Voices from the Grave: Two Men's War in Ireland

by Ed Moloney

  Strangely enough the ATO, a Captain Walker, visited me after they moved me. They arrested me and first took me to Mountpottinger police station in East Belfast, where I was questioned and they put me in a cell that was literally like a wet dank dungeon and I presume that they thought, ‘Well, these aren’t very good conditions.’ It was a Saturday night, the earliest court hearing was Monday morning, so they moved me to Holywood, County Down, where they put me into a cell that was not a whole lot better but at least it was dry. While I was in that cell Captain Walker arrived and thanked me for my assistance, which is all a bit interesting. The focus of attention was: where did I get the explosives; where did the explosives come from? Now I didn’t know where the explosives came from, but the police were quite fixated with that. I was encouraged to talk to a couple of long-haired gentlemen who turned out to be police officers, but not your typical police officer, Special Branch or something like that, and they were absolutely obsessed with where I had got the explosives. I think the theory must have been that they were trying to trace the source, but since I had no receipt, I didn’t receive the explosives until the vehicle was about to drive off, I wasn’t able to help them at all.

  But I wasn’t in a frame of mind to help them anyway, no. I had a very simple view of it. I pleaded not guilty all along. I was arrested in a vehicle, a stolen vehicle with a bomb in the car. Now there wasn’t much hope of beating that charge but I fought it because my view was that the state’s got me and if it wants to keep me, it’ll have to do the work, I’m not going to do the work for them, very simple, total denial. I was charged with possession of explosives with intent to endanger life. I’ll never forget one night there was a police officer … a guy called Frank Savage, a Shankill Road man, who said to me, ‘What are you going to do when the wife’s got a lodger?’ and I replied, ‘If you say that to me again I’ll pull your fucking head off’, and he never said it to me again … That type of sleazy sick politics in the police room is frankly foolish and detrimental to the concept of justice and law. Anyway, I was then taken to the magistrates’ court in Townhall Street and remanded in custody for a week, and I had always been told not to take long remand periods, that you want to appear every week, and I did appear every week for seven months in that courtroom. I would be brought out in a little blacked-out transit van which, when we were going through Carlisle Circus on the roundabout, we would try to overturn it. You’d maybe a dozen prisoners in the back and the theory was that in the mayhem maybe you’d just get away. It was highly unlikely; we’d probably all end up butchered in the back of the bloody thing, but that was the type of thing that we got up to. I was held in Crumlin Road jail for about seven months which seemed long enough but then I know others who were there two years on remand.

  When I arrived at the jail, first of all I was taken into what’s called the annexe base which is like a reception area. [They] have a look at you and process you, and then you’re put into what’s called the annexe base, B Wing, into a pretty sparse basic cell, on the ground floor, with a courtyard behind it between B Wing and C Wing. You’d have been lying in your bed and then the next thing you’d hear people out in the courtyard, prisoners from C Wing exercising, which was the Loyalist wing. They’d ask, ‘Who are you, what are you in for?’ I knew some of them and they shouted over, ‘It’ll not be long till you’re over here’, and literally a day later I was moved from the isolation of the annexe base into a collective jail regime. You were unlocked in the mornings; you got out for breakfast, if you wanted breakfast; I don’t think I got up once for breakfast in the whole seven months, for a bowl of cornflakes, and a bit of sausage or potato bread floating about in gallons of grease. It was not what you wanted. Then you would have been locked up again after breakfast, for a relatively short time. We’d have got quite a bit of association when the wing was open, when the cells were open, then you’d maybe four or five hours of discussion and conversation, you’d maybe play a game of table tennis and you just got your day in. I did a lot of reading, and eventually after a while you would have got a radio in. A radio in many ways was your only company, until the jail started to fill up, and it filled up massively at that time, particularly with UVF people. I can remember being three to a cell, although I had started off on my own but then ended up three to a cell. It was a large influx of UVF people. It seemed to me that the UVF at that time outnumbered the UDA and the UDA were considered to be a much larger organisation on the outside … and when I was remanded instead to Long Kesh, the UVF outnumbered the UDA in there as well. Then I was brought back to the Crumlin Road for two weeks to await trial which might have been May in 1975. I was sentenced to eleven years for possession of explosives with intent to endanger life. I had some very strange experiences in jail, [for instance] I found out that my security clearance or my security level was the highest that you could get. We used to call such people ‘red-book men’. ‘Red-book men’ meant that you were considered very dangerous. I don’t know why they considered me desperately dangerous, but I was a ‘red-book man’, and I thought, ‘Why?’ Usually that was reserved for murderers, maybe multiple murderers … and that carried with me the whole way through jail including Long Kesh. If I needed to go to the doctor, I had to have a prison officer all on my own, whereas prison officers could escort other prisoners who weren’t ‘red-book men’ in twos … If I wanted to go to the study hut, for instance, it became a bit of a nuisance as I had to wait for a screw to be available. If there were, say, five of us going to the study hut, well that meant three screws, one each for a pair of prisoners and one for me. I wasn’t the only one, there were a number of people, but I just never came to terms why.

