Voices from the Grave: Two Men's War in Ireland (46 page)

Just how apprehensive some Protestants were in 1966 is evident from an account of the time given many years later by Billy Mitchell, a UVF leader at an early stage of the Troubles and at one time a devoted member of Paisley’s Free Presbyterian Church:

March 1966 brought the first indication that matters could get serious. The RUC began investigating a series of petrol-bomb attacks on Catholic homes in Belfast while local newspapers reported that O’Neill’s government was examining suggestions that the UVF was being re-formed to oppose Republican Easter parades the following month.
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On 21 May 1966, the new UVF announced itself in a letter to the local press that declared war ‘on the IRA and its splinter groups’, adding, ‘Known IRA men will be executed
mercilessly and without hesitation.’ It concluded, ‘We are heavily armed Protestants dedicated to this cause.’ Six days later a twenty-eight-year-old Catholic store man, John Scullion, was making his way home drunkenly from a bar on the Falls Road when he was shot, apparently from a passing car, and on 11 June he died in hospital. At first the RUC believed he had been stabbed but after claims of responsibility were phoned into the
Belfast Telegraph
, his body was exhumed and the shooting confirmed. It turned out that the Scullion killing was a botched operation. The gang had set out to kill an IRA man called Leo Martin but, when they couldn’t find him, picked on Scullion when they heard him shout, ‘Up the rebels.’ The casual, random killing of Catholics such as Scullion would become one of the UVF’s later hallmarks.

The next victim was an eighteen-year-old single Catholic barman called Peter Ward who had wandered into a Shankill Road bar called the Malvern Arms on the night of 26 June along with three Catholic friends. In search of a late-night drink after working their shifts in a hotel in downtown Belfast, the four men sat drinking for an hour or so. At around 2 a.m. they left the bar, and were met with a fusillade of gunshots. Three of the men were hit and a single bullet struck Ward, piercing his heart and killing him instantly. It later emerged that the UVF gunmen had been drinking in the Malvern Arms at the same time, had spotted the off-duty hotel workers and had concluded, without much evidence, that they were IRA members. Again they had been hunting for IRA victims that night without success and seemingly chose Peter Ward and his friends because they were readily available Catholic targets. In the wake of the murder, Prime Minister O’Neill rushed home from Somme celebrations in France where, ironically, he was commemorating the UVF of 1916, and banned its modern-day manifestation, calling it ‘this evil thing in our midst’. A day later the new UVF claimed its third victim, a seventy-seven-year-old Protestant widow, Matilda Gould, who died in a house blaze caused by a petrol bomb meant for a Catholic-owned bar beside her home.

The RUC moved quickly against the UVF and soon arrested the major activists. Three men were subsequently convicted of the Peter Ward murder, all of them from the Shankill area. Their leader was a thirty-three-year-old shipyard stager and former soldier called Gusty Spence who had worked for the Unionist Party and whose brother was a Unionist election agent. Charges of murdering John Scullion were dropped but Spence was convicted of killing Peter Ward and given a recommended twenty-year prison sentence. Many years later Spence would claim that he had been inducted into the UVF at a meeting attended by some forty men in Pomeroy, County Tyrone, earlier that year. He had been invited to join, he would claim, by two Unionist politicians, both anti-O’Neill members of the party’s ruling Ulster Council, but since he has consistently refused to name them, his claim has so far defied confirmation.

If the origins of the new UVF are shrouded in confusion and uncertainty it is because it was so tangled up with other paramilitary-style groups that found shelter under Ian Paisley’s wide umbrella, Ulster Protestant Action (UPA) and the Ulster Protestant Volunteers (UPV). One of Spence’s co-accused, Hugh McClean, later told RUC detectives how it was that he came to join the UVF: ‘I was asked did I agree with Paisley and was I prepared to follow him? I said that I was.’ While Paisley was quick to distance himself from the UVF after O’Neill proscribed it, and heartily condemned ‘the hell-soaked liquor traffic’ that constituted the background to the Ward murder, the truth was that he and the new UVF were part of the same overlapping and interlocking network of anti-O’Neill fundamentalism.

