Parallel development: the Workers Party and the Progressive Unionist Party in Northern Ireland

Before he went on the run, in the wake of Ernie Elliot’s murder in 1972, former British soldier and UDA member David Fogel gave an interview to the London Times.(1) In it he denounced sectarianism and said that he hoped that one day ‘the Official IRA and the UDA would work together, because both organisations have the working people at heart’ (Boulton, 1974; 182-183). Sadly, for all that Glen Barr’s founding of the New Ulster Political Research Group in November 1974 (in the aftermath of the UWC Strike) represented a genuine attempt to find a working class alternative to sectarianism, such politics were already being bloodily rooted out of the UDA when Fogel fled the country. Fogel’s remarks were, however, extraordinarily predictive of a process of parallel development in the Official IRA (which later became the Workers Party) and the Progressive Unionist Party (largely derived from the Ulster Volunteer Force, UVF).

In 2005, the fact that working class politics were once a factor in Loyalist Belfast isn’t merely suppressed. In the words of Trinity College Dublin academic Andrew Finlay, (himself from Rathcoole in North Belfast) it has been ‘erased’. To some extent, this reflects the situation in mainland Britain under New Labour, where Martin Kettle of The Guardian (as an example) disputes the significance of the 1984 Miners’ Strike and the fetish for identity and cultural representation is used to deliberately close down working class politics.

Such a generally perverse exercise in post-modernism, however, has implications in Northern Ireland that it doesn’t elsewhere in the UK. As Jean Marsh of Northern Ireland’s Women’s Coalition, (whose own husband was in the UDA in the 1970s) once told this writer: if you create a vacuum in Northern Ireland there is always someone in a gun and a balaclava to fill it. This is indeed the situation caused by the failure of the Good Friday Agreement, that of itself represents the poverty of identity politics at this time.

Meanwhile Ian Kyle Paisley, who flirted with social radicalism in 1972, in his talks at Downing Street in June 2005, has as good as revealed that he actually wants to be in government with IRA/Sinn Fein – something that David Trimble, to his credit, claimed all along. (2) Paisley said that he would be quite prepared to share government with the IRA if Irish taoiseach Bertie Ahern (right-wing Fianna Fail Prime Minister and one time crony of Charles Haughey) did likewise.

For all his appearance as a clown and a sectarian rabble-rouser whose ‘traditional unionism’ owes nothing to British politics, Paisley must be aware that Fianna Fail are in deep trouble in the Irish Republic, likely to hang on to power after the next election only if they form a coalition with Sinn Fein. (3) If this happens, then the origins of such a coalition could probably be traced back to the meeting at the Intercontinental Hotel in Dublin, where the Provisional IRA was founded in 1970 (Patterson, 1989; 164).

Around the same time as Paisley’s remarks in 2005, Bertie Ahern himself said that rather than disband, the IRA could reconstitute itself as a ‘commemorative association’. This outrageous capitulation to IRA terrorism, on the part of a ‘green Tory’ Prime Minister, was duly reported on the RTE, BBC Northern Ireland and Channel 4 News programmes on the same day. Most grotesque, was his claim that as the Official IRA, in the form of the Workers Party, had made the transition to legitimate politics, there was no reason to suggest that the green fascist IRA/Sinn Fein couldn’t do the same. As Ahern is at least as intelligent as Paisley and was close to Charles Haughey in the 1970s, this is a particularly perverse claim. Meanwhile, Fianna Fail’s open courtship of the IRA came much closer, when the IRA announced a largely cosmetic decommissioning of some of its weapons on Saturday, 24 September, 2005, amidst much triumphalism and with young children waving plastic Kalashnikovs at a Nuremberg-type rally in Dublin.

Suffice to say that by Sunday, 1 October the Sunday Tribune newspaper was able to reveal how small arms, (as might be used in knee-cappings and other forms of criminality) had been exempted from the high profile PR exercise that was arms decommissioning; and that, with a vast criminal empire worth millions, the IRA can purchase a new arsenal any time they want. Meanwhile, Eoghan Harris, in his Irish Sunday Independent column, isn’t the only journalist in the Republic and elsewhere to suggest that the IRA might ‘have something’ on Ahern, dating from the years of its inception. In any event the cosmetic disarmament is likely to be enough for the formation of a Fianna Fail-Provo coalition to go ahead, even while the IRA exists.

Covert origins of the Provisional IRA

In the real world, rather than that of Paisley’s opportunist tub-thumping, a Fianna Fail-Sinn Fein coalition in the Irish Republic has always been extremely likely; because a cabal of corrupt Fianna Fail politicians, very much on the right of that party, connived in the creation of the Provisional IRA in the early 1970s. Their collaborators included members of G2, Irish Army Intelligence. They particularly included Captain John Kelly – whose memoirs to this effect were subsequently self published and contents upheld in an Irish Court (Dillon, 1989; 1-24).

There is a further reason why a Fianna Fail-Sinn Fein coalition is likely, and indeed, necessary, for Bertie’s political survival. In the Irish Republic the Labour Party is no longer the right-wing, unprincipled force that it was under Dick Spring. Under the leadership of Pat Rabbitte, a highly principled and able leader, the old Democratic Left faction of the Labour Party, which has its origins in the Workers Party and before that, in Official Sinn Fein, now runs the Party. It has also, quite correctly, secured an electoral pact with Fine Gael, in the run-up to the next election. This necessary compromise is in accordance with what Labour supporters like myself (I still have a residence and vote in the Republic) see as a Gramscian ‘war of position’, whose long term aim is a Labour government.

Against this coalition is the present government, whose Thatcherite policies have led to the squandering of the speculative wealth generated during the ‘Celtic Tiger’ phase of the economy, left what passes for a health service (no free, universal health care) in total crisis, failed to provide affordable social housing or an adequate infrastructure for sustained economic growth. Rather, Fianna Fail favours the kind of boom and bust that has at least been abandoned in Britain since the demise of Thatcher.

Fianna Fail is also a byword for corruption and gangsterism. In the run up to the election, a perverse form of spin doctoring has been taking place, beginning with the local press in parochial, rural areas, where labour movement traditions are weak. Basically, the line being pushed, is that Fianna Fail as ‘the Republican Party’ founded by Eamonn DeValera has ‘lost its way’ because of the nefarious influence of the openly Thatcherite Progressive Democrats (PDs) on the coalition. (4) If Fianna Fail is in trouble at the next election, it will have no choice but to ditch the PDs, blame Mary Harney for its Thatcherite mistakes and reaffirm its republican credentials by entering into coalition with Sinn Fein.

If this happens, it will be a case of both these venal parties reaping the fruits of Fianna Fail involvement in the genesis of the Provisional IRA’s green fascist murder gangs in the early 1970s. According to Martin Dillon, Fianna Fail politicians like Charles Haughey and Agriculture Minister Neil Blaney had financed the genesis of the Provos to try and facilitate a UN intervention in Northern Ireland. (5) Dillon, however, is being far too generous towards the Fianna Fail politicians (Dillon, 1989; 1-24). Former Fine Gael leader John Bruton said exactly the same thing to BBC’s Peter Taylor: namely that Fianna Fail politicians and Irish Army Intelligence connived in the formation of the Provisional IRA at this time (BBC, States of Terror). This view is shared by the Workers Party in Ireland who claim that Fianna Fail’s motive, in helping to establish the Provos in this way, was to establish right-wing death squads in the extermination of the Irish left – and in particular, members of Official Sinn Fein. Indeed, there is more than anecdotal evidence to support this claim. In Cork, for example, the division was bloodily resolved with guns and on this occasion, the Officials or ‘Stickies’ won.

