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5

TALKING AND KILLING

From Portadown to Shankill Road,

From Larne to Drumahoe,

Where volunteers do organise,

Says he, ‘You’ll find Big Jim,’

Says he, ‘You’ll find Big Jim.’

UVF Poem (1974)

Loyalist Club, Shankill Road, Belfast, 31 March 1974

The ‘Royals’ pop group were on stage performing a few of their well-known cover songs as part of the weekly Sunday night cabaret show. The Loyalist Club was fairly crowded. Downstairs, it was standing room only for most of the evening. There were another fifty people in the upstairs lounge, where club stewards served hamburgers from a small kitchen to those anxious to line their stomach after a few hours of heavy drinking. Bar staff hurriedly pulled draught pints of Guinness as men and women mingled at the bar. Some were impatient, and had been waiting a while to be served. ‘Twenty Embassy please mate,’ said the tall man with red hair, as he joked with the barman.1 Twenty-seven-year-old Jim Hanna, nicknamed ‘red setter’, was a married man with one child. He was a self-employed heating and plumbing engineer, and part-time bar steward. He was also the UVF’s Director of Operations, making him responsible for targeting the group’s enemies. Hanna had arrived at the club shortly after 7:30 p.m. in the company of a female friend.2

Hanna spent most of the evening in the club chatting to people and enjoying a few drinks. At midnight, Hanna and his female friend left the Loyalist Club through the gates of the delivery yard towards Jim’s car, a fawn-coloured Morris Marina 1.8 saloon, which he left parked under a street light outside St Michael’s Church in Mansfield Street. ‘We walked to Jim’s car and he unlocked the doors,’ his friend recalled. ‘I got into the car into the front passenger seat and Jim got into the driver’s seat. Just as soon as we got into the car, the driver’s door was opened and I heard a number of bangs. Jim slumped over me. I thought immediately it was shots and I curled up in the car. After Jim slumped over me the shooting continued, and I was shot on the top of both legs. I did not see who fired the shots and I did not see any other person at the car. The way Jim fell across me obstructed my view.’3

Hanna was shot in the chest and abdomen by two men armed with a pair of Walther 9mm pistols. One of the men opened the driver’s side door before both gunmen emptied their magazines into their victim. Twelve rounds were fired in total, hitting Hanna nine times in the chest and torso. Journalists later claimed that he was shot point blank in the head, which was not the case.4 The gunmen blended back into the shadows from where they had come to kill Jim Hanna.

Having heard the shots and the woman’s screams, up to a dozen local people rushed over to the vehicle to see if they could help. A doorman from the club lifted Jim Hanna’s lifeless body out of the vehicle and carried the victim back into the club where a bar steward telephoned an ambulance. The attack had taken place in a dimly lit street when most residents had retired to bed for the night. The doctor who examined Hanna on his arrival at the casualty department of the Royal Victoria Hospital pronounced him dead at 12:40 a.m. In his post-mortem, pathologist Dr John Press found twenty-one entrance and exit wounds in Hanna’s body, right arm and right thigh.5 It had all the hallmarks of a deliberate, planned assassination that was devoid of mercy. By opting to shoot their victim at such close range, the gunmen made sure he would not survive the attack. Hanna had to go, they reasoned, and this was the most effective way to ensure that it happened. Nothing had arisen in the club that night to indicate that Hanna was in any immediate danger. He had not found himself entangled in any heated arguments, nor did he have any visible enemies. His murder remained a mystery to many people on the Shankill.

The assassination didn’t come as a surprise to some of those in the UVF’s inner circles, for Hanna had courted controversy in recent months by soft-pedalling on calls from the rank and file to further escalate the organisation’s terror campaign. As the group’s overall military commander, this was an unfathomable position for Hanna to adopt, the group’s younger hardliners believed.

It later emerged that Jim Hanna had also met with an Official IRA leader in the Europa Hotel in central Belfast, widely regarded in the 1970s as the ‘most bombed hotel in Europe’. Robert Fisk of the London Times, who first broke the story, claimed that the UVF and Official IRA shared common ground on the political front, and wished to see an end to sectarian killing.6 Internal discord ensued, with one hooded UVF leader promptly emerging from the shadows to quash rumours of any talks. ‘We need a political front to counter the propaganda of the Provisional alliance, the British government and the Faulkner–Fine Gael Pact,’ the UVF spokesman told those journalists gathered at a hastily convened press conference. When questioned about his organisation’s position on a united Ireland, the UVF leader reiterated the group’s total opposition to any moves in this direction.7 The UVF followed up an impromptu media appearance with a written statement, carried in its journal Combat, denying that it had ever ‘at any time discussed political or military policy with either the Official or Provisional Wings of the Irish Republican Movement’. For the UVF, ‘Irish Republicanism and Ulster patriotism are poles apart and can never come together in common policy decisions.’8