Gusty Spence would be transformed into a Loyalist folk hero, his bungled efforts to take on the IRA in Belfast soon regarded in places such as his native Shankill as evidence of remarkable foresight. When the Provisional IRA launched its campaign five years later in 1971, the painted slogan ‘Gusty was right’ peppered walls on the Shankill. For a while his prophet-like status was rivalled only by Paisley’s. When the Troubles gathered steam and UVF prisoners
began arriving in Crumlin Road jail and then in Long Kesh, Spence was the automatic choice for their O/C or Officer Commanding. Spence had served in the Royal Ulster Rifles in West Germany and in Cyprus where he had fought the EOKA uprising and he ran the UVF compounds of Long Kesh like a British Army barracks with tight discipline. The next Chief of Staff was Samuel ‘Bo’ McClelland, another Shankill man who like Spence had served in the Royal Ulster Rifles. He had lied about his age so he could join up to fight in Korea. His successor, Tommy West, was also a former British soldier, a special forces veteran. Between the three, the group’s early leaders put a British Army stamp on the UVF, both inside and outside the prisons.

In the mid-to late 1970s Spence underwent a remarkable transformation, seemingly shedding his hardline Loyalism and addiction to violence. On 12 July 1977, the most hallowed day in the Loyalist calendar, he addressed his fellow UVF prisoners and made a call for ‘a universal ceasefire’ by Republicans and Loyalists, an appeal that failed to inspire his audience. Spence argued that Loyalist violence was redundant because Northern Ireland’s place in the United Kingdom had been accepted by both the British and Irish governments and could not be altered without the say-so of its people. It also emerged that Spence had been learning the Irish language and studying Irish history and that he had sent condolences to the widow of Joe McCann, a prominent Official IRA activist who had been controversially shot dead by British troops. From David Ervine’s interviews with Boston College it is clear that, inside the UVF compounds, Spence had also been preaching the merits of sharing power with Nationalists, much to the dismay of some of his fellow prisoners.

It was during this period of Spence’s political regeneration that David Ervine was exposed to some of the ideas that later became central to the political approach of the Progressive Unionist Party (PUP), the UVF’s subsequent political wing: not just acceptance of power-sharing with Nationalists but populist, leftish views on economic and social issues of a sort that could be found in the
manifestos of most European Social Democrats. After his release from jail in 1984, Gusty Spence would describe himself as ‘a moderate socialist’,
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while Ervine, when his spell in jail ended in 1980, would get into violent arguments in bars when he espoused his progressive agenda, on one occasion earning a punch in the mouth and the charge, ‘You’re a fucking communist!’ On one level this highlighted the paradox that lies at the heart of the UVF: the co-existence of left-wing political sympathies with an often violent, racist-like hatred for Catholics, more redolent of the extreme Right.

The roots of the UVF and the PUP help to explain the anomaly. Gusty Spence and later David Ervine were essentially part of the same iconoclastic tradition as Tommy Henderson, the Independent Unionist MP for the Shankill at Stormont between 1925 and 1953. A housepainter and decorator by trade, Henderson was a founder member of the Ulster Unionist Labour Association, which had been set up in 1918 by Edward Carson to purge ‘Bolshevism’, with its sympathy for the Irish Republican cause, from the local trade-union movement. Carson’s efforts to link Labour with Sinn Fein led on one occasion to the mass expulsion of left-wingers, trade-union activists and Catholics from the shipyards.