  In Crumlin Road the UVF command structure was very clear and very defined, but probably not as confident as the command structures in Long Kesh because they were long-term structures, whereas remand is a constant flow of people, it was a transitory jail process. In Crumlin Road you just had to take it on face value because the outside organisation said, ‘Here is the way the world works’, and that’s the way the world worked. We had people in charge of floors, we had people in charge of landings, and then we had [someone in] overall control. The first time I was in [the O/C] was Tommy McAllister from Donegall Pass and when I was back for my trial it was Billy Hutchinson. The whole time I was awaiting trial we were locked up twenty-three hours a day, and it was three to a cell, and when you needed a crap in the middle of the night, and there’s two other fellas in the cell, you may not feel too good about it. But it’s easier to stand the smell of your own crap than it is for somebody else to stand the smell of yours. They were not good conditions, cockroach infested, parts of the jail were mouse infested, it wasn’t good, but it was home, and actually quite interesting. I saw and learned a lot about people in that period of time. Young working-class Protestant people – and this is of course a generalisation – seemed to me to need alcohol to laugh, but in the jail we learned to laugh without it … for some it was character-building, for others it was destruction; there were those who just couldn’t cope, there was those who grew in stature in jail, it’s amazing. And of course that was carried on then in Long Kesh where the atmosphere was fundamentally different, where UVF had express and unshared control and processes of discipline that were substantially superior to those in Crumlin Road jail. It was interesting.

  When Gusty Spence was convicted and sentenced for the Malvern Street murder, legend has it that he complained bitterly, ‘So this is what you get for being a Protestant!’ It was a refrain that would be repeated by hundreds of Loyalists after him and it reflected an anger that far from Loyalists being jailed for taking up arms to defend a common cause, the Unionist establishment – RUC, polit-icians and judicial system – should instead praise them. David Ervine was no different.

  … here were the police officers who were defending the status quo just like me, the screws who were standing beside me in the dock defending the status quo just like me, and the fucking judge defending the status quo just li
ke me. Now there was plenty of talk in our community about ‘Ulster will fight and Ulster will be right’, and ‘shoot to kill’, and plenty of political mouthing, but when you actually went and did it, somehow or other you were the scum of the earth, and that was certainly on my mind … I’ll never forget when Lord Justice Jones [sentenced me], I waited on him getting the black hankie and putting it on his head. He was renowned for harshness, and I remember him saying to me, ‘The defendant has very unfavourably impressed me’, and he chastised the policeman, Frank Savage, for being less articulate than the prisoner, which I thought was a rather strange comment. It came from the judge’s interruption during the policeman’s evidence when he asked him, ‘Do you believe that the defendant is contrite?’ and Savage didn’t know what contrite meant. At that point the judge lost the rapper and said, ‘I have absolutely no doubt that the defendant knows what contrite means’, and here was this peeler getting sandbagged for not being a polished connoisseur of the dictionary. It was crazy, but behind it was a sense that: ‘Hold on a wee minute here, you’re a scumbag, you shouldn’t be articulate.’

  I think that the Loyalists found themselves very much misunderstood, that the community mood music was to fight back, even if they themselves would not necessarily do the fighting. There was a clear belief that the forces of law and order would not protect the people, would not protect the integrity of Northern Ireland’s position within the United Kingdom … But there were other things, I mean, these judges were case-hardened. You weren’t talking here about going into a court filled with your peers who would make a judgment on whether you were guilty or innocent. It wasn’t about getting the truth, it was just about clearing the decks, the conveyor belt to Long Kesh. There weren’t too many people who were walking out of the courts, and under the Diplock* regime it was democracy defending itself by undemocratic means. I think when democracy defends itself by undemocratic means then it is behaving wrongly, and in my case it’s punishing me because I believed that I was doing the right thing for my society, on the basis of the refusal of the state to actually deal with the problem of IRA insurgency.

  There’s no such thing as justice. I think that there’s loads of law, but I don’t believe I ever saw justice, I don’t believe that justice is done in courtrooms. I think that the independence of the judges is very questionable; not only was very questionable but still is very questionable. They get infuriated when they hear that said, but I cannot believe that they were an independent group of people. They were part of the state machine, and it was a state machine going through the illusion of normal democratic behaviour. I remember my mother coming to see me and I was telling her just some of the things that happened to some people in police stations, and she didn’t want to believe it. I had never seen the institutions from the inside, I never really had any effective functioning with the police, I had no effective functioning in the courts, I had no effective functioning in the prison regime. But my experience of the institutions was that they were as corrupt as fuck, and if I thought they were corrupt as fuck, and I was a defender of the status quo, how much more when the young Nationalist got his first glimpse. I wonder was he surprised at the degree of shit that exuded from those institutions, or did they just reinforce the rightness of his cause?

