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

by Ed Moloney

  The Irish government embraced it, I have to say, much more readily than the British. In terms of understanding the need for the conduit and understanding the need for integrity and honour in the use of the conduit, I think the Irish were much more attuned to that … you could argue that they saw the UVF as dangerous and wanted to mediate and defuse whatever difficulties there may have been but the British government would have seen the UVF as less dangerous because it was not likely to be expressly damaging the, the British exchequer.

  … there had been already a conduit, the Reverend Roy Magee, who was our conduit to Robin Eames and also was partially used to test out the Irish government to check constantly to see was he getting the same feedback … Robin Eames also became important in both jurisdictions in terms of talking directly to the senior people, but again it was all about the remeasuring and measuring and remeasuring of what we already had been told … [The UVF] was never satisfied with the answers that it got back unless it got a series of answers that all concurred from different touchstones, and even then there was a risk of being wrong. It was a very nervous time; you could be lied to, you could be getting shafted, and they were very conscious of that, but in the main they operated a very simple copper-fastening process. It came down to Chris Hudson’s integrity, it came down to Robin Eames’s integrity and [having] someone who could call the truth if in the event you were shafted, someone [who] would stand up and say, ‘No, this is shameful and ridiculous, this did not happen or this was said or that was said.’ It was all the UVF had, but it was relatively comfortable, I think, in that the UVF had done everything that it could to get to the nitty-gritty and it was then a question of: ‘Well, OK, and if this is true and if this is right, what is our fallback position, what is, what is our capacity for redress apart from violence?’

  At that stage the UVF was not offering a ceasefire. It was trying to understand what the fuck was going on in terms of the constitutional position of Northern Ireland within the United Kingdom and what deals were being made with the IRA … The bit that worried us all to our backbone was what is the position of the British administration and the British were about as helpful as a fart in a spacesuit in terms of our explorations and deliberations; indeed the Irish government were much more forthcoming. The IRA, remember, has diametrically opposed desires for the outcome of the political struggle in Northern Ireland than does the UVF. None of us trusted the British government because we had the debacle of the Anglo-Irish Agreement, which was clearly a steamroller of the democratic rights of the Unionist community. They’d done it before, and one could imagine they could do it again. I remember in separate conversations with two Taoisigh, or whatever you call them … [John] Bruton and [Albert] Reynolds, and as far as they were concerned, without the principle of consent nothing was possible, and they meant it, and at least one believed that they meant it, and that was important, absolutely vital. Their assertion [was] that central to anything would be the principle of consent, and we were getting that similarly from Robin Eames directly from the British prime minister, and, and though it turned out to be that was the case, we didn’t know whether to believe or trust them. But when you’re getting it from two separate Taoiseachs and you’re getting it from a British prime minister and you have, if you like, whistleblowers in the event of dishonour, then I think it was all we could get. It all had to fit … it all did fit and that’s why there was confusion in the UVF. We didn’t believe the Provos were going there; we didn’t see the Provos pulling their people to that position, and we struggled with that, but eventually you had to take it on face value. If it walks like a duck, looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, it’s a fucking duck, and we knew the game was absolutely, absolutely on.

  The Downing Street Declaration was another indicator of the game being on, but eight months for the Provos to respond to the Downing Street Declaration was a serious confusion, and I remember, about April of 1994, big questions about whether the Provos were going for it or not, whether it was really going to happen or not, and shortly thereafter there were rumours of ceasefire from the end of April 1994 and that ceasefire didn’t come till August, and the UVF leadership was watching and listening and all of a sudden then you started to see that there was the odd Unionist politician who started to know a wee bit about it. Now whether we were ahead of them, I think we were. I think we were way ahead of them.

