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

by Ed Moloney

  The policy of ‘criminalisation’ officially came into effect on 1 March 1976 when special-category status for all paramilitary prisoners was scrapped. The accompanying emphasis on confession-based convictions was soon felt by the UVF. Less than a year after Ervine had been removed from the scene, in October 1975, the bulk of the UVF in South-East Antrim – based principally around the towns of Carrickfergus and Larne – was arrested and charged with a series of murders, attempted murders, bombings and robberies. In February 1977, after a trial that lasted seventy-six days and at the time was the most expensive in Northern Ireland’s legal history, twenty-seven South-East Antrim UVF men were convicted, twenty-one on the basis of verbal or written statements they had made to detectives in Castlereagh. Among the murders they were convicted of were those of two UDA members, shot and buried in a secret grave in the spring of 1975 during vicious feuding between the two groups. When the new policy picked up momentum, Long Kesh began filling up with UVF prisoners.

  One of those imprisoned was thirty-five-year-old Billy Mitchell, the former Paisleyite turned UVF leader. Many early UVF figures had imagined the Troubles would be sharp but short; by mid-1973 it was clear that they could last a lot longer. Against a background of growing paramilitary impatience with Unionism’s political leaders, Mitchell persuaded the UVF to call a ceasefire, which began in mid-November 1973, in an effort to prompt a Republican response. The ceasefire was enforced with impressive discipline and the UVF did not kill anyone for over five months, until the end of February 1974. During the cessation, Mitchell also met members of the Official IRA, who had been on a ceasefire against the British since 1972, and more controversially with leading Provisional IRA members, Daithi O Connail and IRA Quarter Master General Brian Keenan, for exploratory peace talks. The dialogue stumbled on the predictable issue of Northern Ireland’s constitutional status and the violence resumed. Even so, the British took heart from these developments and in April 1974, just as the UWC strike was building, the Labour Northern Ireland Secretary Merlyn Rees announced that the ban on the UVF would be lifted, a move that reflected British hope that this might encourage the recent signs of moderation.26 A similar ban on Sinn Fein was also ended for the same reasons.

  Mitchell’s move was supported by Gusty Spence from his compound† in Long Kesh. By that stage Spence had almost completed his remarkable journey away from violence and hardline, inflexible Loyalism but the first sight of Spence in Belfast since his arrest in 1966 was of the old, diehard Spence. In July 1972, he was granted forty-eight hours’ compassionate parole to attend his daughter’s wedding but as he was being driven back to the jail his car was blocked and Spence was ‘kidnapped’ by fellow UVF members. He spent the next four months or so of this contrived freedom helping to reorganise and restructure the UVF; he also designed a uniform for the organisation, the main feature of which was the black leather jacket that became the UVF’s daunting hallmark. A British television interview with Spence made during his spell of liberty featured a taciturn, uncompromising figure whose answers came in unsmiling monosyllables. He was re-arrested in November 1972 but by the spring of 1974, some eighteen months later, he had performed a political U-turn, now advocating a peaceful, negotiated settlement to the Troubles. Before long he would also be quietly preaching the merits of power-sharing with Nationalists, a far cry from his adamant opposition to Terence O’Neill’s mild reformism.27 Spence also encouraged the UVF to create a political party, the Volunteer Political Party (VPP) which had a brief if unsuccessful existence contesting for the votes of Shankill Road Loyalists. Like Billy Mitchell, Gusty Spence opened dialogue with Republicans, reaching out to IRA prisoners of both Official and Provisional stripes, helping to set up a Camp Council to negotiate issues of common concern with the prison governor, on which sat the Commanders of UDA, UVF, Official IRA and Provisional IRA inmates. In these developments, along with an influx of hardline prisoners to the jail, can be found both the source of Gusty Spence’s eventual estrangement from the mainstream UVF outside the jail as well as the influences that shaped David Ervine’s later political odyssey in the Progressive Unionist Party, the VPP’s successor.