The point is further underlined by Henry Patterson (Ulster University, Jordanstown) in the most important book ever written on Irish republicanism: The Politics of Illusion (Radius, Hutchinson, 1989). Declassified CIA documents, reprinted in the Irish Socialist Party publication, The Voice, revealed that the CIA also welcomed the formation of the Provos because they were ‘nationalist rather than Communist’ and could help to neutralise the threat posed by ‘Marxism’. (6)

On one thing however, Dillon and his mentor, Conor Cruise O’Brien, are absolutely correct: because of the role played by Fianna Fail in the inception of the Provisional IRA, an unspoken understanding developed between the two organisations. Namely, that the Provos would be free to operate from the Republic, using it as a safe haven for terrorist activities, and be free of harassment from the authorities, so long as they did not engage in terrorism and criminality in the Republic itself. It was for this reason that a Loyalist terror group called The Militants, which later became the Ulster Freedom Fighters (UFF), started making incursions into the Republic, endorsed by former Stormont Home Affairs Minister, William Craig, from 1972. (7) What angered the Irish authorities for example, about Bridget Rose Dugdale and Eddie Gallagher, (and later, the INLA) was that they operated in the Republic: e.g. in the kidnap of industrialist Tiede Herrema, in Limerick in 1975. This was recently borne out by an interesting documentary for the Irish language programme, Scannal, on RTE on 2 October, 2005.

Hence the collusion of the Provos with the Garda Special Branch (or ‘heavy gang’) in framing the INLA for the 1977 Mail Train Robbery which, according to Tim Pat Coogan, was actually carried out by the Provos. Only in 1987, after the British government had abandoned unionism (with the Anglo-Irish Agreement of November 1985) and after John Hume’s scurrilous courtship of Sinn Fein to join a pan-nationalist front had already begun in Northern Ireland itself, did Charles Haughey start to move against the Provos in the Irish Republic.

It is worth noting that according to Patterson’s book and also to a former Official Sinn Fein member whom I know, who was at the meeting in the International Hotel, Gerry Adams’ role in the Official-Provisional split of 1970 was decisive (Patterson, 1989; 126). The former Official says that in an attempt to patch things up, Adams came back into the room after the Provos had walked out – a claim that Adams himself strenuously denies. Thereafter, within the Provo camp, Adams was the leader most able to convince journalists like Liam Clarke that he was more interested in politics than paramilitarism and was thus the key to the ‘peace process’ (Clarke, 1989). In short, Adams affords left cover to IRA terrorism by reconstituting elements of the old Official IRA ‘Social Republicanism’, within what the Officials themselves had denounced as an otherwise fascistic Provisional movement (Patterson, 1989; 161-193).

British left support

This has been important in winning a section of the British left for support of IRA terrorism; or, at the very least, for the inclusion of IRA terrorists in the political process. This has since become the position of the British and Irish governments as well. If one accepts the Officials’ definition of the Provos as ‘green fascists’ – committed to a corporate state from which non Celtic and non Catholic elements have been assimilated and purged, and in which the working class movement would be physically intimidated by armed gangs – then Adams is actually much more dangerous than an open thug like Martin McGuiness, who makes no claims to political sophistication, has never described himself as a socialist and builds his political reputation entirely on his credentials as a paramilitary hard man.

Small wonder that the UVF tried to assassinate Gerry Adams in 1985, only to see their efforts scuppered by John Gregg of the Rathcoole UDA. (8)

The origins and contradictions of social radicalism in the Official Republican Movement

Bertie Ahern’s claim that the Provos can make the transition to legitimate politics as surely as their Official IRA counterparts in the 1970s, would be evidence of astonishing political ignorance, if Bertie wasn’t the devious prodigy of Charles Haughey that he is. (9) What anyone with even a cursory knowledge of the relationship of left and republican politics in Ireland should know, is that the political radicalisation of the Official IRA has its origins in Sinn Fein’s infiltration by the Irish Communist Party in the 1950s. Then, in 1958, the Northern Ireland Labour Party won an election landslide in Belfast, wiping out both the unionist and Nationalist parties in all but the middle class constituency of South Belfast which remained unionist (Rumpf and Hepburn, 1977). This was in part a response to efforts by the unionist administration to resist the introduction of the Beveridge Plan that angered and radicalised a significant layer of Loyalist workers. It was also in spite of a (thankfully inept) IRA terrorist campaign waged under the rubric of Operation Harvest, at the time (Patterson, 1989; 79).

As the second Stormont Prime Minister from the 1930s, to the 1950s, Lord Brookeborough’sopposition to Beveridge and to Clement Attlee’s welfare state led to important divisions in the Unionist Party, between ‘traditional unionists’ and what might be called ‘British democracy unionists’, the latter being first represented by Captain Terence O’Neill. It also led to the civil rights movement. In particular it led to an initiative, supported both by the Communist Party and Official Sinn Fein leadership, the Wolfe Tone Society, founded by Anthony Coughlan and Ray Johnston (a Protestant), both members of the Connolly Association.(10) The aim of the Wolf Tone Society was nothing less than to seize control of Stormont, as a stepping stone to the establishment of James Connolly’s 32 county workers republic (Patterson, 1989; 84-87).

All of the weaknesses in the Wolfe Tone Society’s strategy derived from its Stalinism. In particular, and as Henry Patterson tells us, it derived from the Stalinist ‘Third Period’, with its denunciation of Labour Parties as being ‘social fascists’. This had found a particular resonance in Ireland and had also been a factor in the founding of the Irish Trotskyist movement by Bob Armstrong in Belfast in the 1940s (Bornstein and Richardson, 1986). Thus, in helping to found a civil rights movement, with an eye to seizing control of Stormont, the Stalinists favoured a popular front with bourgeois nationalism over the more obvious strategy of working with or inside the Northern Ireland Labour Party (Patterson, 1989; 104). A similarly absurd stance blighted its attitude to the Irish Labour Party in the Republic. To make matters worse, the Labour Party in Britain had never adequately supported the NILP because of its commitment to a united Ireland by consent (Cusack and McDonald, 2000). In the 1960s this served to alienate substantial sections of the Protestant working class who had every interest in supporting a programme of civil rights, provided it was founded on Labour politics and clearly distanced from republican goals (McDonald and Cusack, 2004; 9-10).