The truth was that Hanna had been one of two senior UVF Brigade Staff members who had also met secretly with the Provisional IRA in Lough Sheelin in County Cavan. The other person who had attended the meeting was Billy Mitchell, the commander of the powerful UVF battalion in East Antrim. The meetings had been brokered by journalist, Kevin Myers. There to meet the two UVF men were Dáithí Ó Conaill and Brian Keenan. ‘Keenan was militarily the most important man in the IRA, then and over the coming decades. His presence made this a very high-powered delegation indeed,’ recalled Myers. It was to be the first and only meeting between these sworn enemies. In Mitchell’s eyes, ‘we genuinely wanted a political voice. The very fact that the UVF had met with the Officials and the Provos at the highest level indicates that they wanted to think about bringing the conflict to an end. Unfortunately, it was too much too soon,’ he later admitted.9

Although it was something of an open secret that Jim Hanna had ‘friends in military intelligence’ at the time,10 the reality was that if he was also an agent he was almost certainly working to put the UVF out of business. After his death, Fisk suggested that because of his moderate tendencies, Hanna may have strongly opposed a plan hatched by UVF hardliners to bomb Irish towns south of the border.11 Hanna’s liberal outlook, combined with reports that he had met with both wings of the IRA, provided the excuse Young Turks within UVF ranks needed to justify his execution. Hanna’s wife was in no doubt who had killed her husband, ‘You know Billy Marchant?’ she asked Myers. ‘Well, Marchant killed Jim.’12

At the time, the UVF strongly rejected the rumours it had played any role in Hanna’s death. ‘The Ulster Volunteer Force Brigade Headquarters Staff view with contempt the erroneous suggestions made by the Security Forces against the UVF regarding the murder of Mr James Hanna at Mansfield Street on Sunday evening 31st March 1974,’ read a statement issued by the organisation after his death. The denial was designed to refute rumours that Hanna had been executed after an internal ‘Court of Inquiry’ found he had compromised weapons and explosives in the same place where he had died. In signing off, the UVF vowed to bring his killers to justice. In reality, the UVF Brigade Staff was under repeated internal strain, ever since it announced its ceasefire on 18 November 1973. By eliminating Hanna, UVF hardliners believed they were removing the final obstacle for a return to their organisation’s military campaign. These men were soon disappointed when, a few days later, the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, Merlyn Rees, de-proscribed the UVF and Provisional IRA.13 The UVF Brigade Staff’s flirtation with politics, rather than militarism, appeared to be working.

***

Dublin City centre, Evening, Friday 17 May 1974

Thirty-five-year-old Ann O’Neill was out shopping with her family when the first car bomb exploded at 5:28 p.m. in Parnell Street. It killed her husband Edward outright, and badly injured her son, Edward Junior, who was hit by flying shrapnel. So severe were young Edward’s injuries that the surgeon who performed skin grafts on his face could see the bridge of his nose protruding through what was left of his skin. His face had literally been blown off by the force of the blast, and shards of metal and glass had become lodged deep in his tiny body. One young girl was decapitated by flying debris. It was impossible for either the emergency services or the other civilians who went to her aid to know who she was. Eleven people were killed, including two infant children. Elsewhere in the city, on Talbot Street, another bomb exploded at 5:30 p.m., killing thirteen people, one of whom had been pregnant.’ At the same time, a third bomb exploded in South Leinster Street, killing two women. The bombs had exploded with such force that the blasts had knocked people over like skittles. Men, women and children were thrown along streets, into doorways and against walls like rag dolls. A mother walking her baby in a pram was thrown violently into the air. People screamed in sheer terror. Shock set in, and some people were literally frozen to the spot. Twenty-six people were killed in Dublin, and another 253 injured. It was the worst terrorist atrocity in the city since the Anglo-Irish War of Independence. Just over two hours later, in Monaghan, some seventy miles away, another car bomb detonated outside a Protestant-owned pub, killing seven people.

