by Ed Moloney
The turmoil caused by the impending English Civil War contributed to another abiding characteristic of Unionism, a deep, chronic sense of insecurity. The Irish Rebellion of 1641, which took place just months before hostilities began between Charles and Parliament, was sparked by fears among the Catholic gentry of an invasion by English Parliamentarians and Scottish Covenanters who suspected that, in Ireland, Charles I would raise an army that would first put down the rebellious Scots and then help him impose his will in England. What started as a rising turned into a Catholic onslaught against the Protestant Planters, motivated in no small measure by a desire to regain confiscated lands. Contemporary pamphleteers in England greatly exaggerated the subsequent killings, claiming that over two hundred thousand settlers had lost their lives; it is likely that the true figure was nearer to twelve thousand, who were either killed or died from starvation, disease or cold when they were expelled from their homes that winter. The most notorious incident took place in Portadown, County Armagh, in November 1641 when between a hundred and three hundred English Protestants were marched by Irish soldiers to the bridge over the River Bann, stripped and herded into the icy river, where they either drowned or died of exposure. The stories of Irish butchery, both the exaggerated versions and those closer to the truth, during the ‘massacre of 1641’ entered Ulster Protestant mythology and culture as evidence of the enduring threat they faced from those native Gaels whose ancient lands they now occupied.
Those three elements which made up the Ulster Protestant political persona – conditional loyalty, banding and insecurity – all found expression in the Home Rule crisis of 1912, out of which emerged the military force whose name and methods would be co-opted sixty years later by David Ervine and his colleagues. Throughout the latter part of the nineteenth century, the British Liberal Party had become the champions of limited self-government for Ireland. The party’s leader and four-time prime minister, William Gladstone, had first tried, and failed, to steer a measure granting Irish Home Rule through parliament in 1886 and then again with the same result in 1893, when the House of Lords vetoed his Bill. A third effort was made by Gladstone’s successor, Lord Asquith, in 1912, a course he was persuaded to follow after John Redmond’s Irish Parliamentary Party had secured the balance of power in the House of Commons. This time the auguries seemed good for Irish Nationalism. The House of Lords had by this point lost its veto power and the Liberal–Irish Parliamentary majority in the House of Commons was sufficiently large to ensure the measure’s safe passage through Westminster. As the Edwardian age faded into the past, Ireland confidently looked forward to managing its own affairs.
At this point Dublin barrister Edward Carson and the Ulster Unionists entered the story, leading the opposition of Northern Ireland Protestants to Home Rule and bringing them to the edge of insurrection. Carson won the support of the British Conservative Party and set out on a whirlwind campaign throughout Ulster mobilising grassroots Loyalists to the cause. His efforts culminated in the signing of the Ulster Covenant at Belfast City Hall in September 1912 by over half a million men and women, some using their own blood for ink. Declaring that Irish Home Rule would be ‘subversive of our civil and religious freedom’, signatories of the Covenant pledged themselves to use ‘all means which may be found necessary to defeat the present conspiracy’.
The phrase ‘all means’ captured the essence of conditional loyalty, signalling that if the British parliament reneged on its bargain with them, then Ulster Protestants were entitled to take their defiance to the point of using violence. What those ‘all means’ meant in practice was apparent long before the Covenant was signed. By the spring of 1912, Carson was reviewing columns of marching men, members of an armed force of some hundred thousand men he had helped raise, led by a former Indian Army general, equipped with 35,000 rifles and 3 million rounds of ammunition smuggled from Germany to the port of Larne on the Antrim coast. Their intent was clear. If Home Rule went ahead and efforts were made to impose it on Ulster, then there would be resistance, led by Carson’s Army, by now called the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), and with all this came the distinct possibility that Ulster would secede from the Union and organise her own government. It was a classic example of banding together for self-protection, as the Scottish Covenanters of old had done, and its success encouraged Irish Nationalists to do something very similar.
Some, but not all, of the volunteers raised by Irish Nationalists did go to war against Britain – in Easter 1916 and again in 1919 – but not the UVF. The outbreak of hostilities with Germany in 1914 put Home Rule on ice and the UVF volunteered virtually en masse to fight for Kitchener’s Army in the trenches of France and Belgium. The slaughter of the 36th (Ulster) Division on the Somme in July 1916 was an act of sacrifice by the UVF which, in Ulster Protestant eyes, both deepened Britain’s contractual obligation to their cause and would serve to legitimise the grievance that any future betrayal coming from London would represent. Irish self-rule was not revisited until 1920 when the Government of Ireland Act, sometimes called the Fourth Home Rule Act, was passed, creating two states in Ireland and granting both a measure of self-rule. The Southern part was de facto amended by the terms of the 1921 Treaty, but the Northern part remained untouched, thus creating the Northern Ireland that exploded in violence in August 1969.