  I can remember going down to Armagh to meet [Archbishop] Robin Eames along with military people from the UDA, UVF and Red Hand [Commando] … They had built a relationship with him in the first instance through Roy Magee, then with him directly about his bona fides as a monitor, in other words: ‘If this all goes belly up maybe you can just tell the truth here.’ I refuse to think of it as a confidence-builder, but a barrier-diminisher. One of the most fundamental issues for the UVF was a single issue, it was the principle of consent, that was a simple requirement, also that … Northern Ireland be a separate [unit] for the principle of consent, that it wasn’t going to be exercised on an island-wide basis and it wasn’t a United Kingdom or British Isles-wide basis; it was expressly the people of Northern Ireland. There are some people who chastise us for having the audacity to discuss the issue [but] for me it’s the epitome of democracy. Others say, ‘Well, what happens if they outbreed you?’ Well, I think we needed to be dealing with very straightforward democratic concepts, and there is no greater democratic concept than self-determination by the people of Northern Ireland. And that principle of consent was enshrined not only in legislation in the United Kingdom parliament, but legislation in the Republic of Ireland’s parliament. Forget about Articles 2 and 3; for me the insertion into Irish government legislation of the principle of consent for Northern Ireland was fundamental, absolutely fundamental. The UVF got what it wanted; the UVF effectively got what it wanted …

  I think released prisoners were important, some very important [in all this]; they were coming out [of jail] with attitudes that were more liberal, and I think they had an effect on the ground in the communities that they came from. But then there were others who had a direct role or relationship with the [UVF] leadership, and they were significant. I think one of them in particular was hugely significant and a second one was slightly less so; the first one was Gusty Spence, and the second was Billy Hutchinson. Billy Hutchinson was in a role, a very unofficial role in liaison across the wall [with Republicans], which was of significance … I think the [UVF] leadership would probably have felt bolstered [by all this], felt confirmed in the direction that they were travelling, because it was travelling, it was an exploration, it was a process of exploration, it had all the hallmarks of horror, but behind that horror was a clear search to find out what was going on … There was confusion on many occasions; the UVF had its own Provo experts, and then you had the political analysis, and very often the political analysis was at absolute variance with what anybody believed the Provos would or would not do. They were very intense discussions and quite brilliant discussions … but you could have the UVF Provo experts saying, ‘Well, this doesn’t add up, they’re not going there’, and the political analysis we were getting and the feedback we were getting was saying, ‘They are going somewhere and it is to a better place, potentially a better place. The question for us is what price did they get for it, and is the dealing between the British and the Provos detrimental to Unionism?’ So when the UVF finally arrived at a position in 1994 it was a relatively comfortable position; it knew it had no choice because the game was on, and the game was going on with or without them, and indeed the IRA wanted the game to go on most definitely without Loyalists.

  The sixteen or so months between the April 1993 disclosure that John Hume and Gerry Adams had ‘resumed’ their meetings and the IRA ceasefire of August 1994, have to be among the most turbulent in recent Irish history. Again, some of the events were played out in public but much happened in secret; extraordinary acts of violence at times seemed to doom the peace process to failure but each time the process was dragged b
ack from the edge.

  As if to reassure its grassroots that there would be no sell-out, the IRA launched a bombing blitz in the spring of 1993 within days of the Hume–Adams meeting in Derry. A huge truck bomb in Bishopsgate in the City of London devastated the financial district while many of the targets in Northern Ireland seemed designed to provoke Loyalist anger; the Glengall Street headquarters of the Official Unionist Party was blitzed by a 1000-pound lorry bomb and the centres of the predominantly Protestant towns of Portadown, Newtownards and Magherafelt were badly shattered. As the British and Irish governments wrestled with the Hume–Adams dialogue, important gestures were made by Dublin to the Provos. Irish Taoiseach Albert Reynolds made a secret offer to lift the ban on Sinn Fein appearing on the Irish electronic media while the Irish president, Mary Robinson, travelled to West Belfast to shake hands with Gerry Adams, albeit well out of the view of the TV cameras. In September, the IRA called an unofficial seven-day ceasefire to mark the presence of a delegation of influential Irish-Americans who were in Ireland on a peace-process fact-finding mission. The move was intended to impress the Americans and through them to recruit the Clinton White House to the Nationalist side of the peace debate. The Sinn Fein leadership had expanded the notion of pan-Nationalism to incorporate Irish America in the hope that the combined pressure would persuade the British to move positively.