  Notes – 3

  12 David Miller, Queen’s Rebels, pp. 1–13.

  13 Michael Hopkinson, The Irish War of Independence.

  14 Principles of Loyalism, Progressive Unionist Party internal discussion paper, 1 November 2002.

  15 Sarah Nelson, Ulster’s Uncertain Defenders.

  16 Independent, 18 October 1994.

  17 Ed Moloney, Paisley: From Demagogue to Democrat?, p. 146.

  18 Ibid., p. 231.

  19 McKittrick et al., Lost Lives, p. 556.

  20 Principles of Loyalism.

  21 McKittrick et al., Lost Lives, pp. 1474–5.

  22 Information culled from McKittrick et al., Lost Lives.

  23 Ibid., pp. 441–2.

  * The no-jury system of trials was introduced in 1972 ostensibly to avoid the intimidation of juries in terrorism cases on foot of a recommendation made by Lord Kenneth Diplock, a senior Law Lord, who had been asked by the British government to consider alternatives to internment without trial. In the Diplock courts, as the new system was christened, a single judge acted as jury and anyone found guilty had an automatic right to appeal before three judges.

  4

  The British government did not start treating Northern Ireland’s Loyalist paramilitaries in the same way as the Provisional IRA, as terrorist threats whose members needed to be removed from the streets, until February 1973, when the first two Loyalists, both leaders in their way, were interned and sent to Long Kesh. Loyalist violence had really escalated in the wake of the internment swoop aimed at the IRA in August 1971, not only because, far from dealing the IRA a fatal blow, it had boosted Republican violence and greatly increased Nationalist alienation. The moderate SDLP had walked out of the Stormont parliament a month before over some controversial killings carried out by the British Army and after internment it spearheaded an angry campaign to boycott Northern Ireland’s institutions and to withhold public rent and rate payments to the state. The one-sided nature of the operation, which ignored Loyalists, fuelled Nationalist anger. The UVF was already there, albeit hidden inside the folds of Tara, and in September that year the various Protestant vigilante groups set up in Loyalist districts in and around Belfast during the year came together to form the Ulster Defence Association (UDA), which acted partly as a mass protest movement and partly as a deadly paramilitary force. By February 1973, well over a hundred and twenty people had been killed by either the UVF or the UDA. By 1973, Edward Heath’s government in London was beginning to seek a political exit from the morass of Irish politics and had turned its mind to constructing a widely based deal around the concept of power-sharing between Unionists and Nationalists, and some form of relationship with Dublin, the so-called ‘Irish dimension’. Exploratory meetings had been held in late 1972 but the SDLP, the major Nationalist party, was playing hard to get, raising demands that internment be ended. The decision to intern Loyalists was thus seen as a sop to Nationalists and a one-day protest strike, a precursor of the UWC strike a year later, was called by hardline Unionists and led to confrontations between Loyalists and the British Army, during which one UVF member and one UDA member were shot dead.24

  The first two Loyalists interned also came, one each, from the UVF and the UDA. The UDA internee was Edward ‘Ned’ McCreery who led a gang in East Belfast notorious for the viciousness of its killings. One of its victims was kidnapped, stripped, hung by his heels and repeatedly stabbed and beaten before being shot dead. Another had the shape of a cross and the letters ‘IRA’ branded on his back.25 A grenade attack on 1 February 1973 by members of McCreery’s gang on a bus carrying Catholic workers to a building site in East Belfast was the trigger for his internment. The UVF leader chosen for detention was not really a UVF member at all, but the founder of a small paramilitary group that aligned itself, to the point of virtual absorption, with the UVF. John McKeague founded the Red Hand Commando in 1972, and had a storied track record in the world of Protestant politics. Once a close associate of the Reverend Ian Paisley, he had been charged but acquitted of involvement in the 1969 bombings that ended Terence O’Neill’s political career. He went on to found the Shankill Defence Association, which played a major role in the violence of August 1969 in West and North Belfast, then broke with Paisley, ostensibly over money but also because rumours about McKeague’s sexuality – he was reputedly a paedophile – had become rampant amongst Loyalists.*

  The decision to intern Loyalist paramilitaries, along with the burgeoning moves by the Heath government towards what became the Sunningdale Agreement, acted as a stimulus both to para military recruitment and their violence. By the middle of 1974 the UVF and the UDA, in their different and often conflicting ways, had become major actors in the story, serious obst
acles in the way of British policy. They had, for instance, played an important role in the UWC strike that brought Heath’s efforts to nought in 1974, although by David Ervine’s account it seemed the UDA, rather than the UVF, was more active, more ready to expose its members at street barricades and the like. By the time David Ervine was caught with a bomb in the boot of his car, the memory of that victory was beginning to fade and with it the central place the Loyalist paramilitaries had created for themselves in the Unionist political firmament. And by then the British, led now by Labour’s Harold Wilson, were frying different fish. A month after Ervine’s arrest the first moves were made towards a truce between the British and the IRA and while Loyalists assumed the worst, that the British would sell them down the river, they were mistaken. None the less, the consequences of the IRA’s lengthy ceasefire would be serious for the UVF. The change in British security strategy, fashioned during the ceasefire and introduced towards the end of 1975, criminalised Loyalists as much as it did Republicans and soon RUC holding centres such as Castlereagh in East Belfast were churning out UVF men whose admissions during interrogations would earn them convictions and often lengthy jail terms in the juryless Diplock courts.