UDA’s drug-fuelled thugs decide to end their slaughter of the innocents

THE decision by the UDA to declare its war is over and to disband its cover group, the Ulster Freedom Fighters (UFF), was long overdue. Its announcement was followed by the assertion of a former UDA killer, Kenny McClinton, that “people in loyalist circles are driven by ideals and the defence of their country” and that the only reason the UDA ever existed was “to defend the loyalist community”.

This lie was a reminder of previous pious rhetoric by the IRA about why it existed. Modern Irish republicanism has often been vague, contradictory and ideologically incoherent, but its leaders have continually perpetuated the myth that it has been consistent as a defender of its community, even though the longer its campaign lasted, the more support for the IRA in Northern Ireland was given through gritted teeth, or ambivalent quiescence, while questioning the leadership in public could often result in being shunned, intimidated or terrorised.

The same was true of the loyalist community’s relationship with the UDA. Undoubtedly, given the scale of IRA activities in the early years of the conflict, the UDA and other loyalist paramilitaries could garner considerable support for their response, but the claim that they existed solely to “terrorise the terrorists” quickly rang hollow.

The dishonest and self-serving lectures from both republicans and loyalists in the last few years have merely served to illustrate that neither group demands or offers any kind of complex vision or understanding of their own past and their own history. They remind me of the words of historian Alvin Jackson, who wrote about the manner in which “the past is continually and ritually sacrificed to a caricature of the present. Threads are plucked from both past and present and woven into a smothering ideological blanket of a uniform green or orange”.

In looking at the myths associated with the Protestant sense of history in Northern Ireland, he noted the tendency to “spirit away those aspects of a complex inheritance” which do not suit contemporary needs.

In the course of more than 30 years, the UDA/UFF killed in excess of 400 people — most of them innocent Catholics. Another one of their main activities was the continual exploitation of working-class loyalist communities and the grooming a new generation of young loyalists who, despite their grand-sounding, self-imposed titles, were little more than steroid-pumping, drug-taking thugs. Established in September 1971, the UDA was essentially the result of a fusion of a number of vigilante groups that emerged in north and west Belfast. At its peak in 1972, the UDA had a membership of more than 40,000 men. Most of them had day jobs and came out at the weekends to man barricades, organise demonstrations and fire missiles, like their young republican counterparts, while a hardcore of unemployed members worked full-time for the organisation and carried out attacks as the UFF.

As historian Henry Patterson has observed, “the object of its attacks was defined as the republican movement, but UFF attacks extended well beyond known IRA men to include any Catholic unlucky enough to come into the path of one of its assassination squads”.

In the early years of the conflict, it was relentless in its use of violence. In the 18 months after its first murder of a Catholic on the Crumlin Road in 1972, it killed more than 200 people. The attacks were mostly the work of small groups of undisciplined UDA men inflamed by alcohol and sectarian hatred.

The UDA played a leading role in the Ulster Workers’ Strike of 1974 that helped to bring down the power-sharing executive, but feuding, infighting and power struggles between the UVF and the UDA inevitably reached the point of tit-for-tat assassinations and allowed the professional politicians to reclaim the momentum.

Despite the UDA’s claim that it stood for the interests of working-class loyalists — including, though its professed socialism, their economic interests — the megalomaniacs in its ranks ensured it did nothing to advance the cause of those it professed to champion, and allowed itself to be used by politicians like Ian Paisley who, when convenient, as during the 1974 strikes, were content to see it orchestrate trouble only to reject it when the threat of anarchy in its ranks was clear.

By 1975, Paisley accused the UDA of being involved in crimes that were “just as heinous and hellish as those of the IRA”.

The notion that these paramilitaries represented and defended the wider loyalist community was bogus and self-serving, as their forays into electoral politics illustrated. In 1982, for example, John McMichael, the deputy leader of the UDA, stood in the south Belfast by-election and won a paltry 1.3% of the vote.

By the early 1980s, its leadership was considered too middle-aged and corrupt and was pushed aside by a younger and even more ruthless group, ensuring that in 1992 and 1993, for the first time since the outbreak of the Troubles, loyalists were responsible for more deaths than republicans. In October 1993, the IRA’s attempt to wipe out the leadership of the UDA in a bomb attack on the Shankill Road resulted in the death of 10 people, nine of them shoppers or passers-by who were killed when the bomb went off prematurely. A week later the UDA, again using its cover organisation, the UFF, wreaked its revenge for the Shankill bombing when two of its men machine-gunned customers in the Rising Sun Bar in Greysteel, Co Derry, killing six Catholics and one Protestant.

AFTER these massacres, the UTV programme Counterpoint invited into its studio Michelle and Ian Williamson, whose mother and father had been killed in the Shankill bomb, and Mena Donnelly, whose father was killed at Greysteel. Donnelly looked across at Ian Williamson and said simply, “the men who did that to your family weren’t acting for us” — an emphatic reminder that the myth that the UDA existed to defend the loyalist community, or that the IRA existed to defend the republican community, could not be sustained much longer.

Unfortunately, it took the UDA longer to accept this than other paramilitaries, an indication of its lack of political focus and failure to instil any discipline in its ranks. It was also clear by the 1990s that the UDA had other priorities, which included a campaign of pipe-bomb attacks on Catholic homes and violence to defend their many profitable criminal activities, including drugs, cross-border fuel smuggling and criminal moneylending.

At least the UDA’s instructions earlier this week on bringing an end to its activities acknowledged that its main problem in recent times has not been defending loyalists against republicans, but the murky underworld of drugs. It’s south Belfast ‘brigadier’, Jackie McDonald, insisted, “the drug dealers must go… don’t think anybody’s an informer for telling the PSNI where the drugs are or where the drug-dealers are because it’s our kids that are suffering”.

There was also the instruction that all Ulster Young Militants will be directed towards community development and education, though there is little chance that any such education will involve an honest appraisal of the dirty history of the UDA.