Worse was, that by courting right-wing Nationalists, who had also opposed the Beveridge Plan and established separate schools for Catholics in Northern Ireland, over the Labour Party and any central commitment to working class politics, the civil rights movement left itself open to the charge that they were a Trojan Horse for republicanism. Both Ian Paisley and William Craig wasted no time in milking this slander for all that it was worth. (11)

What firmed-up the working class orientation of the Officials after the outbreak of ‘the Troubles’, was the establishment of an initiative calling itself the British and Irish Communist Organisation (BICO), comprised largely of intellectuals who had supported the civil rights movement, and who included in their ranks the likes of Paul Bew, Peter Gibbon and Henry Patterson. These went on to produce the most important history of the Northern Ireland state in the form of The State In Northern Ireland, published in 1979. What was truly ground-breaking for these thinkers, on the left, was a recognition that Loyalist fears as to what would happen to them in a ‘United Ireland’ were in fact well founded, and that the formation of the Northern Ireland state in the May of 1921 was not only popular but completely justified. They also acknowledged that the Unionist bourgeoisie, beginning with Carson and Craig, had exploited this situation, in the wake of the class struggle generated by the Russian Revolution. (12)

The best scenario

The best scenario, as the BICO and later Henry McDonald were to comment, would have been for Northern Ireland to be completely integrated into the UK and Stormont never to have been established. This would have given rise to the establishment of the main British political parties in Northern Ireland, including the Labour Party, and with Clement Attlee’s landslide in 1945 that would have been the end of the ‘national question’. Instead, the Unionist Party was allowed to mismanage Northern Ireland’s affairs for 50 years, pursuing a right-wing agenda, dividing the working class through sectarianism and using the very real threat posed by the nationalist-republican siege of Northern Ireland, to present any form of progressive politics as a threat to the country’s position within the UK.

Unfortunately, the Official Sinn Fein leadership were not won to this view overnight, continuing to defend the existence of Stormont even when the British government – in the aftermath of Bloody Sunday – belatedly wound it up. They were thus, in essence, singing from the same hymn sheet as William Craig and the UDA; but not of Paisley, who at this time advocated total integration into the UK as part of a (then) socially radical program in the DUP. (13) The idea that a radical Stormont could provide a powerhouse in the creation of Connolly’s 32 county workers republic (a slogan long surpassed by events) was also a factor in the reluctance of the armed wing of Official republicanism to stand down. While denouncing the Provos as green fascists (a label I would endorse) with their openly sectarian murder campaign towards working class Protestants and the British public, the Official IRA were themselves guilty of a number of terrorist outrages including the murder of William Best, a young British soldier on leave in his native Londonderry, and the bombing of Aldershot barracks, after Bloody Sunday, in which they killed four cleaners and a Catholic Chaplain (McCann, 1980).

The situation in 1972 and 1973 was thus one of intense complexity and contradiction. In the Crumlin prison and internment camp, the Official IRA had started courting UVF prisoners and this was eventually reciprocated by Gusty Spence, (the UVF o/c in the prison) in a letter to the widow of the Official IRA’s Joe McCann, whom Spence saluted as ‘an honourable and brave soldier’ (Boulton, 1974; 168). Shortly afterwards, the UVF and Official IRA staged a joint protest in support of political status and Gusty began his political education programme among UVF prisoners (Boulton, 1974; 168-169). At the same time, the Officials didn’t begin to fully embrace legitimate politics fully until after their 1973 Ard Fheis (conference), as reported in The Irish Times (26 November 1973). Although the majority of Official Sinn already had little enthusiasm for terrorism, the shift was further encouraged by the development of open class warfare in Ireland, such as the postal strike, and important trade union disputes at Dunlops in Cork City and Irish Steel in Cobh. In October 1973, the Officials were represented at the World Congress of Peace Forces in Moscow (Patterson, 1989; 147).

Dialogue between forces close to the Official IRA and UVF continued outside of the prison system during this period. In each case, the origins of their radical politics can probably be traced back to the British and Irish Communist Organisation. But there was also resistance. Thus, in 1973, following his removal as deputy leader of the DUP, Desmond Boal formed the Ulster Democratic Front (UDF) with Hughie Smyth, a future Lord Mayor of Belfast, who knew radicalised elements in the UVF. The UDF was involved in talks with the Official IRA that broadly complimented Gusty Spence’s various initiatives in the prison system. One set of talks between the Official IRA and UVF were brokered by the Irish Times journalist Kevin Myers.

This didn’t stop elements in the UVF from trying to bomb the Official Sinn Fein delegation at Bodenstown in 1973 or Billy Mitchell, as editor of Combat magazine, from pronouncing his support for the National Front (Cusack and McDonald, 2000). Likewise, Ken Gibson’s Volunteer Political Party, which was linked to the UVF, had more in common with the Strasserite fascist organisations in Britain, such as Britain First, with which it was linked, than with any species of Left politics. (14)

After the signing of the Sunningdale Agreement in 1973, completely over the heads of Northern Ireland’s population, the absence of control over its own ranks on the part of the UVF Command saw the proliferation of the Shankill Butchers gang; but, also, of a particularly vicious sectarian murder campaign accredited to the UVF, under the flag of convenience of the Protestant Action Force. (15) Only when this failed did a group of trade unionists, led by Harry Murray and Billy Kelly of the Ballylumford Power Workers, approach Andy Tyrie of the UDA, at his house in Glencairn, with the proposal to defeat Sunningdale by working class action (Fisk, 1976). As Patterson tells us, the success of the Ulster Workers Council Strike in 1974 also accelerated the process of politicisation and the end of paramilitarism on the part of the Official IRA.

Although the Officials were thus much more likely in the 1970s to discard paramilitarism than are the green fascist Provos of today, this process was not without resistance – almost on a par to that which saw the rise of the Protestant Action Force. Those Officials who stuck to the paramilitary road after the UWC Strike of 1974 (with the possible exception of Dugdale and Gallagher) ended up becoming more fascistic in their methods even than the Provos. The INLA and IPLO, for example, are Marxist in name only and degenerated still further, as a drug-dealing sectarian murder gang, after the 1977 train robbery, with the succession of Seamus Costello by Ronnie Bunting Jnr, (whose father had been a Paisleyite in the 1960s) and with the rise of such venal characters as Dominic McClinchey and Martin O’Prey.

False starts and contradictions in the rebirth of contractual Loyalism: the origins of the Progressive Unionist Party

In the further prosecution of the thesis of this essay, the distinction between contractual and deferential Loyalism is decisive. At the heart of this distinction is the continual negotiation between sectarianism and class consciousness in the Protestant working class of Northern Ireland. (16) Historically, the deferential unionist articulates her or his defence of Northern Ireland’s position in the United Kingdom in sectarian terms and thus, in political deference to the political structures and institutions of ‘traditional unionism’. Being themselves historically the creation of the unionist bourgeoisie, as a reaction to the Russian Revolution and Engineering Strike in 1919, these structures have since been partly if not completely discarded by the Unionist Party itself and taken up (from about 1976) by Ian Paisley’s Democratic Unionist Party; in short, by a petty bourgeois party with a mass working class base. (17) It is also important here to emphasise that there is nothing ‘British’ about the ‘traditional unionism’ represented by Paisley: his parish pump parochialism is much more akin to that of a backwoods Irish politician like Jackie Healy Rae, the notorious racist from Kerry, who publicly reveals much of what rural Fianna Fail actually thinks.

The distinction between contractual and deferential loyalism was observed but not entirely understood by David Millar in his important book, Queens’ Rebels, about the UWC Strike of 1974. Here, Millar equates contractual loyalism with a nascent Ulster nationalism because Glen Barr, the socialist-leaning chair of the Ulster Workers Council, also developed a position advocating Ulster UDI. (18) This position on the part of Barr and his associate, Harry Chicken from Rathcoole, while an important part of the learning curve for contractual loyalism in the journey to class consciousness, was poorly thought out, premature and fraught with contradictions.

