by Ed Moloney
With the CLMC ceasefire came a new respectability for the UVF and the UDA. The ultimate mark of this was an invitation to visit the United States of America, made possible when the Clinton White House agreed to waive the visa ban on people such as Ervine, whose prison records normally disqualified them from entering the country. Eventually, David Ervine, Billy Hutchinson and their UDA equivalents would get to wine and dine in the White House, just like Gerry Adams, but Ervine’s first trip to the States came only a month after the CLMC had suspended its violence. The expedition was a revelation to David Ervine, not least because of the insight he gained into how America’s self-interest shaped foreign policy. Bill Clinton’s interest in the peace process might have been shaped by the prospect of Irish-American votes but as far the mandarins of Washington were concerned, it was about fighting its own wars. Peace in Northern Ireland would free up British military resources for use against the United States’s new, emerging enemy: militant Islam.
… the Loyalist ceasefire was declared on 14 October 1994, and less than a month later we were invited to speak to people in the United States, in three cities – New York, Boston and Washington – and that was interesting; certainly, as one of the delegates, it was extremely interesting and very pleasurable. I had never been in America before, I had never been on a flight that length of time, I had never been picked up in a limousine and driven around, and I have no doubt people believed that we were being seduced, but leaving that element of it aside, it was vital. We were able to talk to the State Department, to the United Kingdom desk officer and when we simplistically accused the United States administration of being pro-Provo, he said, ‘Well, you know the Provisional IRA don’t have Buccaneer bombers, they don’t have aircraft carriers, and we need to help sew up the British exchequer so that we can take on the next big battle in the world.’ And we all looked at him, and he said, ‘Islamic fundamentalism.’ That was November 1994, and I was not alone, there are witnesses. We came away, I think, a little annoyed with ourselves. We went with a view that somehow or other all Irish-Americans were rampant Provos, and came back chastened because that’s not the case, far from it. But I found them … very pro-United Kingdom, even many of the Irish-Americans. You’ve also got to remember that it was also a case of Gerry Adams got his visa, so we had to get ours, and there is an element of legitimacy in that. Clinton gave Adams his visa when Adams could not achieve legitimacy from anywhere else; he couldn’t get it from Unionism at all, and he couldn’t get it from the British, so the Americans provided that legitimacy which fuelled the belief in Adams’s constituency that what he was advocating was of value. And it wasn’t dissimilar for Loyalism; [it] was in many ways an indication of legitimacy [or] an indicator that the path that one had chosen was being recognised. For too long anyway the American understanding of Northern Ireland was minimalist to say the least, and in the words of a UVF Commander, ‘Maybe part of the job was if you can’t convince, confuse’, and I think we did because they began to realise … the complexity of Northern Ireland. It is not as simple as many outsiders perceive, and certainly the vast array of Irish Americans were quite simplistic in their views …
The IRA ceasefire broke down in February 1996 largely because of the growing influence of IRA leaders who had been critical of Gerry Adams’s peace strategy for some time. The principal detractor was the IRA’s Quarter Master General, Michael McKevitt, whose views carried great weight in the IRA’s Southern Command and around the crucial border areas of South Armagh and Louth. His influence was all the greater because he had played a key role in arranging the Libyan arms shipments to the IRA and his marriage to Bernadette Sands, the sister of the hunger-strike icon Bobby Sands, during the peace-process years added to his pedigree. McKevitt’s critique of the Adams strategy had been legitimised by the British government’s stand on IRA decommissioning, refusing to allow Sinn Fein into political talks until the IRA had started destroying its weapons, and ending the ceasefire over this issue was the first stage in his plan to topple Gerry Adams.