  The internment of Loyalists and a swelling conviction rate meant that by late 1973 the UVF’s prisoners had to be moved from Crumlin Road jail in Belfast to Long Kesh. Spence was one of the first to be transferred. He was the natural choice for Commander of UVF prisoners and introduced a regime strongly influenced by his years in the Royal Ulster Rifles, as he told BBC journalist Peter Taylor many years later: ‘The compounds were run on British Army lines with made-up beds, highly polished boots, pressed uniforms, etc. There was a daily regime. Reveille was at eight o’clock in the morning, followed by showers, breakfast, and then a parade. Then the day was laid out.’28 By November 1974, when David Ervine was driven through the gates of Long Kesh, Gerry Adams, Ivor Bell and Brendan Hughes were beginning their battle with the IRA’s Camp Commander, David Morley, another British Army veteran whose idea of prison discipline, while more eccentric than Spence’s, was similarly derived from his days as a squaddie. This was the Long Kesh that would be Ervine’s home for the next six years, first as a remand prisoner then as a sentenced man.

  For the short time I was on remand in Long Kesh, I was held in Compound 20. Compound 18 and 19 at that time were UVF compounds, 16 and 17 were UDA compounds and 21 was Official IRA. We were held in the remand compound, 20, which was mixed UDA, UVF … I remember the day that I arrived, I was met by Gusty Spence who actually lived in Compound 18, but he was in Compound 20 to meet the influx of new prisoners in his capacity as the O/C of the UVF in Long Kesh. So it was very clear that the [prison] structure was not only solid, but was established in the relationship between the UVF and the jail [authorities] … It seemed to me that here was clear recognition of the importance of the control factor in men. [The authorities] knew that they couldn’t control UVF people; the only people who could control UVF people was the UVF leadership, and that was very clear. You were coming from a jail where you were locked up, allowed out, locked up, allowed out all day, every day, that’s the way it worked. In Long Kesh, the huts had doors that opened out onto a fairly large hundred-metre-square compound and pretty much from seven o’clock in the morning till nine o’clock at night you could do what you wished. Or at least that’s the way you might have thought, but then enter UVF rules and regulations where one had to be out of bed in the morning at a specific time … washed and preened by a certain time, that one’s living space had to be spotlessly cleaned. Being tidy was not good enough. This wasn’t what I was expecting … My remand period in Long Kesh was almost a grounding for what I would be coming back to, because in the sentenced compounds, 18 and 19, the implications of that discipline were actually much more acute than in Compound 20. They weren’t invasive but they were about making the place function, and you learned very quickly a set of rules …

  … there was a ‘no conflict’ policy [which meant] you weren’t allowed to hit anyone. If you had a dispute [then] lifting your hands was actually a very risky business because you were then directly challenging the authority of the UVF in Long Kesh and that did not go down well at all. You would have been expected to deal with things in a manly manner. In other words if there was a real dispute then [it was into] the boxing ring and [on with] the boxing gloves. The venting of anger and frustration was done in a controlled manner rather than simply in a brawl. There were very, very few incidents of physical violence, but of course the other compounds around us did not necessarily function in that way. Other groups controlled their membership by violence. I remember the story about a guy in, I think it was Compound 16, the UDA compound, who apparently had infracted their rules and his head was put in a workbench vice and tightened. The UVF leadership did not advocate the use of violence for control purposes … and it worked. On one occasion I saw a guy use a knife and he was immediately stripped of special-category status, political status, if you like, and thrown out. I actually think that in terms
of control mechanisms the UVF were away ahead of the game inside that jail … The cleanliness wasn’t about telling anybody they were dirty; it was about absolute discipline, having pride in yourself. It was a lot of very subtle psychological things that I think Spence, perhaps in his army years and in Crumlin Road jail, had thought of, along the lines of: ‘We know that people can get depressed; we know that there’s a danger of disenchantment, they’re fed up and depressed’ … Spence had a lot of things in place that were about keeping you occupied and giving you a concept of pride … I have to say to you, I raised the odd eyebrow, but I got on with it, and over later years I would be in admiration for the style, attitude and nature of the way he controlled those men.