Both Steve Bruce and Henry McDonald, in their different ways, have shown that an Ulster UDI position lent itself more consistently to the fascism of a John McKeague, than to the proto-socialism of a Glen Barr, even in the 1970s (Bruce, 1992). It was later embraced by third position fascists such as David Kerr, (a one time prodigy of William McGrath) and his allies in the National Front’s ‘political soldiers’, who parachuted into Northern Ireland during the resistance to the Anglo-Irish Agreement in 1985. (19) In the end, even the UDA discarded its commitment to UDI, when John MacMichael based his Common Sense on a plagiarised PUP discussion document in February 1987 (Cusack and MacDonald, 2000).

Much more likely, contractual loyalism provides the only basis (through the development of Labour politics), on which Northern Ireland can become truly British, in contrast to its present, precarious position, half in and half out of the UK. Significantly, at times when labour politics have been in the ascendant in Northern Ireland, the Catholic electorate and population has also shown little interest in the so called national question – with this being particularly evident during the 1950s, and the beginning of the civil rights period. On the basis of social inclusion, the national question would almost certainly be rendered irrelevant while the complementary end to the constant threat from republicanism and nationalism would lead to the withering away of traditional nnionism, and its reactionary and anachronistic practices as well.

Certainly, there is no intrinsically ethnic reason why Northern Ireland Catholics would want to be part of a state which doesn’t even have a national health service, in which most of them have never set foot in their lives. While purely anecdotal, a Catholic phoning in to the Gerry Anderson show on BBC Northern Ireland spoke volumes when he said that he had no problems with being British – it was traditional unionism in Northern Ireland that he couldn’t abide. I also know several Catholics, even from the Falls Road, who hold this view and would vote Labour over Sinn Fein or the SDLP if such a Party existed.

Without doubt, this above observation was partly grasped by the British and Irish Communist Organisation in the early 1970s and also by the Ulster Democratic Front founded by Desmond Boal (hitherto a cohort of Paisley) and Hughie Smyth in 1973. Smyth later went on to found the Progressive Unionist Party, with links to the UVF, in 1979. But in the early 1970s, most of the UVF’s more sophisticated cadre were in prison, including one David Ervine, who came from a labour movement background (with relatives in the Communist Party) and only joined the UVF after the Shankill Road bombing and Black Friday, in the January and February of 1972. (20) Thereafter, Ervine had experienced a very brief career as a paramilitary before joining Gusty Spence in prison on explosive charges.

Spence’s political discussion groups were not initially met with particular enthusiasm by most of the UVF prisoners – Ervine excepted. Bruce speaks of right-wing UVF men who detested Spence, calling him ‘a cunt in a cravat’ (Bruce, 1992). One went so far as to hang the cat that Spence stroked in political discussions, leaving its carcass draped on the wire that separated UDA and UVF prisoners.

The UVF was a very small organisation that had been proscribed as early as 1966, with some 80% of its membership provided by former British Servicemen in the 1970s. It was highly secretive and resolutely opposed to the kind of mass mobilisations that might bring it into conflict with the British Army (Cusack and McDonald, 2000). For all that the master-mind of the Loyalist No Go Areas, David Fogel, was himself a former British Army sergeant and Gusty Spence was greatly assisted by the existence of the No Go Areas during his ‘abduction’ in 1972, there was no way, for example, that the UVF was going to initiate the establishment of Loyalist No Go Areas or a strike against the Sunningdale Agreement (Boulton, 1974; 172-174). Rather, the first Loyalist paramilitary ‘Leftists’ that we encounter are in the mass-based UDA, which brought all of the contradictions of Loyalism under one umbrella, but in which right-wing forces and gangsters styled as local ‘hard men’ with their own turf, could very quickly gain the upper hand. (Crawford, 2003; McDonald and Cusack, 2004)

UDA radicalism is thus short-lived and mostly confined to the 1970s. Ernie Elliot in Woodvale, for example, challenged Charles Harding-Smith from a left-wing position and was supported in this by his lieutenant, David Fogel, an English former British Army NCO who had married a local girl. Elliot was also supported by Jim Anderson in East Belfast and the position of both men was greatly enhanced by Harding-Smith’s detention on gun running charges in London. (21) It may also be significant that the IRA were on cease-fire for part of 1972, during which time a Sinn Fein delegation, that included Gerry Adams, met at the house of Paul Channon MP in London. The more that Anderson and Elliot distanced themselves from William Craig, the more that they won the opportunist support of Tommy Herron, (never a social radical) who saw this a means of moving against Charles Harding-Smith, for personal rather than ideological reasons. According to what Irish Times journalist Kevin Myers told this writer, Herron had no politics beyond sectarian gangsterism and self promotion and this would seem borne out in the ‘memoirs’ of Mike Stone and accounts, for example, of Dillon and McDonald and Cusack. Boulton, however, believes that Herron may have been genuinely radicalised after he was beaten up by British Paratroopers in 1972.

Without doubt, the group led by Elliot were indeed serious about the formation of a working class party, some months before Boal and Hughie Smyth got together in the UDF. There is no evidence however, that this earlier group actually read the literature of the British and Irish Communist Organisation, which was influencing Official Sinn Fein at the time. Rather unwisely, they allowed Billy Hull to chair their meetings, perhaps mindful of his socially radical role in 1969, as editor of The Peoples Press. (22) There is also, as we have seen, some ambiguity as to Tommy Herron’s role in relation to this group.

The UCA smear

What is not true, but was latterly claimed, was that Elliot was leader of the mysterious Ulster Citizens Army, whose propaganda leaflets carried the Connolly Plough. The UCA was not a creation of Army Information Policy at Lisburn, though Colin Wallace has acknowledged that the Army gave the UCA material to journalists.(23) Elliot was stopped at an Army checkpoint at the spot where he was murdered a week later and the boot of his car was found to contain books by Franz Fanon, Che Guevara and Leon Trotsky (Boulton, 1974; 182-183).

After Elliot was murdered, David Fogel sold his story to The Times, calling for unity between the Official IRA and elements in the UDA, then fled the country. Less than a year later, Tommy Herron was murdered following a phone call to Robert Fisk of The Times, in which he said that his life was in danger from right-wing supporters of William Craig inside the UDA. More specifically, he said that ‘Craig wants the UDA to march on Rome while Mussolini takes the train.’ (Fisk, 1976) According to Martin Dillon, Herron was lured to his death by a woman. He had two tickets to Canada, for himself and his daughter, in his pocket and was subsequently accused of having embezzled UDA funds. (24) Gregory Brown walked into a Police station in England and confessed to Herron’s killing in 1983.(25)

This incident didn’t mark the end of political radicalism in the UDA because there was still mass working class struggle in Britain, and the resistance to the Sunningdale Agreement took the form of an (ultimately successful) mass strike whose significance was never grasped by Ken Gibson and the UVF. (26) It was the most successful political strike in British Labour Movement history since the General Strike of 1926; and completely different from Paisley’s reactionary 1977 strike in this respect. (27) Politically, the radicalisation of a layer of UDA members found expression in Glen Barr’s founding of the New Ulster Political Research Group in October 1974, for which he courted funds in Libya, causing him to be condemned as a ‘Communist’ both by Ian Paisley and John Tyndale’s Spearhead. Loyalist prisoners rioted in the internment camps a month later, (leading in part to the end of internment in February 1975) and the UCA smear – this time directed against Barr – resurfaced at this time.