Nor was it surprising that division and discord were also visited on the Loyalist paramilitaries in the wake of their ceasefires and at around the very same time. By embracing the peace process, the UVF and the UDA were way ahead of their own people, sometimes dangerously so. At best Unionism was evenly split on whether the IRA was genuine or whether the British could be trusted and those politicians, such as Molyneaux’s successor David Trimble, who share the Loyalist analysis of the IRA, were constantly under challenge and threat. Inevitably the ceasefire was opposed inside the UVF and the UDA but in the UVF’s case there was an early conviction that the hand of Ian Paisley’s DUP was helping to stir the pot.
The central figure in the drama was forty-six-year-old Billy Wright, the organisation’s Mid-Ulster Commander who lived in Portadown, County Armagh, possibly the staunchest of Loyalist towns in Northern Ireland. A member of the UVF’s youth wing, the Young Citizen Vounteers, at the age of fifteen, Wright had served time in jail for a paramilitary hijacking and arms offences but afterwards became an evangelical gospel preacher in County Armagh. In the mid-1980s he returned to the UVF’s ranks and was in charge during its ‘escalate the war to end the war’ phase when the UVF set out to kill Republicans. The irony of Wright’s break with the mainstream UVF was that he and his Mid-Ulster colleagues had killed more Republicans than most and by so doing strengthened Ervine and the peace party in the UVF. Estimates of the number killed during his watch go upwards from twenty and his men were the first, and only, paramilitaries ever to kill a journalist, Martin O’Hagan, who had offended Wright by renaming his UVF ‘Brat Pack’ in Mid-Ulster the ‘Rat Pack’ and Wright himself, ‘King Rat’, although Wright later grew to like the soubriquet.
The spat came to a head during mid-summer 1996 over a standoff that had by that point become a semi-permanent feature of Northern Ireland’s political architecture. For decades Orangemen had marched along the Garvaghy Road in Portadown en route to a church service. But over the years the area had become mostly Catholic and the marches turned into an occasion for communal strife and conflict. As the peace process gathered strength, a Nationalist demand to ban the march became something of a litmus test for overall British sincerity. In 1995, Catholic residents blocked the marchers and Orangemen refused to be re-routed, a stance that led to a violent confrontation with the RUC. The march was eventually allowed through with Nationalists asserting that there had been an agreement that any parade the following year could happen only after the Orangemen had consulted local residents. The Orangemen’s protest had spread, however; there were riots and road blockades across Northern Ireland and the seaport of Larne had been closed off by protesters. Two senior Unionists, Ian Paisley and soon-to-be Ulster Unionist leader David Trimble had turned up at Drumcree to show solidarity, a sure sign of where majority Unionist sentiment lay.
In 1996, it was the same story but more of it. At first the RUC banned the Orange march but after an outburst of Protestant violence, the police reversed course and pushed the march through, notwithstanding Nationalist anger. What changed the police mind was not just the rioting and roadblocking that had broken out all over Northern Ireland but the threat presented by Wright’s UVF teams. The UVF leadership in Belfast had ordered Wright to withdraw from Drumcree but he refused and in a calculated act of defiance Wright’s men picked a random Catholic target, a taxi driver called Michael McGoldrick, and shot him dead. Wright had so arranged the McGoldrick shooting, according to David Ervine, to make it appear that his incipient rebellion had support in the UVF’s Belfast base. A handgun was shipped up from the Shankill UVF’s dumps but as it turned out the weapon had no forensic history and so the ploy failed. Wright was expelled from the UVF and a threat made to kill him if he persisted in his defiance. Wright took up the challenge and formed the Loyalist Volunteer Force (LVF), made up of disaffected Mid-Ulster UVF men. The hatred between Billy Wright and the UVF leadership was of a special intensity. Each side accused the other of
working for the British and worse. Ironically it was not the UVF that finally claimed Billy Wright’s life, but prisoners from the INLA wings of the Maze prison who, in December 1997, managed to get near Wright, then serving a prison term for threatening to kill a woman in Portadown, and shot him dead. Just how the INLA was able to gain access to Wright is currently the subject of a British government investigation.