That the bombs were placed with such military precision immediately raised questions over who could have perpetrated the attacks.14 No group admitted responsibility at the time, though the finger of blame was pointed at loyalist paramilitaries. It was not long before allegations of ‘collusion’ between the terrorists and British state agencies were raised. They were based largely on the public confession of John Weir, who was jailed for his part in atrocities perpetrated by the so-called ‘Glennane Gang’, a group of part-time and reserve RUC officers who, in their guise as UVF members, murdered dozens of people in the Mid Ulster area.15

It has since been established by an Irish government inquiry into the bombings that the UVF was responsible, and that its members from Belfast and Mid Ulster carried out the – fastidiously planned and well-executed operation. ‘The loyalist groups who carried out the bombings in Dublin were capable of doing so without help from any section of the security forces in Northern Ireland,’ wrote the judge who led the inquiry, ‘though this does not rule out the involvement of individual RUC, UDR or British Army members. The Monaghan bombing in particular bears all the hallmarks of a standard loyalist operation, and required no assistance’.16 In line with the UVF’s own explanation for the attacks, it was believed by the Irish government that the farm used by the UVF members who carried out the attacks was central to the planning and preparation of the bombs. ‘It is also likely that members of the UDR and RUC either participated in, or were aware of those preparations,’ read the report.17 Yet, despite the close involvement of some Security Forces personnel who moonlighted as terrorists, the inquiry into the Dublin and Monaghan bombings concluded:

Ultimately, a finding that there was collusion between the perpetrators and the authorities in Northern Ireland is a matter of inference. On some occasions an inference is irresistible or can be drawn as a matter of probability. Here, it is the view of the inquiry that this inference is not sufficiently strong. It does not follow even as a matter of probability. Unless further information comes to hand, such involvement must remain a suspicion. It is not proven.18

The carnage unleashed by the UVF on unsuspecting shoppers in Dublin and revellers in Monaghan was not the first time, nor the last, that the group would turn its sights south of the border. Reflecting on the rationale for sending the carnage to the Irish Republic, one Brigade Staff officer at the time observed how, people in the south were ‘being very blasé about their attitude towards republicans – they weren’t getting extradited, they weren’t being actively pursued into the Republic, we saw it as they were getting a free hand to do what they wanted … And well, we just wanted to let them know what it feels like. That was it.’19

The Dublin and Monaghan bombings were the tip of the iceberg as far as UVF attacks were concerned. The vast majority of the devices were well-constructed, expertly transported and planted, and in a considerable number of cases they demonstrated advanced bomb-making skills. The UVF certainly had such men in its ranks, with a few of them having seen action in Britain’s post-war conflicts, such as Palestine, Korea, Malaya, Cyprus and Aden.20 Some of these men had been NCOs in the British Armed Forces, and were extremely adept at leading men on operations, handling explosives and other weapons of war. Like those in the Provisional IRA at the time, one or two of these UVF men had even demonstrated a deadly ingenuity by turning under-the-counter products – the so-called ‘Co-Op mix’ – into what we would today call Improvised Explosive Devices. Organisationally, of course, the UVF had been involved in constructing bombs from as early as 1966. By 1974 they had perfected their bomb-making techniques. Although the Provisionals had also made great strides in their own bomb-making prowess, they hadn’t the same kind of pedigree of well-trained volunteers in their ranks that the UVF could call upon. It was little wonder that the UVF could explode more bombs than their IRA rivals in 1971 and unleash a wave of death and destruction on Irish streets, north and south of the border.21 Until the mid-1970s, the UVF preferred to take most of its recruits from the ranks of disgruntled ex-servicemen. This cadre of individuals not only possessed intimate knowledge of weapons and explosives, but were also adept at passing that knowledge on by way of training and advising others.

Another way in which the UVF acquired such military experience was by infiltrating the ranks of the British Army. One such individual was Geordie, a young volunteer who hailed from the Oldpark Road area of North Belfast. He said that in the early 1970s, ‘there was no formal training’ for UVF members. In order to acquire such skills and drills, he claimed he was ordered to infiltrate the Territorial Army (TA) by ‘Big Sam’ McCorkindale, the UVF’s commander in West Belfast. ‘Big Sam’ certainly had prior military experience, having served in the ranks of the British Army. Geordie alleges that, as a result of his infiltration, he spent hours cleaning weapons in military armouries. ‘We cleaned millions of them; from SLRs to Sterling sub-machine guns to GPMGs,’ he said. He also claimed that, in one incident in the 1970s, he and several other UVF men tried to smuggle guns into the province. In one run, the men were able to conceal a cache of weapons inside their military vehicles, which were then returned to Belfast after a weekend exercise. Searches by the Royal Military Police turned up hundreds of stolen weapons hidden in the side-panelling of huge water tankers.22