Barr was elected to the Constitutional Convention in 1976, despite these smears, but only because he took a tough line on the Loyalist prisoner issue. This alluded to the problems, later experienced by the Progressive Unionist Party (PUP), of trying to build a radical left party on the basis of a paramilitary organisation. Barr was also wrongfooted by his commitment to Ulster UDI, rather than the reverse: i.e. total integration into the UK on the basis of working class politics. (28) In 1982 he published his important but flawed pamphlet, Beyond the Religious Divide, written with Harry Chicken. In the same year, he was ousted from control of the New Ulster Political Research Group by John MacMichael, then head of the UFF, who used it in his power struggle against Andy Tyrie. That MacMichael might have had MI5 links was revealed when he himself recycled the UCA smear, this time against Colin Wallace, to Independent journalist David McKittrick, formerly of BBC Northern Ireland. (With the BBC’s John Ware, McKittrick was the author of the two page smear of Wallace and Fred Holroyd in The Independent in 1987.)

If the process of political radicalisation in the UVF worked more slowly than in the UDA, it at least had the appearance of being surer. In contrast to the unwieldy structure of the UDA, with its massive Inner Council represented by de facto warlords each to their own turf, the UVF aspired to a centralised structure partly based on that of the British Army, and partly on Bolshevik democratic centralism.(29) This hasn’t always worked, especially when much of the UVF leadership were in prison in the 1970s. The Ulster Democratic Front, for example, was such a shortlived initiative that it is mentioned only in the Cusack and McDonald account; and most of the political radicalisation in the UVF centred around Gusty Spence’s group in the prison system at this time. David Ervine was a more than welcome addition to this group. In the world outside, both the Volunteer Political Party and Protestant Action Force had links to British fascism, in the form of the National Front. Only when the UVF’s military organisation was further crippled by arrests in 1977, did wider ranks of UVF prisoners take Spence’s work in the political discussion groups seriously.(30) The PUP itself wasn’t founded until 1979 – again by Hughie Smyth, but with strong links to Spence’s supporters in the UVF.

The dialectics of contractual Loyalism in the 1980s and 1990s

The main obstacle to the further development of contractual loyalist politics in the 1980s was Margaret Thatcher’s routing of working class politics in Britain. The second was the basic unsuitability of paramilitary groups as a basis for left politics in any form. This was particularly true once the UDA ceased to be a mass organisation, degenerating ultimately into a coalition of drug gangs and fascistic sectarian murder squads by the 1990s. In the UVF too, however, there were problems; and while the PUP was founded in 1979 it would not be correct to see it as representing the majority of the UVF before 1985.

One factor militating against political radicalisation, was the constant need for the UVF to appropriate money and arms. As Cusack and McDonald (2000) tell us, it set up a complex arms procurement network involving the Mid-Ulster Brigade and supporters in Scotland and Canada. This was a factor in the rise of Johnnie Bingham of the Turn-of-the-Road Gang in Ballysillan, as a major player in the 1980s UVF. Bingham was anything but a socialist and his value to the UVF command derived from his ability to appropriate modern weapons, (including Colt Commanders and Armalite assault rifles) from North American Survivalists through a contact in Toronto called Taylor. Domestically, he styled his turn-of-the-road gang in Ballysillan once more as the Protestant Action Force. To join this group, new recruits, who would be aged between 19 and 23, had to kill someone. Inevitably, these killings were sectarian.

The PAF’s commitment to sectarian murder escalated with the Anglo-Irish Agreement and with the total failure of the Unionist politicians to provide political leadership. They also land-mined RUC patrols and plotted the bombing of civil servants who administered the Anglo-Irish Agreement. By any reckoning this was a dangerous and particularly nasty organisation. It also welcomed the National Front’s ‘political soldiers’ when they set up shop in Belfast; and Bingham served as election agent to George Seawright, a fascist and sectarian bigot who had even managed to get himself expelled from Paisley’s DUP. Seawright had come from Glasgow, where he’d been a member of Paisley’s UPVs in the 1960s; and his brother Davey was a prominent Strasserite fascist in Scotland.

In the end, Seawright was assassinated by Martin O’Prey of the IPLO, triggering a tit-for-tat feud between the UVF and republicans. This also had the effect of withdrawing the UVF and its political representatives from any initiatives against the Anglo-Irish Agreement, after the unionist politicians bungled their ‘Day of Inaction’ in March 1986. (31) Then Johnnie Bingham fell prey to a sting operation mounted by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police after Taylor’s girlfriend informed on him. The case against Bingham collapsed, as did so many ‘supergrass’ trials in the 1980s, but had the effect of targeting Bingham on behalf of his republican foes. Bingham was incredibly careful about his personal security, with a mobile home on the Antrim Coast and network of safe houses. He was nonetheless assassinated outside his own house in what can only be described as suspicious circumstances.

Only when Bingham’s group fell did the supporters of the PUP get the upper hand within the UVF. By now, Gusty Spence was out of prison and had been succeeded by Billy Hutchinson as UVF o/c in the Maze prison. (32) David Ervine was also out of jail. The most important indication of significant ideological difference between the UVF and UDA at this time was a statement from the UVF supporting the African National Congress and struggle against Apartheid in South Africa, while the UDA continued to see South Africa as its main source of arms. (33) That said, the UDA stole a PUP discussion document as the basis for its Common Sense initiative in February 1987, which was accredited to John MacMichael (Cusack and McDonald, 2000). Steve Bruce was one of many writers to observe that John MacMichael wasn’t capable of writing Common Sense. (34)

Beginning with the Fernhill House Declaration of 1994, the political rise of the PUP was linked very closely to the fortunes of the peace process. But its commitment to such socially radical policies as public ownership under workers control had been abandoned by 1997. One factor here was Tony Blair’s rise to the leadership of the British Labour Party and the over-turning of Clause 4 at the Labour Party Conference of 1995. Just as important, however, was the scandalous commitment of Dick Spring’s Labour Party in Ireland (before the Democratic Left joined and took over that Party) to coalition with Fianna Fail, to the idea of a pan-nationalist front and to the arrogant idea that Sinn Fein had to be part of a Northern Ireland government whether unionists like it or not. While in Dublin, as the guest of Eoghan Harris, the PUP’s David Ervine was deeply shocked to hear Irish politicians effectively blame John Major for the Provos’ 1994 Canary Wharf bombing. He was even more angered when he returned to Belfast to hear from the press that, according to Dick Spring, he agreed with the idea of a Dayton-Ohio type international conference on Northern Ireland. Ervine had said no such thing and the consequences for his political career could have been disastrous. (35)

Hence, while the Workers Party remain supportive of Ervine, (who has since succeeded Hughie Smyth as PUP Party leader) the PUP as a whole – and particularly Billy Hutchinson – have become deeply suspicious of an Irish left to which he was once quite close. (36) This wasn’t helped by the fact that the Socialist Party, to whom Hutchinson was close for a while, refused to support punitive state measures against the Omagh bombers in 1998 and have since softened their stance on Sinn Fein. In the late 1990s, the PUP continued to do well so long as the peace process was intact and the Good Friday Agreement enjoyed some support in the Loyalist working class. Even at its high point, however, the PUP could only muster a quarter of the votes received by the Democratic Unionist Party, whose share of the vote has since increased, making it the main political party in Northern Ireland. There were a number of factors here, including the fact that most unionists do not support paramilitarism in any form and see the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) and British security forces as the forces to combat terrorism.

