruthlessness, and form part of the urban legend surrounding his reputation inside the UVF.

Mervyn Connor had joined the UVF in 1972. Originally from the Shankill Road, he was a labourer by trade. Apart from a surgical procedure for a hernia when he was eighteen, Connor was in good health when he died. Psychologically, he was also fit and healthy, which aroused suspicions about the apparent suicide note. So devastated by their son’s death were his parents that police believed they would be willing to testify at his inquest later that year about his state of mind. When they were shown the alleged suicide note, Mrs Connor said that she did ‘not think’ her son ‘was telling the truth’ in it. ‘He had written a statement which implicated another prisoner in being guilty of murder. The name of the other prisoner is the name mentioned in Exhibit C1.’ Detectives attempting to investigate the death said they had ‘run into a wall of silence when questioning prisoners in the jail’.24

It did not take the pathologist long to identify the cause of Connor’s death, concluding that the young man had been poisoned with cyanide. The autopsy revealed that he had significant levels of the substance in his blood and organs and that this was a result of it having been ingested orally. Normally an amount of 50–300 milligrams was needed to kill an adult male but in Connor’s case it was inordinately high, at 450 milligrams. The only way that that could have possibly been administered was if his mouth had been held open and the poison forced down his throat. Even though the poisoning of Mervyn Connor had been witnessed on the wing, most of the eyewitnesses placed themselves at the scene of the concert – it would have been risky giving evidence against Murphy.

At his trial between 18–20 June 1973, Lenny Murphy was acquitted of killing Ted Pavis by the jury. Having observed several murder trials before from the public gallery, he knew how to play the system.25 Without incriminating evidence from his co-accused, who he had killed, he was convinced that the trial would collapse. Murphy walked free from the Crumlin Road Courthouse opposite the prison. His taste of freedom lasted only a few minutes, after which RUC officers re-arrested him under the Special Powers Act.26

***

During his several months at large in July–October 1972, Gusty Spence had reorganised the UVF more formally along British Army lines, with three battalion areas established in Belfast, East Antrim and Mid Ulster. In turn, units equating to geographic areas were established in roughly company size of 100–200 men each. Although these companies were further divided into platoons of 20–30 men, the welfare component continued to dominate. The military ‘teams’ were much smaller, and numbered up to a dozen or so men. With more men in the non-combatant ranks of the organisation, the ruling Brigade Staff began to think about ways to put them to good use in support of military activities. By the middle of 1973, this included approving political activity. Billy Hutchinson, a young YCV member who was particularly active on the Shankill Road at the time, remembered how this played out:

I think what you have to do is you have to look at the UVF structure in terms of who occupied the five command positions on Brigade Staff and, at any given time, whoever was in charge, it would have been a minority view in terms of the politics, whether it be left-wing or right-wing, actually dictated what happened on the streets. In ’73 you would have had a more left-wing sort of regime. I remember in ’73, they called a ceasefire to try and allow the whole thing of the power-sharing executive at Stormont to actually formulate a government. Now, what brought that down was a number of things. But the UVF did ... try and allow … politics to actually grow. All those things came about because of the politics of the leadership of the UVF.27

For much of 1973, there was a feeling within the UVF that a turn towards politics meant ‘going soft’. Several prolific gunmen in the Shankill UVF believed that force, not politics, was the only thing their enemy understood. In leadership terms, this was a period of ‘great flux’ for the UVF.28 The carnage unleashed on ‘Bloody Friday’ still weighed heavily in the minds of the UVF’s newest recruits a year after the events of that day. They were determined to hit back, even if they had no idea why they were doing so.