The UVF’s infiltration of British military ranks also extended to the newly formed UDR, the British Army’s largest infantry regiment, which was based permanently in Northern Ireland.23 Many of these men led ‘double lives’. Geordie remembers how, at one UVF meeting in the early to mid-1970s, almost all the men present held dual membership of the UVF and British Army. Two were UDR Sergeants, one was a UDR Corporal, and two other men were in the TA. It was then that the army moved swiftly to eradicate dual membership – leaving these men on borrowed time. Billy Mitchell, a leading member of UVF Brigade Staff at the time, justified such infiltration on the following basis. ‘It is part and parcel of human nature. Anyone who believes that it did not happen, or that it should not have happened, is naïve in the extreme,’ he later wrote. ‘There are a number of valid reasons why loyalists would want to join elements of the local Security Forces – intelligence gathering and military training being among them.’24

Up until its de-proscription a few weeks before the Dublin and Monaghan bombings, the UVF had been a highly secretive organisation, which people were only invited to join. It vetted its members rigorously and styled itself as a ‘counter-terrorist force’, established to oppose ‘violent nationalism’. In an early issue of Combat magazine, the UVF said its objectives were to:

(a)Watch over, promote and protect the Protestant liberties, culture and traditional way of life of the Ulster people.

(b)Work for the physical defence of the loyalist community in the face of armed aggression and terrorist activity.

(c)Train, equip and discipline a dedicated body of Ulster patriots capable of implementing (a) and (b) above.25

The UVF claimed that the vast majority of decisions it took were ‘of a military nature’, directed towards ‘producing an efficient military reaction against the terrorist programme of the Provisional Republican Alliance and its various political and cultural front organisations’. Billy Mitchell went on to elaborate:

Primarily the UVF saw itself as a military machine. The term which fits although wasn’t used at this time was ‘defensive retaliation’ but very often it was ‘get your retaliation in first’, [such as] defence of working-class areas, retaliation for republican activities. UVF Brigade Staff at that time employed this twin track approach. It was never going to follow the Stickies and go for politics alone. It was always going to be both approaches. It was useful to engage with the NIO. It was useful to engage with political parties, useful to try and get people elected, as they did with Hugh Smyth and in Carrick with Hugh Burton. [However], the main campaign was a military one.26

The UVF argued that this policy was ‘legitimate, essential and rewarding’, making the organisation ‘a force to be reckoned with by our enemies’.27

Such familiarity with weapons and explosives gave the UVF a greater killing potential, but it came at a price. Geordie recalled attending a UVF training session in the Shankill, where he and other volunteers were invited to pack tubes full of explosives and attach a fuse. The bombs were crude and volatile, with volunteers nicknaming them ‘candy sticks’. ‘They were very unstable,’ Geordie revealed. ‘The place looked like Switzerland, as the fertilizer was stacked high in the warehouse.’ So blissfully unaware were some of the men to the dangers of handling explosives that he remembers seeing ‘one guy coming to the door of the warehouse with a fag in his mouth’. The amateurish nature of the operation meant that volunteers were sometimes killed by their own bombs.28

What made it difficult for the UVF to maintain a high tempo of operations at this time was that the vast majority of its members began their terrorist career in their spare time. Some men worked as office clerks, others as painters and decorators, engineers and even carpenters. Geordie worked as an office clerk by day and acted as a ‘wheel man’ for the UVF by night, which involved stealing cars for UVF operations. His platoon commander then was a young John Bingham, who would later rise to become the UVF’s military commander in West Belfast. According to Geordie, there was little thought given to thorough planning inside the UVF at this time. From deciding on the spot to go out and ‘shoot a taig’, to neglecting to change the plates on stolen cars, UVF teams took a blasé approach to their military operations. In one particular incident in the 1970s, Geordie recounted the circumstances that led a UVF team to drive a van into republican West Belfast loaded with two gunmen in the back. Dressed head to toe in boiler suits, masked and armed with sub-machine guns, the men believed they had been tasked with killing two republicans. The plan was simple. They were to drive up to the street corner where the targets had been spotted on a regular basis, slam on the brakes alongside them and the gunmen in the back of the vehicle would kick open the doors and shoot the two men dead. When they got to the scene, the UVF men kicked on the doors but they failed to open. The intended targets, hearing the commotion inside the van, ran off. The UVF team, dazed, confused and anxious to get away, ditched the van and reported back to their commander. ‘It was a farce,’ Geordie said, ‘The doors were not locked, yet they couldn’t open them. Such was the way many of these operations went.’