In contrast to the UDA’s political wing, the Ulster Democratic Party or UDP, the PUP did and does take socially radical politics seriously; but its membership is heterogeneous. Along with the layer of radicalised former prisoners (who are all in their 40s or older), there are people in the PUP, especially in Rathcoole, simply because of its links to the UVF. There was also a layer of working class people, including women and some Catholics, who have never been involved in paramilitary politics and who joined the PUP precisely because it is a working class party with a social agenda. Along with the Workers Party, it remains the only party in Northern Ireland with elected representatives to support free abortion on demand. Its secular politics and commitment to social inclusion mean that it is more of a British Party than Paisley’s DUP. Unfortunately, with its electoral demise, the PUP’s influence over the UVF has diminished. UVF members have been involved in race attacks in Sandy Row and there were defections to the LVF from the UVF in Rathcoole, before the blood feud between the two organisations escalated in 2005. When the PSNI moved to arrest UVF men accused of being involved in the killings, this precipitated the worst rioting that Belfast has seen since 1986.

Although the riots were initially engineered to stop the arrest of UVF men, they quickly sucked in all kinds of forces angry at government capitulation to IRA terrorism. An idea being floated at this time was that former IRA terrorists be allowed to join the Police Service of Northern Ireland despite the Northern Bank raid, the murder of Robert McCartney in an IRA shebeen in the Markets and a similar IRA murder of a taxi driver in Dublin, as a favour to a criminal. Inevitably, the riots took an incoherent and reactionary form, with the graffiti along the Shore Road now equating Peter Hain and Tony Blair with the IRA, and the racist targeting of a Chinese takeaway leading to the burning of Sammy Wilson’s DUP offices next door.

While UVF supporters attacked the police and David Ervine said he could do nothing to stop the violence, the UDA resumed sectarian attacks – e.g. in the mixed area of the Village where I drink, near where I live in Rathcoole. On the estate itself, being UDA controlled, there was no trouble.

Meanwhile, in the context of all this, the IRA announced the PR stunt that was weapons decommissioning.

Conclusions

If Stalinism prevented the transformation of the Workers Party into a mass party for socialism in the 1970s, then the continued links between the PUP and UVF both inhibit the former’s electoral growth and hold back the further development of socially radical politics in its ranks. This takes a number of forms. According to a Rathcoole Socialist who is a very good friend of the former UVF commander in North Belfast:

‘Dictionary Dave [Ervine] is certainly serious about his socialist politics, but he took the oath in the 1970s. He held the gun in one hand and the Bible in the other and swore himself for God and Ulster and the UVF. That means he’s still UVF. That means they’ve still got a hold on him. Davey would like to disconnect the PUP from the UVF but can’t.’

Of course, similar claims have been made on the part of Gerry Adams; but Adams doesn’t mention socialism these days; and in Ervine’s case, it rings more sincere. (37) In its TV election broadcasts for the assembly elections in 2004, the PUP also emphasised ‘community politics’ over ‘class politics’. It also lacks a trade union base. At the same time, some of the best political minds in Northern Ireland are either in the Workers Party or the PUP and their existence, as household names, proves that a mass-based party for democratic socialism can be built in the country.

When the Workers Party split in the late 1980s, (as a response to the crisis in Stalinism world-wide), I denounced the Democratic Left as opportunists who had entered Parliament with an eye to entering bourgeois coalitions. This observation on my part was influenced by my then membership of the Workers’ Revolutionary Party Central Committee who were trying to recruit the Workers Party hardliners and by the fact that many of my relatives were members of the Workers Party in Cork at the time.

These days, I’m still very much a Marxist but am no longer a Trotskyist; and I certainly no longer believe in the appropriateness of vanguard democratic centralism in a western democracy. Ergo, I think I was wrong to oppose the strategy of the Democratic Left which has since entered the Irish Labour Party, providing it with its best leadership since Connolly and Larkin. At the same time, as a Cork Protestant, who grew up in Birmingham and served in the British Army as a teenager, I’d never cared for the left’s affording of cover to republican terrorism and now realise that Ireland has been ‘two nations’ since the 1930s, when the Irish Labour Party was routed by Fianna Fail and DeValera proclaimed a theocratic constitution.

If the Irish Republic needs a Labour-dominated government, (and ultimately, a Labour government without coalition partners) then Northern Ireland needs a Labour Party. The existence of the Workers Party and PUP prove that such a Party could be built; and indeed, much of the constituency for such a party might come from the Workers Party and PUP. An arrangement might even be possible in which these established parties can affiliate to Labour – providing the PUP ditches its paramilitary links.(38) As we’ve seen, this may not be easy.

A Labour Party in Northern Ireland would provide the only basis for policies of social inclusion, by which sectarianism could be eradicated. With the Unionist Party now likely to backtrack on the courageous programme of reforms initiated by Trimble, realigning with Paisley and so called ‘traditional unionism’, only a Labour Party can deliver the policies that will render Northern Ireland truly ‘British’. The main obstacle to this process, as ever, is the republican-nationalist siege of Northern Ireland, the endless threat to its position in the UK (to which the Irish and British governments contribute) and of course, the existence of the IRA terror gang.

Hence, when Billy Hutchinson canvassed in the elections in North Belfast, he wanted to talk about social issues. An Ardoyne Protestant community that has suffered low level ethnic cleansing from IRA thugs (the real background to ‘Holy Cross’, as engineered by Sinn Fein) wanted to talk about the appeasement of IRA terrorists and Billy lost his seat to the DUP.

Ditching all this talk about a united Ireland would also be good for Irish politics, because it would prevent Fianna Fail from hiding behind its anti-British claptrap while screwing the Irish working class.

In the week that the IRA announced its decommissioning amidst a Nuremberg-style rally in Dublin, I got into an interesting argument with one of my more liberal colleagues at Queens University. The woman in question was horrified that I saw decommissioning as a sham because IRA criminality meant they could buy new guns any time that they wanted. What also worried ‘Finnula’ was that I kept talking about the working class when, according to her, cultural identity was just as important to people as class identity. Obviously she had read too many copies of Marxism Today and Screen as an undergraduate, or spent too much time in the company of people from the Centre of Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham, or the Demos think tank. My response to ‘Finnula’ was that the politics of cultural identity thrive because of the political defeat of the working class – not as authentic politics in their own right. I also pointed out that the fetish for cultural identity means something quite different in Sandy Row or Andersonstown than it does in the academic world of the Lower Malone; and that both al-Qaeda and the BNP represent the politics of cultural identity. Which is why we need to bury the politics of cultural identity for reasons that Jim Larkin, Rosa Luxembourg, Sean O’Casey, CLR James, Hanif Kureishi and Darcus Howe have all understood.