There are a number of reasons to dismiss Billy Wright’s version of why he and the UVF parted company. Billy Wright was a Commander in an area of Northern Ireland that had lost the greatest number of weapons and the greatest number of men over a seven-or eight-year period, yet not one single inquiry was ordered by Billy Wright’s leadership into why they were losing so much. That was one reason. Another, which I have no doubt heightened the first, was that Billy Wright was involved heavily with drugs. There is a notorious story about a dance hall in Northern Ireland, where, on one side of the hall, the Irish National Liberation Army sold certain types of drugs and, on the other side, Billy Wright’s UVF members sold a different type of drugs. This is where they’d carved up a drugs market; these were diametrically opposed, absolutely violent enemies of each other, who could function together in that respect. As I understand it, Billy Wright was requested to attend an inquiry and the history of inquiries within the UVF is that one is absolutely safe attending one; there would be no likelihood of summary justice or being manhandled or beaten or harshly dealt with during it. I’m aware of three separate occasions when Billy Wright refused to attend a UVF inquiry. Now there will be many people around the world will say, ‘Sure, Billy Wright’s entitled to go there or not to go’, [but] Billy Wright joined the Ulster Volunteer Force, Billy Wright accepted the rules, regulations and procedures of the Ulster Volunteer Force, accepted the leadership of the Ulster Volunteer Force, and was duty bound as a member of that organisation to fulfil his responsibility, to honour the codes that were laid down. He chose not to do that and for that reason he and his cohorts were expelled, not for any other reason, although there were issues that were undoubtedly adding to the annoyances that the UVF was suffering from Billy Wright. Not least of all [was] his relationship with some constitutional Unionists who were encouraging him, if you like, to destabilise the UVF peace ship … I personally believe with all that is in me … that he was an agent of some outside force or other. Why were no inquiries requested into the number of men or weapons that were lost? Why could he function – it would seem with impunity – selling drugs openly in a public place, when Northern Ireland was effectively living in a police state because of the Troubles?
It’s absolutely not the case that Billy Wright’s people were [always] opposed to the peace process. I can remember sitting at home – the IRA ceasefire must have been about two weeks old, that would have taken us into mid-September 1994 – and I can remember my door being rapped, it was a Saturday night, strangely enough, and he and another man were there. I brought them in, and Billy Wright launched into a great tirade about how important it was for the Loyalists to call a ceasefire: ‘We need our people to be going to university, we need to be getting funding off governments to help with university places’, and all the rest of it … You couldn’t knock down the logic of it, but the ceasefire was not my gift, the ceasefire was not agreed – far from it. You had three paramilitary organisations involved in the Loyalist ceasefire. They each had to assess the IRA’s motives and the role of the British government … those issues were the largest determining factors in whether there would be a ceasefire or not and yet Billy Wright was at my door demanding that there be a ceasefire. You could argue that a similar situation happened and I think it was in February of 1995 when the Framework for the Future document were published [and] Billy Wright was demanding the end to the ceasefire. Billy Wright’s knee-jerk reaction was: ‘Ah, end the ceasefire, end the ceasefire.’ There was a headline in the Belfast Telegraph shortly thereafter and again in The Sunday Times on the same weekend heralding this coming UVF ceasefire and I have no doubt that the journalists were talking to Billy Wright, so if that was a man who was opposed to the peace process, I’ll eat my hat. The same Billy Wright who met the Irish government in secret, by the way, unknown to the leadership of the UVF, seeking funding for whatever purpose …
At the same time that Wright was expelled from the UVF, the UDA threw out one of its own alleged dissidents, Alec Kerr. Death threats were issued to both men by the CLMC but soon, Ervine alleged, the UDA began to play ‘footsie’ with Wright, which encouraged him to set up the LVF.