The UVF’s botched operations in the mid-1970s certainly pointed to the lack of forward planning and even bordered on recklessness, but they also highlighted the autonomy that individual members and teams had in targeting Catholic civilians with no connection to physical force republicanism.29 In some cases, this was due to a lack of specific intelligence on IRA members; at other times, Catholic civilians were deliberately targeted. Although Gusty Spence had set himself firmly against indiscriminate attacks on Catholic civilians, it appeared that some UVF volunteers were still prepared to adhere to his earlier dictum that, ‘If you can’t get an IRA man, get a Taig.’30

***

Antrim Road, North Belfast, Night, Saturday, 12 October 1974

Seventeen-year-old Ciaran Murphy spent the day drinking Guinness with his best friend Seamus Larkin in several bars in North Street in Belfast city centre. He looked old for his age, standing tall at 6'1". At the time, Ciaran sported an afro hairstyle that made him look like the Irish singer-songwriter Gilbert O’Sullivan. He was the youngest in a family of six children, three boys and three girls, and lived at the family home in Ardoyne with his mother Kathleen. His father, John, had passed away in 1967. Ciaran worked for G Plan Central Heating, a firm that gave him a small company van for his own personal use. He was spotted around the area on a frequent basis, often stopping to offer lifts to local people. Ciaran was a friendly lad, a young man full of boundless energy and of the hopes and dreams of many teenagers at the time. He had ambitions but loved to stay grounded by socialising with friends and family.

As evening passed into night in that cold October night, Ciaran and his friends made their way back to Seamus’ house, where they were picked up by another friend, Patrick Mulholland. All three travelled to the Saunders Club in Elmfield Street, arriving promptly at 7:30 p.m. It didn’t take them long to get into the swing of things in the club. Ciaran drank gin and tonic all evening. At 11:45 p.m., the three friends left to go home. Even though he had been drinking all day, Ciaran volunteered to drive so they could pick up takeaway food on their way back to Ardoyne. As they drew up behind some parked cars at the Wei Ping Chinese restaurant on the Antrim Road (known locally as ‘Provie Charlies’), Ciaran misjudged the distance and touched the back bumper of the rear car. Slightly shaken by the experience, he got out of the car and told his two companions that he couldn’t drive anymore. Before they could protest further, Ciaran walked off on his own, picking up some chips before making his way home to Ardoyne along the Cliftonville Road.

After a few minutes, Ciaran noticed a beige-coloured Ford Corsair drive past him. Inside were three UVF men. The car crawled along at a slow pace. The three men inside joked to one another about the drunk teenager they spotted on the other side of the Street. ‘Look at that idiot, let’s stop him and see who he is,’ shouted one of the men. The driver made a sharp U-turn in the road, before pulling up alongside the young man. Ciaran ignored them and carried on walking. He was drunk and staggered along eating his chips. ‘Do you want a lift then mate?’ the men in the car inquired. ‘Dead on, dead on,’ he replied, and one man opened the door. Realising in a split second the danger he was now in, Ciaran quickly changed his mind. Before he could protest any further, he was grabbed from behind and bundled into the back seat of the car. At that moment he dropped his chips, which spilt across the pavement. Two of the men sat either side of Ciaran holding him down. He tried to break free but his attempts to do so were futile. The men had no intention of letting their captive go.

After driving a short distance to the 42 Club in the Silverstream area, the leader of the gang, a young man, got out of the car and strolled inside. In a loud voice he proclaimed, ‘We’ve got a taig.’ Upon hearing the young man’s boast, a senior UVF man threw him out of the club, believing he was drunk. Taking umbrage at the slight, the young UVF man returned to the car and ordered the driver to take them to the home of a UDA man, an infamous paramilitary who was nicknamed ‘the window-cleaner’ for his modus operandi of using a pair of ladders to climb through windows and murder people in their homes. The four men then travelled to Tyndale Community Centre. There, Ciaran was badly beaten, and had his watch, money, driving licence and rings taken from him. The men then stabbed him repeatedly with a small bladed knife. He fought back, holding up his hands as he tried to deflect the thrusting blows away from his body. Ciaran was beaten again before being dragged out to the car. Meanwhile, ‘the window cleaner’ had retrieved a Luger pistol from a nearby weapons cache.