  Also in September, John Hume and Gerry Adams suspended their talks, saying that they had reached sufficient agreement to create the basis for progress and were forwarding a report on their deliberations to Dublin. In fact no such report existed; the ploy seemed calculated to add pressure on the governments to move in their direction. Their statement was the trigger for an upsurge in Loyalist violence. Over the next month or so attacks by the UVF, the UDA or the Red Hand Commando averaged one a day. Under pressure from their grassroots to retaliate, the IRA decided to strike at the leadership of the UDA. A bomb was placed inside a fish shop in the floor below the UDA’s headquarters, timed to explode as the Loyalist leadership was holding its weekly meeting. The IRA’s intelligence was faulty and so was the plan. The bomb exploded prematurely, killing one of the IRA team and nine Protestant shoppers, four of them women and two schoolgirls. The UDA leadership had not been meeting at the time. The Loyalists struck back and within a week had killed twelve Catholic civilians. The worst single incident was in Greysteel, County Derry, on Hallowe’en weekend, where the UDA machine-gunned customers in the Rising Sun Bar, killing six Catholics and one Protestant. As if to reinforce the impression that events were spiralling out of control, a consignment of weapons bound from Poland for the UVF was intercepted on a cargo ship in Teesport, England. Its cargo included nearly two tonnes of high explosives.

  This was the background to the unveiling of the Downing Street Declaration (DSD) in mid-December, 1993. Stripped of a date for British withdrawal at the insistence of both British premier John Major and his Irish counterpart Albert Reynolds, the DSD was not what the IRA Army Council had been hoping for. Instead the document restated the principle of consent in terms that could have come straight out of Father Reid’s playbook and offered Sinn Fein a place at the conference table if the IRA ended its violence. Meanwhile the Irish government broadly hinted that it would alter its constitutional claim to Northern Ireland to reflect the need for consent, a significant concession to Unionists. The British were staying and Northern Ireland, that is the Unionist majority in effect, would be a separate unit in the exercise of Irish self-determination, just as Father Reid had envisaged and the UVF/PUP had demanded.53 Not surprisingly the IRA Army Council rejected the document but Adams persuaded his military colleagues to keep the judgement secret and to ask for ‘clarification’ of the document instead, a move that helped tie the IRA into a process that would lead eventually to the Good Friday Agreement and the fulfilment of the Reid–Adams blueprint. With the exception of Paisley’s DUP, mainstream Unionists reacted with equanimity to the Downing Street Declaration while the UVF said it did not feel threatened and would not support any ‘publicity stunt’ organised by Paisley.

  In the wake of the DSD, Sinn Fein became the target for a stream of government-supplied ‘goodies’ designed to make retreat from the process by the IRA costly enough to give it pause for thought. The media ban on Sinn Fein in the South was lifted by Albert Reynolds in January 1994 and the next month Gerry Adams was granted a forty-eight-hour visa to visit New York, during which he was fêted as a media star cum statesman by Irish America. The British government’s anger at the move served only to strengthen Adams’s hand in his dealings with the Army Council. The violence continued apace in the background, with both Republicans and Loyalists killing freely. The former INLA leader Dominic McGlinchey was shot dead by unknown assailants; Loyalist attacks on the SDLP intensified, as did the killing of Catholics and people associated with Republicanism, and in April members of the UVF’s sister organisation, the Red Hand Commando, brutally beat and shot dead a Protestant woman, Margaret Wright, who had wandered into an illegal drinking club where she was mistaken for a Catholic.