The creation of the new Northern Ireland state, the preservation of the link to Britain and escaping absorption into an Irish and predominantly Catholic state did little to reduce the Unionists’ real or imagined sense of insecurity. A large section of the population, at least around a third, was Catholic, and Nationalists in outlying parts of Armagh, Fermanagh and Tyrone especially resented their separation from the rest of the island. The rest accepted their fate sullenly, a stance reflected in the posture of Nationalist MPs at Stormont, who boycotted the parliament during its early years. With a large slice of the population antipathetic to the new state’s existence, a panoply of coercive laws was drawn up, designed to curb Nationalist or Republican threats. In addition to the new Royal Ulster Constabulary, the Unionist government led by James Craig raised a large part-time police reserve, the Ulster Special Constabulary, to enforce them. The ‘Specials’ or ‘B’ men, were substantially composed of elements of the UVF who had survived the trenches at the Somme. This was such a defining part of their identity that Scottish historian Michael Hopkinson said that the force, which was widely involved in reprisal attacks on Catholics in the North during the 1919–21 period, ‘amounted to an officially approved UVF’.13 It was one of these Specials who shot Brendan Hughes’s great-uncle dead in a tram in York Street in 1922. When the modern UVF appeared in the mid-1960s and began targeting Catholics, Unionist politicians, not least of them Prime Minister Captain Terence O’Neill, were at pains to contrast the imitation with the original, as if the old UVF had never been involved in such killing. Far from having ‘misappropriated’ the UVF name, as O’Neill asserted, it is arguable that the new UVF had much in common with its predecessor.
The new UVF of the 1960s appeared on the scene, not by coincidence, with the first signs that the inflexible politics of Unionism might be softening and in this regard it is impossible to separate the arrival of Ian Paisley and the resurrection of Carson’s Army from one another. By the 1960s, Northern Ireland’s traditional industries – shipbuilding and linen in particular – were in serious decline or at risk of extinction. It was evident that to survive and replace the lost jobs, Northern Ireland had to tempt new foreign investment to set up shop and a fresh, friendlier image was required, one that suggested stability and peace rather than division and conflict. The Northern Ireland prime minister since 1963, an affable but shy former Irish Guards officer called Captain Terence O’Neill, who could trace his lineage back to the Chichester family, the pioneers of the Plantation, began reaching out slowly and cautiously to the Catholic community, visiting schools and shaking hands with nuns, sending condolences to the Catholic primate on the death of Pope John XXIII, and the lik
e. O’Neill’s ecumenism was hardly earth-shattering but in contrast to his entrenched predecessors, Lords Brookeborough and Craig, it was dramatic, seismic stuff. Economic pragmatism dictated the next tectonic shift, when O’Neill invited Sean Lemass, an IRA veteran and successor to Eamon de Valera as the Fianna Fail Taoiseach of the Irish Republic, to Belfast for talks, mostly about economic co-operation. That O’Neill failed to inform his cabinet beforehand, and in the eyes of many Unionist MPs at Stormont had broken his word to them never to talk to Dublin, only fanned the flames of discontent.
Opposition to O’Neill built up within the Unionist Party and outside, where the raucous Ian Paisley, the latest in a long line of fire-breathing, political preachers in Northern Ireland, mobilised discontent to first build his church, the Free Presbyterians, and then his political machine, the Protestant Unionists. The rise of O’Neillism coincided with a worldwide surge in ecumenical friendship between the Catholic Church and mainstream Protestant denominations, a rapprochement that was as alarming to many Northern Ireland Protestants as O’Neill’s inclusive politics. It all helped to fuel Paisley’s rise.
Easter 1966 marked the fiftieth anniversary of the Rising in Dublin and many Unionists expected that the IRA would use the occasion to launch a new campaign in the North. The IRA’s last military crusade against the Northern Ireland state had been launched in 1956 but had petered out within a year. It had failed to attract significant Catholic support and was formally ended in 1962. What followed was a peace that was often uneasy, thanks not least to Ian Paisley. In 1964, threats by him to invade the Falls Road to remove a Tricolour displayed in the window of a Republican election office sparked several days of rioting between Nationalists and the RUC, who pre-empted Paisley but outraged Nationalists by breaking into the office to carry away the offending flag. The incident reinforced the view that the police were the servants of Unionist extremists. Despite its military collapse and failure to win Catholic backing, Unionists found it difficult not to regard the IRA as anything but a permanent and tireless threat and so, by the spring and summer of 1966, tension and apprehension had grown noticeably.
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:
I remember being told that the police had evidence that the IRA intended to take over the town of Newry during the 1966 Easter Rising commemorations and emulate the stand taken by Connolly and Pearse at the GPO in 1916. The IRA’s intention, we were told, was to make an armed stand and call for United Nations intervention. Gusty Spence recalls that some Unionists also believed that the IRA in Belfast intended to take over the City Hall and that this resulted in an RUC guard being posted. There was also a widespread belief, whipped up by hard-line Unionists, that the IRA intended to use the 1966 Easter Rising Commemorations to orchestrate civil disturbances in Belfast and Londonderry. Preparations for the Easter Rising Commemorations appeared to confirm that something was happening within Nationalist areas. Both the political climate and the stories about the alleged intentions of the IRA in 1966 ensured that the time was ripe for the reconstitution of the UVF.14
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.15 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 o
f 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.