  … there were many reasons why the discipline of the UVF was absolutely vital, but the point I make was that Spence was virtually unassailable regarding fairness, [and the way he] used his authority. He had been the O/C of the UVF before he came into Long Kesh, and … a weaker leader would have been crushed from the outset. There were a few wobbles but in the main the internal discipline of the UVF held. The compound system was one of humane confinement, particularly if it was augmented with psychologically sensible attitudes on the leadership’s part and not only that, a ‘no conflict’ attitude by the leadership. You weren’t, if you were five foot three, going to be pushed around by somebody six foot four when the dinner queue came; you just weren’t going to get bullied, it wasn’t going to happen …

  The Wilson government’s new criminalisation policy saw the eventual destruction of the compounds and huts of Long Kesh and their replacement by the H-blocks along with a more conventional and restricted prison regime. Ervine believed that the old Long Kesh regime encouraged cross-community contact and he blamed the Labour government and especially the new policy’s overseer, Northern Ireland Secretary Roy Mason, for making changes that might have jeopardised the potential for some sort of peace process. As it was, the new prison system led directly to the IRA protests and hunger strikes of 1980 and 1981, which deepened the conflict. Ervine also condemned the changes because life in cells and wings discouraged prisoners from seeking further education.

  … I think that … it’s a tragedy that the continuum of the compound process until the end of the conflict wasn’t allowed because I think that the Ph.D. s would be coming out of our ears. Interestingly enough, in the UVF compounds people were inclined to take classes that were related to mathematics and very practical things, computers and so on, whereas the Provos were inclined to take classes related to social issues. I was doing a foundation course, an Arts and Humanities foundation course, and part of it was the study of poetry and I remember a big guy called John Wallace, who now is living in Scotland, whose view of poetry was that poetry was for pansies, poetry was for big girls’ blouses. He would say things to me like, ‘What are you doing that for, you big idiot you?’ Totally disparaging. John Wallace eventually had to take the compulsory classes and out of that [he] did an Open University degree. He then left Long Kesh to take up Ph. D. work at St Andrews University in Scotland and stayed in university for I don’t know how many years after that. So it was quite interesting to see the mindset changes in people with exposure to education … it was tremendous stuff.

  If the Provisional IRA in Long Kesh at this time had Cage 11, where Gerry Adams and Brendan Hughes discussed revolution, plotted the overthrow of the IRA leadership and recruited a following, then the UVF had its equivalent, Compound 21, where Gusty Spence was eventually housed. There, the UVF leader gathered around him his own band of followers who discussed ideas such as power-sharing – as unwelcome to the UVF outside the jail as Adams’s left-wing inclinations were to his leadership – and nurtured the core of what would become the UVF/PUP leadership that twenty years later would embrace a peace process initiated by the same Gerry Adams.