Notes

1. Ernie (‘Duke’) Elliot from Woodvale was the first prominent UDA figure to aspire to a form of working class or left politics. For all that Henry McDonald (with Jim Cusack, 2004; 27-35) reveals both that Elliot was involved in ‘romper room’ beatings, and that Fogel, his English-born lieutenant, had initiated the strategy of UDA ‘No Go Areas’ in Belfast. Elliot formed an alliance with Jim Anderson in East Belfast against the right wing, sectarian UDA leader, Charles Harding-Smith, the notorious ‘Woodvale Godfather’, who was briefly detained on gun running charges following a [British] Special Branch sting operation (Boulton, 1974; 159-162). This enabled Anderson and Elliot to briefly come to the fore, to distance themselves from William Craig, (the former Home Affairs Minister) and talk lucidly about the formation of a working class party. Rather unwisely, according to Steve Bruce (1992), they allowed Billy Hull to chair the meetings. Tommy (‘rent-a-quote’) Herron, a garage proprietor and UDA leader from East Belfast, belatedly aligned himself to the group, after the ‘No Go Areas’ led to direct conflict between the UDA and British Army, and Herron himself was beaten up by paratroopers (Boulton, 1974; 176). Hitherto, Herron had run a sectarian murder gang known as the Number One Assassination Team, which included British Army deserter Albert ‘Ginger’ Baker and prefigured the UFF in a number of respects (Dillon, 1989; 256-257). According to Michael Stone’s memoirs, Herron initiated Stone into the UDA by getting him to shoot the family dog, and may have aligned himself to the left group merely as a means of challenging Smith. Kevin Myers of The Irish Times and Steve Bruce both dispute that Herron had any innately leftist leanings. Elliot and Fogel were meantime falsely targeted as members of the (completely bogus) Ulster Citizens Army (Dillon, 1989; 88-89; MacDonald and Cusack, 2004; 50). This led to a wave of further arrests: e.g. of Bob Gray, the international darts player living in Malvern, Worcestershire, in 1984, who had been in the UDA in the early 1970s and whose arrest was reported by this writer in the Worcester Evening News. After the demise of Fogel and Elliot, control of the Woodvale Defence Associate fell to Davey Payne and John White – the founders of the Ulster Freedom Fighters murder gang (MacDonald and Cusack, 2004; 55).

2. The social radicalism of the DUP in 1972, the year that it was formed, owed less to Paisley, who had established his reputation as a right-wing rabble rouser during the 1960s, than to the barrister, Desmond Boal, who was the party’s deputy leader and the real intellectual force behind the DUP’s program, in the brief period of 1972-73 when it showed some promise. Ernie Elliot and Jim Anderson, as an example, both said that they preferred Paisley as unionist leader to Craig at this time. Later, Paisley used the Free Presbyterian Church to isolate and neutralise Boal within the DUP, in a process that is admirably described in Steve Bruce’s superior book on Paisley, God Save Ulster! (Oxford University Press, 1986). Boal went on to found the Ulster Democratic Front with Hughie Smyth in 1973 that is described as a precursor to the PUP in the core of this text.

3. Bruce shies away from the more sensationalist aspects of Paisley’s early career in his 1986 book on Paisleyism. These include the fact that he was implicated by the RUC in the abduction of a minor in the 1960s. Fortunately, David Boulton showed no such inhibitions in his 1974 book, cited at length in this article. Most notoriously, according to Colin Wallace, Paisley was aware of and helped to cover-up John McKeague’s paedophile activities at the Kincora Boys Home in the early 1970s (Foot, 1989).

4. The PDs derive from the old Jack Lynch wing of Fianna Fail that were squeezed out, (and often issued with death threats!) by Charles Haughey’s leadership, of which Bertie is heir. They then embraced Thatcherism in the late 1980s, just as Britain was discarding it. Their only redeeming feature, observed by Eoghan Harris (the Irish Sunday Independent) and Henry McDonald (The Observer) alike is that for their own reasons, they detest republicanism and the IRA. Hence Malcolm McDowell has actually been a good Justice Minister, in terms of cracking down on republicans and crime, scrapping the absurd Irish language qualification in the Garda Siochana, etc., although he has failed to render the Irish Police accountable and also to act on the Morris Tribunal recommendations into Garda corruption. When it comes to racism and the criminalisation of asylum seekers, his policies are every bit as venal as New Labour in Britain.

5. Every former UDA and UVF man that I know says that had this happened, it would have given loyalists something in a uniform to shoot at. In fact both the first RUC officer and British soldier to be killed in the present troubles, were shot dead by loyalists, but this was rare. It wouldn’t have been if the British soldiers had been UN peace keepers!

6. This eventually found its way into one of Jack Higgins’s more preposterous novels, namely Confessional, in which we all presumably root for the KGB hit-man trying to kill the Pope. (Sectarian joke!)

7. The Militants were founded by Davey Payne and John White around the time of Elliot and Fogel’s demise in the UDA. (Boulton, 1972; 181; McDonald and Cusack, 2004; 55-63.) Later in 1972, the UVF were involved in more efficient bombings of Dublin that may have been targeted by British agent Kenneth Littlejohn and which were calculated (with a degree of political sophistication) to ensure the passing of antiterrorist legislation in the Republic. (Cusack and McDonald, 2000.) The bombs were made according to the ‘co-op mix’ design favoured by the UVF, with no additional sophistication, so named because all the ingredients could be bought in the co-op. The creator of the co-op mix bomb however, was an early convert to social radicalism within the UVF, who may have been peripherally connected to Hughie Smyth’s UDF (see text), who also wanted to bomb the Catholic Seminary at Maynooth and the US Embassy in Dublin before he was interned. When UVF bombs returned to Dublin and Monaghan during the UWC Strike of 1974, in the form of car bombs, these were accredited to a renegade unit in Portadown, and displayed a sophistication of technology that the UVF, with its co-op mix, did not possess at the time. All leaders of the Ulster Workers Council including the UVF’s Ken Gibson condemned the bombings, with the exception of Sammy Smyth who was linked to the UFF – for all that the Shankill Road UDA organised an (opportunist) cash collection on the street, in the aftermath of the bombing (McDonald and Cusack, 2004; 78). According to ex-Army Intelligence Captain Fred Holroyd, there is good evidence linking Captain Robert Nairac of the SAS, who was subsequently involved in the Miami Showband massacre, to these bombings, which were later claimed by the UVF in its Fernhill House Declaration of 1994 (Cusack and McDonald, 2000; Holroyd and Burbridge, 1989). This led to scurrilous efforts to smear Holroyd in which Martin Dillon was himself involved (Dillon, 1989; 161-187). Holroyd has since given evidence to the Barron Inquiry in Dublin.

8. It is a standard joke in Belfast that Adams owes his life to the professionalism of the RUC and incompetence of the UDA. The UVF plan was meticulous and involved tearing the top off of Adams’s armoured limo with cutting gear, according to Cusack and McDonald (2000) and members of the UVF team who have subsequently spoken to this writer. Meanwhile, Gregg’s team, (his nickname was ‘Grogg’ in Rathcoole) staged a botched assassination attempt against Adams in a Belfast traffic jam, thwarting the more professional UVF attempt that had a far greater chance of success. Grogg was later assassinated by Johnny (‘Daft Dog’) Adaire on his way back from a Glasgow Rangers match in 2002, after Grogg resisted Daft Dog’s attempt to unite the North and West Belfast UDA – thereby threatening Grogg’s power base. Already, Grogg had executed some of his closest confederates on trumped-up charges of financial impropriety to consolidate his position, modelling his methods on those of Saddam Hussein. He was also an admirer of Adolf Hitler. Grogg was travelling in a mini cab owned by Jock’s Cabs, a UDA controlled taxi firm in Rathcoole, when he was hit. Jock’s Cabs are now nicknamed ‘unlucky cabs’ in Rathcoole.

9. Haughey once described Ahern as the most devious of his generation of Fianna Fail leaders and meant it as a compliment.