The men took Ciaran to a quarry overlooking the city, where they lifted him out of the vehicle, making him take off his jacket to stand in the freezing cold. A pistol was thrust into his back and he was ordered to walk forward into the darkness. Ciaran was then told to kneel down. The men gathered around their prey, swopping like vultures. The young Ardoyne man was again punched and kicked. His knuckles were red raw as he tried desperately to shield himself as the blows rained down on his thin frame. He cried, probably for his mother, knowing that he had nowhere to go. The men made him pick himself up and kneel down facing away from them. One of the men cocked his pistol, then shot Ciaran in the back four times. His body slumped to the ground. On his way out of the quarry, one of the gang scrawled his nickname, ‘The Pope’, on the road.31 An employee of the quarry, Leonard Stewart, discovered Ciaran’s body at 8:30 a.m.

It was a few hours before Ciaran’s family were told of the horrifying news of his death. His twenty-year-old brother, Patrick, was at his home when his mother came to visit him at lunchtime, having returned home from Mass to discover her youngest son was missing. ‘When I saw her, before she even said anything, I think I knew something was wrong, and knew he was dead,’ Patrick recalled. After a brief visit to the Army Barracks in Flax Street, Patrick and a few friends were told that a body had been discovered matching Ciaran’s description and that they should go immediately to Musgrave Street RUC Station. There they were met by a CID officer, Detective Constable Jonty Brown, who took them to Laganbank Morgue to identify the body. When Patrick walked into the room he spotted three bodies on trollies to the left and one body on the right. Before the sheet was pulled back, he knew instinctively that it was his brother, his black frizzy hair was sticking out from under the white death shroud the mortuary staff had placed over his body.

The police detectives investigating the murder later traced the weapon used to kill Ciaran to two other shooting incidents, an armed robbery, a murder and an attempted murder. It was a weapon held and used by the UDA. On this occasion, though, it was used by members of the UVF to murder Ciaran Murphy, an innocent young man, killed for no other reason than that he was a Catholic.32 In 1977 the RUC charged one man with involvement in the attack. He pleaded guilty to Ciaran’s murder at Belfast City Commission on 11 September 1978 and was sentenced to life imprisonment.33 Drunk and vulnerable, his death would come to signify the deep visceral hatred harboured by many loyalist paramilitaries at the time.

Ciaran Murphy would not be the only young man murdered by the UVF that year. Up until that point, he was the sixty-fourth victim of the organisation. Seventy men, women and children would lose their lives at the hands of UVF members in 1974. Twenty had been shot, the remainder had died in bomb explosions, including the Dublin and Monaghan atrocities. The average age of the UVF’s victims that year was thirty-eight. The oldest victim was an eighty-year-old caught up in the Dublin bombings, and the youngest an unborn baby and her one-year-old sister, in the same incident. Although the vast majority of victims were Catholic civilians, French, German and Italian tourists were also killed by the organisation, at a time when it was apparently observing a ceasefire.

***

The slaughter of Catholic civilians was not the only thing running through the minds of UVF and RHC volunteers. Inside Long Kesh, loyalists attached to both organisations were engaging in political thinking. A ten-point plan for peace was even put forward, which called for the continued lowering of the army’s profile, reduction of military footprint, strategy of non-violence, release of prisoners, an amnesty and, of course, de-proscription.34 One of its key architects of the plan was RHC volunteer ‘Plum’ Smith. It was his belief that the proposal ‘built on or reiterated ideas that the RHC and UVF had put forward earlier’. There was an acceptance that paramilitaries on both sides ‘had acted for political reasons’.35

In January 1975, the UVF and UDA took separate, albeit complimentary, decisions to talk to British government officials. Up first was thirty-four-year-old Andy Tyrie, the UDA’s Supreme Commander, who led several delegations to meet James Allan, a British official working out of Laneside in North Down. Much of the UDA’s demands of the government revolved around the welfare of their prisoners, especially in Long Kesh. Accompanying Tyrie on these occasions were fellow members of the organisation’s ruling Inner Council, including Hugh McVeigh, the thirty-six-year-old UDA commander from East Belfast, who represented the organisation on prison-related matters. As soon as the UDA delegates left Laneside, the UVF were shown in to meet Allan. On the afternoon of 27 January 1975, the UVF delegation consisted of political spokesman Ken Gibson, their prisoners’ representative Jim McDonald and Brigade Staff officers Billy Mitchell, Jackie ‘Nigger’ Irvine and Eddy Kearns.36 The mood surrounding the meetings was not good. Both loyalist groupings were involved in a violent feud that would lead to several of their men losing their lives as the year progressed.