  We were provoked, tortured almost, by Spence. I can remember sitting in the sunshine in 1975 minding my own business on the steps of the study hut and Gusty Spence came over. ‘How are you doing, son?’ ‘I’m doing all right, sir, thank you very much.’ He was always given the title ‘sir’. I think anybody who begrudged that soon accepted it and ‘sir’ just rolled out. It would even today roll off my tongue without thinking when I meet him, but anyway we started talking about politics. I was just an average basic chap, and he started asking, ‘Had anybody thought of the politics of the goldfish bowl?’ ‘What is this stupid auld bastard talking about?’ you’re saying to yourself … and he went on to talk about the politics of the goldfish bowl in a society where not only would one be fair but one would have to be seen to be fair, how this was the only way that you could ever have … power-sharing. ‘Power-sharing! Power-sharing! You mean let the fifth column inside the house? Sure you wouldn’t want the fifth column inside the house!’ And I think that Spence’s theory was probably well enough summed up when he would say, ‘Well, I’d rather have them pishing out from inside as pishing in from the outside.’ And that was 1975, and Northern Ireland Unionists had not in any way come to terms with the concept of power-sharing. The power-sharing Executive had just fallen, à la the Sunningdale Agreement. Now whether or not people would have acquiesced in power-sharing and were more agitated by … the suggestion of a Council of Ireland is a debatable issue. I think for many … the Council of Ireland was used to justify the strike … In other words, my argument would be that I am not convinced, far from being convinced that the people of Northern Ireland or the Protestant or the Unionist community were wedded to any notion of power-sharing. Spence was away ahead of the game, and he was almost a devil’s advocate. He was constantly facing us with theories that were weird. I mean, you had just come into Long Kesh and the basis of your life was hatred for the Republicans [and] the next thing you know there’s a Camp Council in which every faction, an unheard-of thing, [were] all pulled together by Spence to [engage in] dialogue about the conditions in the jail, to challenge the jail regime about our conditions and circumstances. But that’s not what his real reason was; it was to talk politics among all of the factions, and he nearly pulled it off. The Provos ran away from it eventually because the idea was that you would then extrapolate from these contacts to the outside, and the Provos ran away from it. It’s quite interesting [that] it was the Provos who ran away, not the Loyalists, not even the UDA. That was Spence’s baby, and here he had, by that time, two hundred and forty men who were all full of gung-ho hatred for the Republicans and yet Spence was able to pull it off; he was able to sleep in his bed among these murderers who were dubious about talking to the enemy, bringing in a fifth column. They would be saying, ‘What is this man doing?’ We got that all the time [from Spence]; it was constant, absolutely constant, and if you look at Billy Hutchinson, Billy Mitchell, David Ervine, Marty Snodden, ‘Skittle’ or Alistair Little, ‘Winkie’, Tom Winston, and others, you’re looking at a class of ’75 and the teacher was Spence. I think you were expected to do a lot of your own learning, but the provocateur was Spence … It was structured and unstructured, structured by Spence in ways that he would have tried to provoke debate and in an unstructured manner where he would have tried to collar you and make you think. You were in a cubicle or what some people would call a cell, and you were just sitting around having a yarn, up came politics, paramilitarism, all of that … and it was all the time. The violence outside and the fact that nobody outside was doing anything about it [was] probably … part of the reason why we ourselves took steps that took us into arenas that people had never been before, testing ideas on each other. I remember writing a letter to Combat‡ about the possibility of power-sharing, and being attacked in the compound, well almost attacked. [The attacker] was stopped before he got to me … There was an intensity in our community about such issues and anything that looked like it was reasonable to the other side was seen as a weakness. You would have got that internally as well within the compound system, but in fairness, and it’s been something that the UVF has been very good at since, and the peace process tel
ls the tale. You could fall out with the UVF leadership on a Monday morning and Monday afternoon go back and do business. The UVF in that respect has always facilitated discussion and debate, in my experience, both inside and outside [jail]. I’m sure sometimes they sit with their fingers in their ears not wishing to hear what they’re hearing, but this current leadership has followed on in that tradition. I think that is one of the reasons why the UVF as an organisation as a whole is more sophisticated and settled …

  I remember a number of questions that were nightmare questions, and very simplistic I would have to say, but nevertheless I think of significance. Why do people hate people they don’t know? Imagine [Spence] asking that of the murderers: why do people hate people they don’t know? … Without personal basis or personal foundation , there’s a capacity to hate, and out of the dialogues around that issue it was very clear that the process of manipulation in Northern Ireland is not a thought process, it’s a taught process. So what is that manipulation about, what does it really mean, who does well out of that manipulation, who does badly? Big-house Unionism in bed with little-house Unionism, little-house Unionism goes home to its difficulties and big-house Unionism manipulates the difficulties and remains in the big house, you know. That’s simplistic but nevertheless that was the style and nature of the debate and the discussions.

  Gusty Spence also initiated dialogue with the Provisional IRA leadership and that of the Official IRA, but not the group that split off from the Officials, the Irish National Liberation Army (INLA) which, inside the jail, took sides with the UDA during a violent feud with the UVF in 1975.