… it was the UDA who forced it, and I think the UVF leadership were very uncomfortable at the suggestion that they were going to put a death threat on Billy Wright. They wanted him to go away and leave them alone, that’s effectively what it was; they wanted him to go away and leave them alone. Of course Billy Wright being Billy Wright was never going to do that, but shortly after the UVF and UDA jointly said they were going to kill Alec Kerr and Billy Wright if they didn’t behave themselves, the UDA was playing footsie with Billy Wright, and there was never a chance that Alec Kerr was going to get killed. So I don’t know for sure what was going on at that time, but I feel fairly certain that the UVF leadership were trying to keep the peace with the UDA, and clearly the UVF had the wherewithal to kill Billy Wright and never tried to; they had no intentions of killing Billy Wright, none, at least that’s what it seems to me … It played right into the hands of Billy Wright and the constitutional Unionists, of which Billy Wright was clearly an emissary.
It was fairly common knowledge that Billy Wright was involved in drugs, and I watched these constitutional politicians who would have been aware of Billy Wright’s involvement in drugs describe his only crime as loyalty, that people were trying to drive him out of the country that he loved … He was the first ever public terrorist; he was the first ever TV terrorist. He’s been somewhat overshadowed by Osama Bin Laden of late, but in Northern Ireland terms he was the first ever public terrorist and politicians, it would seem, for their own purposes, could align themselves perfectly well to people who described themselves as being a very effective terrorist. Now, within the ranks of the UVF, it is debatable whether or not he was as effective a terrorist as he suggested …
He certainly achieved support within the UVF, [but] thankfully I don’t think it was widespread, I think that there were a number of people who were probably nervous because the leadership of the UVF in their mind had gone down the wrong road. [The type of people who joined him] hadn’t been heard of for a long time, and certainly when the war was on hadn’t been heard of, and then all of a sudden they’re back again, and they in the main were the type of people that Billy Wright took with him, or seemed to take with him. I think there was a risk of a major challenge, but they weren’t clever enough for it. I think the attempt came with the murder of Michael McGoldrick when a weapon was taken from Belfast and offered to Billy Wright … and I think that not only was it meant to suggest that it was the UVF [who killed McGoldrick] but that the weapon was a Belfast weapon. However, it seemed that they picked a weapon that had no forensics; had the weapon any forensics that were related to the Shankill it would have given the illusion that the degree of support that Wright had was larger than was the case. I would never know about battalion sizes – it’s a logistical issue that the UVF would never talk about – but certainly the first battalion of the UVF has to be a large battalion. I can’t imagine it’s a small battalion. How many men did they lose? Five? How many men went to the LVF and Billy Wright, maybe five? Five? As far as I’m aware, it was a very small number. One of the people who went Billy Wright’s direction was quite highly placed in Belfast, and you could argue was close to the leadership, and I would have to assume that that was more of an ego [thing] …
Q. Jackie Mahood,† I assume you’re talking about?
A. Yeah, absolutely. I wouldn’t doubt it was him provided the weapon. I can remember he was the liaison between the leadership and Billy Wright … Shortly thereafter Jackie Mahood
met his demise within the UVF, but I was there that Sunday [a UVF leadership meeting] when Jackie Mahood was overselling Billy Wright’s power and strength and I think that there was purpose in that. I think that he was sympathetic to Billy Wright and I think there was scheming going on at that time. I think that there were questions about Mahood, but as I understand it there was actually a situation where a man, Jackson, was accused of a robbery and had his hands broken [and] put out of the country without the capacity to wipe his own ass. Events then became clearer, that it may not have been this lad who was involved in the robbery but Jackie Mahood. There was a figure of twenty thousand pounds spoken about, but I don’t think that that was alone the issue that saw the demise of Jackie Mahood … he’s the type of man that always struck me that if there wasn’t a problem he’ll create one, couldn’t leave things alone, and Billy Wright was very like that. They were kindred spirits and I think that a number of factors forced a microscope to be focused on the name Jackie Mahood. Now I don’t function in the higher echelons of the UVF, no matter what anybody thinks, so what I say to you is in my understanding. It can’t be definitive because I wasn’t party to or privy to all of the information, but the bits and pieces that I do know, I can’t imagine I’d be refuted on.