Henderson had political ambitions but when he ran as a candidate for the Unionist nomination for the Shankill seat in the 1920 Stormont election, he was rebuffed. Convinced that class bias had shaped the decision, Henderson stood as an Independent in 1925 for the North Belfast seat at Stormont and won, beating the mainstream Unionists. From 1929 onwards Henderson held the adjacent Shankill seat against repeated challenges from Glengall Street, as the headquarters of the Unionist establishment was known, and used his seat at Stormont to speak up for working-class constituents and to criticise the government’s patronage of wealthy interests. At the same time he took an uncompromising line on the border and relations with the Southern state and Northern Catholics. Henderson held the seat until 1953 when, tellingly, a Northern Ireland Labour Party candidate captured nearly half his vote, allowing the Unionist nominee to slip in between them. That year Henderson
was part of a slate of seven Independent Unionists who stood against the mainstream Unionists in protest at what they claimed was the government’s appeasement of the Catholic Church over education reforms while demanding more jobs and housing for Protestants. It was the beginning of a revolt, in which Paisley and the UVF were key actors, against the Unionist ‘fur-coat brigade’ that ran Protestant politics in those days, a protest against appeasement of Nationalism and an expression of class antagonism.

The Independent Unionist tradition of hardline, populist Loyalism was again taken up in the Shankill area when the Derry-born barrister Desmond Boal won the seat in the 1960 Stormont election. Although standing for the mainstream Unionist Party, Boal was an adviser to Ulster Protestant Action (UPA), a ginger group cum embryonic paramilitary organisation, set up in 1956 in anticipation of the IRA’s coming Border Campaign. Its other leading lights included a young Ian Paisley and a clerk who worked for Belfast Corporation by the name of Billy Spence, whose brother Gusty would soon become a household name. The UPA had encouraged Boal to run and backed him during the campaign. When Boal won, local UPA activists, including Billy Spence, joined the local Unionist branch en masse in an example of infiltration tactics the later UVF would imitate. After the IRA threat receded, UPA moved into the workplace, to the shipyard, to Shorts’ engineering plant, Mackie’s engineering works and elsewhere. Branches were set up and much of their energy was devoted to ensuring that jobs stayed in Protestant hands. Boal, meanwhile, led the parliamentary opposition to Terence O’Neill at Stormont and, according to one former colleague, his motivation had a lot do with class: ‘I think he regarded O’Neill as the Big House still in charge and he resented that and O’Neill’s arrogance bitterly.’
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In 1971, Boal helped Paisley found the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), persuading the Free Presbyterian leader to show a more secular face to Unionists. He also tried to steer the new DUP leftwards, as an early activist recalled: ‘He explained that [the DUP] would continue to be right-wing on law and order but that there was a need in Northern
Ireland for a party with radical social and economic policies which could embrace all people …’
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Boal remained Unionist MP for Shankill until Stormont was prorogued in 1972. The only time his seat was threatened was in 1969 when a Labour candidate called David Overend split the Unionist vote. By the 1990s Overend had become a leading member of the UVF’s political wing, the PUP.

After Spence’s imprisonment, the UVF, or what remained of it, dropped off the radar screen. The civil rights campaign launched by Catholics in 1968 intensified the pressure on Terence O’Neill and gave Ian Paisley and his growing band of followers repeated opportunities to further weaken the Unionist prime minister. The killer blow came in March and April of 1969 when three sets of explosions crippled electricity production in East Belfast and halted the supply of water to the city. The bombs were widely blamed on the IRA and this forced an exhausted O’Neill to resign at the end of April. But the bombs had been the work of people close to Ian Paisley, including figures who had overlapped with the Shankill UVF back in 1966, and the aim had been to discredit and topple O’Neill. In October 1969 a Kilkeel, County Down, Free Presbyterian and quarry worker called Thomas McDowell was badly burned by a bomb that exploded prematurely as he was planting it at a power station in County Donegal in the Irish Republic and died later in hospital. McDowell was a member of both Paisley’s Ulster Protestant Volunteers and the UVF, further evidence of the close ties between the groups.

The year 1966 was a bumper one for Loyalist paramilitaries. In April that year Ian Paisley set up a body called the Ulster Constitution Defence Committee with the principal task of co-ordinating the activities of the UPV, a new, Free Presbyterian-linked paramilitary outfit. By the end of the summer of 1966, Gusty Spence was in jail and the UVF was, like the IRA, a banned organisation. The remnants of the Shankill UVF found themselves leaderless and without direction. Then, in November 1966, another group appeared that offered the UVF refuge until such time as their fortunes could recover.