  According to David Ervine, a Loyalist ceasefire was tentatively planned by the CLMC for July and the intention was twofold: first to pre-empt the IRA ceasefire if possible and second to ensure that the Loyalist groups were not left behind when the IRA cessation came. But then the Republican violence ramped up, followed closely by that of the Loyalists. In mid-June, an INLA gunman sprayed shots into a group of men standing near the PUP’s offices on the Shankill Road, killing the UVF’s Shankill Commander, Trevor King, and two other UVF men. The next day the UVF struck out wildly, killing one Catholic and two Protestants mistaken for Catholics. But worse was to follow twenty-four hours later when UVF gunmen sprayed customers in the Heights Bar in Loughinisland, County Down, as they were watching a World Cup football game between Ireland and Italy, killing six Catholics and wounding five more. On 10 July 1994, two days before the 12th, the IRA fired forty shots at the home in Magherafelt, County Derry, of DUP MP the Reverend William McCrea, two of whose relatives, Leslie Dallas and Derek Ferguson, had been shot dead by the IRA, which claimed both had been active in the Mid-Ulster UVF. The following day, 11 July, the IRA killed Ray Smallwood, a key UDA member of the CLMC’s peace team, and at the end of the month two South Belfast UDA men were also shot dead. Ervine was close by when Smallwood was shot and tried to help him, but to no effect. These killings, and that of Dublin gangster Martin Cahill, long suspected of colluding with Northern Loyalists against the IRA, were regarded by some as score settling by the IRA prior to their ceasefire. Smallwood had tried to kill Bernadette McAliskey and her husband Michael back in 1981, while the two UDA men had killed the wife of a South Belfast Sinn Fein councillor. But the UVF and the PUP took a darker view, suspecting that the aim was to ensure that when the IRA called its ceasefire, Republicans would have sole possession of the mantle of peace.

  Well, I think there were moments of horror for all of us, because you thought you had understood what was going on and then all of a sudden something would happen and you’re devastated by it and [you’re] trying to make sense of it. But it was clear that when the dust settled [that] the game was still on, and it was about touch-stoning all the time to see what state the game was in, or the preparations for the game, and that therefore anger and emotion was something that you knew you didn’t have the luxury for. We were all very angry and very emotional; the Shankill bombing was devastating, an unbelievably devastating set of circumstances which had its knock-on effects … as well which were horrific. In that respect you were derailed … but you had to come back to the reality of what was going on, and the game was still on, and you either played it or you rebelled and tried to destroy the game, [but] the game looked very powerful to us …

  It became clear to Loyalists that around April of 1994 something was really on the go and … the IRA were going to move, we thought, to a ceasefire. The indicators were that the IRA was going to cause a lot of mayhem in the Loyalist community, [sett
ling] old scores, that type of stuff, a big bang, and then a ceasefire, so to everyone who would listen, people like me and others were dispatched to say, ‘This is a bad idea, a bad, bad, bad idea’, and Loyalism would react very badly. You need to do a chronology of it almost because my memory isn’t great, but I can remember things began to happen that hadn’t … really happened in a long time, like a bomb in the Berlin Arms, I think it was, and a bomb in the Grove Tavern, things the IRA hadn’t done in a very long time … We had then the murder of Ray Smallwood and the murders of Joe Bratty and [Raymond] Elder and there were many who perceived that they were expressly about making sure that Loyalism was agitated. Where one gets a little confused is the shooting of Trevor King, Colin Craig and Davy Hamilton, because it was suggested that was INLA rather than the IRA who was responsible. Could they be working in cahoots? I don’t know, I don’t think any of us knew for sure, but certainly around that time there was clear tension, and why wouldn’t there be, within the Loyalist community, great anger within the Loyalist community, notwithstanding the fact that we’d had the aftermath of the Shankill bomb, Greysteel. All of that, I suppose, culminated for many in Loughinisland … it just seemed to us that somebody wanted to keep the Loyalist pot boiling. Our history had always been that one action will beget another action, there’s no question about that … but where I started this conversation was about Loyalists calling a ceasefire first, and that was destroyed by the murderous campaigns of Republicanism, and I have to say to you that there are those who believe it was nothing short of a miracle that six weeks after the IRA ceasefire, a Loyalist ceasefire was called. The IRA were on their way to a ceasefire and were clearly doing things that were expressly about derailing Loyalism, and it brought me to the conclusion … that Gerry Adams was meant to swan the world stage as a peacemaker, as Loyalists rumbled on in violence. What a horror that would have been and what a tragedy that would have been, but again I emphasise a point that I made … before. Loyalists forced their way into the frame as far as a ceasefire was concerned by analysing and by getting out and finding out what was happening. That consultation process prior to the IRA ceasefire [meant] we’d a fair idea things were on their way and we had expressly believed that they were likely to come around April, but many things happened between April and the IRA’s declaration in August, that were really awful and very, very hard to deal with …