In late 1973, a Mini Cooper made its way through Belfast city centre with five men onboard. They were all packed tightly into the car. The three men in the rear passenger seats sat with a large gas canister bomb at their feet. They were loyalist paramilitaries from the UVF on their way to mount an attack on a Catholic bar, when they were promptly halted at an army checkpoint. The soldiers at the checkpoint raised their rifles, pulling them tightly into their shoulders as they took up firing positions. At great personal risk, an NCO stepped forward and put out his hand, indicating to the driver to stop. He then ordered the men out of the vehicle, and radioed for RUC backup. ‘Rucksac required at my location. Over,’ he spoke clearly into the transmitter. A few minutes later two RUC officers arrived at the scene, greeted by a fairly typical sight of terrorist suspects spread-eagled against a wall, with the soldiers training their rifles on the men. One of the policemen ordered one of the young suspects to turn around to face him. As he did so, the suspect whispered something to him. ‘What’s that,’ asked the stern-looking police officer. ‘Here mate,’ the man repeated. ‘You distract the army and we’ll make a run for it.’ The policeman stared back at him with a sense of amusement. ‘The young loyalist really believed I was on his side,’ said the officer. ‘Right,’ answered the RUC man. ‘I’ve a better idea. I’ll distract the army, you make a run for it, and I’ll shoot you.’ The loyalist was confused. A member of his police force was talking about shooting him. It didn’t make sense. ‘Sure we’re all on the same side,’ said the loyalist. ‘No we’re not,’ replied the officer, a Protestant. ‘I’m law and order. You’re a law breaker.’

The young loyalist’s confusion was shared by many other working-class Protestants who were by now feeling marginalised. British politicians had spoken to the IRA on two separate occasions in March and July 1972, the army seemed to be tolerating IRA patrols, even after Operation Motorman, and the police were now turning against loyalists. Young men flocking to paramilitary groups began to feel out of sorts with the world. In their anger and frustration, they responded by wrecking their own areas. ‘Most of the major public order disturbances I was involved in then were in Protestant areas,’ recalled a former RUC officer based in Whiteabbey at the time. ‘It was just stupid. I often asked them did they not think it was stupid to wreck their own areas? They never offered me an answer.’29 In lieu of answers on why they were doing what they were doing, loyalist paramilitary groups continued to swell with disaffected young men like these.

In political terms, unionism was divided. The Ulster Unionist Party had been dealt a body blow by the transference of powers to Whitehall. A Northern Ireland Office had been established in London and at Stormont, which would administer British rule directly. The new Secretary of State, William Whitelaw, held talks in October and November 1973 aimed at resolving the continuing crisis. A conference was called in at the Civil Service college at Sunningdale in December to plot a course for Northern Ireland’s constitutional future, which would lead to an Agreement to establish a powersharing executive at Stormont. For many moderate unionists, led by Brian Faulkner, a cross-community government, with strong representation from the SDLP, was just about tolerable. But what they couldn’t accept was the greater say that Dublin would have in their own internal affairs.30

The UDA’s ‘supreme commander’, Andy Tyrie, and other paramilitary chiefs believed that a power-sharing executive with a ‘Council of Ireland’ attached to it would leave Protestants further exposed. What terrified Tyrie was what he saw as the effectiveness of SDLP Ministers, and the relative inexperience of their Unionist counterparts. So, he set about conspiring with Glen Barr, a UDA spokesman from the Waterside area of Londonderry, and trade unionist Harry Murray from Belfast, to set up a coordinating committee for what was to emerge as the Ulster Workers’ Council (UWC). Its first meeting was held in the Seagoe Hotel in Portadown, in December 1973. Tyrie was right to be sceptical. Ulster loyalism was not served well by its politicians. Brian Faulkner had failed to carry the majority of his party with him, while Bill Craig talked tough in large fascistic rallies in Ormeau Park about the need to ‘liquidate the enemy’. In truth, like his main political rival Ian Paisley, Craig liked to hedge his bets.

On 28 February 1974, a Westminster election was held that would remove the Conservative Party from power, and replace it with Harold Wilson’s Labour Party, the man who had talked to the IRA in March 1972. By now political events had shifted. The major political concerns in mainland UK were primarily economic ones, with the miners’ strike carrying Labour into Downing Street. In Northern Ireland, leading shop stewards in Ulster’s industrial heartland of Belfast watched with considerable interest. Could a similar tactic be used to bring attention to their opposition to the Sunningdale Agreement, and its proposal to give the Dublin government a say in the constitutional affairs of a region of the United Kingdom? Loyalist paramilitaries and Protestant trade unionists certainly believed it was possible, and so they formed the UWC. However, it was the UDA and not the UVF that would remain at the forefront of these political developments in the Spring of 1974. UVF spokesman Ken Gibson and two other members of the RHC were certainly sitting around the table with the others who made up the thirteen-man UWC coordinating committee. It met at UDA headquarters in East Belfast, and is perhaps the reason why the UVF continued to equivocate on the plans for strike action. Gibson would later say that they were merely there as ‘observers’, which led Andy Tyrie to believe that UVF support for a strike was ‘still only conditional’.31