10. Coughlan was originally from Clonakilty in Co. Cork and had been an undergraduate at University College, Cork. He is now a Professor of Public Administration at Trinity College, Dublin, shared an academic platform with this writer in Exeter in 1990 and was a prominent figure in the ‘No’ campaign on the Nice Referendum in 2001.

11. As Peter Taylor showed in States of Terror, the forces that eventually became the Provisional IRA had absolutely no interest in civil rights.

12. The most important manifestations of this were the 1919 Engineering Strike and electoral gains of Labour in Belfast in 1920, although the significance of the Limerick Soviet of 1919 may have been exaggerated by social republican historians. Certainly, the Bolshevik-republican axis existed only in Edward Carson’s imagination and propaganda.

13. This didn’t last long and was more down to Boal than Paisley.

14. Steve Bruce in The Red Hand (OUP, 1992) tries to claim the VPP as the precursor to the Progressive Unionist Party founded in 1979 but this is nonsense. The real precursor to the PUP was the UDF and explains why the original leader of the PUP was Hughie Smyth. The links between sections of the UVF and British Strasserite fascism at this time were also expressed in that Steve Brady of the National Party was able to target an anti-fascist active in London, to be killed by the UVF in Belfast. Admittedly, the anti-fascist was a Maoist and involved with the political wing of the INLA, which would have rendered him a legitimate target from the UVF’s point of view. On the basis of this murder, Brady was able to spuriously claim UVF membership when he succeeded Owen Masters as International Liaison Officer of the League of St. George.

15. In an interview on Peter Taylor’s Loyalists program for BBC, Gusty speaks about a ‘counterfeit leadership’ operating in the UVF at this time. Billy Mitchell has since renounced fascism and while a born again Christian and ‘personally opposed to abortion’, is prominent in the Progressive Unionist Party.

16. In their seminal work on Working Class Youth Culture, in 1976, Mungham and Pearson cite Gramsci to speak of class antagonisms being mediated through the lens of lived experience and culture. What I have done here is to apply this important general observation to the specific case study of Northern Ireland loyalists.

17. Paisley seized his chance to steal the traditional unionist mantle from William Craig in the Constitutional Convention of 1976, after Craig agreed to power sharing with the SDLP and the IRA ended its ceasefire by bombing Tullvallen Orange Hall. Paisley consolidated his traditional unionist credentials with a strike in 1977 that in contrast to the UWC Strike of 1974 did not enjoy mass support. The real key to Paisley’s rise however, (despite the theocratic explanation offered by Steve Bruce) was the political defeat of the British working class by Margaret Thatcher combined with the abandonment of unionism as a political strategy in the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985. In opposing that agreement both Paisley and Jim Molyneaux (the latter cast adrift by Thatcher) cast themselves as traditional unionists but proved wholly impotent before but especially after the Day of Action (Day of Inaction?) against the Anglo-Irish Agreement in March 1986. Trimble’s strategy on succeeding Molyneaux (and with Paul Bew and Eoghan Harris among his advisors) was to try and further modernise the Unionist Party as a British Party, from the top down. If his successor overturns this, and moves for an accommodation with Paisleyism, then this writer, for one, will no longer vote UUP.

18. See Glen Barr and Harry Chicken, Beyond The Religious Divide (New Ulster Political Research Group/UDA. 1982).

19. The best account of this period is without doubt that provided by Larry O’Hara in Lobster 23, 24, 25, 26, 29, 30.

20. Lenny Murphy of the Shankill Butchers also committed his first sectarian murder only after Black Friday.

21. Harding-Smith was arrested by the British Special Branch. The RUC Special Constable provided a character reference for Charles Harding-Smith at his trial (Farrell, 1976).

22. As the leader of the Loyalist Association of Workers in 1972, Hull was a right-wing figure completely loyal to William Craig. The Vanguard rally that Hull helped organise in Victoria Park, Belfast, for example, bore more than a superficial resemblance to a Nuremberg rally and Craig was always referred to as ‘The Leader’. Hull’s confederate, Hugh Petrie, later founded the Vanguard Service Corps, a small paramilitary group directly linked to Craig’s Vanguard.

23. Colin Wallace commented recently in an e-mail: ‘The Army’s view was that Herron, Elliott, Fogel etc were involved in the UCA and were trying to bring about a coup within the UDA.’ But this remains conjecture. The ‘UCA smear’ was later used against Glen Barr and, in a different way, against Colin Wallace himself in 1980.

24. This is a standard accusation during UDA power struggles. When John MacMichael moved against Andy Tyrie for example, in 1987, this was under the guise of an internal investigation into UDA corruption that followed Roger Cook’s program, Worse Than The Mafia, for Central TV. Much of Cook’s information may well have come from MI5; in which case the plan backfired, as Jimmy Craig successfully conspired with the IRA to have MacMichael murdered in December 1987 (Dillon, 1989; 443-458). I had interviewed John MacMichael a week before this in Belfast. John Gregg meantime, used allegations of corruption to purge the Rathcoole UDA ahead of his showdown with Johnny (‘Daft Dog’) Adair.

25. As well as leading to the arrest of Bob Gray, the darts international in Malvern (and thus to my lifelong coverage of loyalist politics in the media), Gregory’s confession led to a Special Branch raid of one of the UDA’s then two headquarters in Belfast, the one in Gawn Street, off the Newtonards Road. (According to Steve Bruce, the existence of two headquarters alluded to the truce that Andy Tyrie brokered, between the East and West Belfast UDA, following the fatal shooting of Harding-Smith in 1975.) At the UDA Headquarters a letter was found from Steve Brady of the League of St. George to Andy Tyrie, leading the anti-fascist magazine Searchlight, (who acquired a copy of the letter) to talk about UDA links to British and International Fascism. This was in fact extremely misleading. Owen Masters, who had preceded Brady as International Liaison Officer of the League of St. George, was in fact pro-IRA, as were most fascist organisations in Europe. A fight had even broken out at the Deekemunde festival to commemorate Adolf Hitler’s birthday, between British fascists and their European counterparts, who were handing out leaflets describing Bobby Sands as a freedom fighter. (Hill and Bell, 1988) What Brady was offering was to stop European fascists supporting the IRA and Tyrie went so far as to pay Brady’s air fare to Belfast, according to Bruce. (1992) He also showed his total contempt for British fascism. According to an anecdote that Henry McDonald told me in a Dublin pub, Tyrie sent a black UDA man to pick up Brady at the airport. Later, Brady’s contacts among the Flemish VMO did offer to help fund the UVF if the UVF carried out synagogue bombings in Belfast. Jackie Ervine of the UVF told the VMO to ‘fuck off’ (Cusack and McDonald, 2000).

26. According to Robert Fisk, the UVF were concerned about loss of revenues from their Peoples’ Cabs. Sadly, Henry McDonald has also taken to describing the strike as a ‘UDA strike’ (McDonald and Cusack, 2004). The strike was followed by more sectarian murders, accredited to the UVF but also by a UDA-UVF feud over taxi revenues, which formed the background the fatal wounding of Charles Harding-Smith. There was then a state crackdown on the UVF that saw Billy Mitchell, among others, thrown into prison.

27. The UDA did run this latter strike on Paisley’s behalf, which was not supported by Billy Kelly’s power workers and which led to the present total animosity of the UDA towards Paisley. Even Mary Holland, writing in The New Statesman at the time, admitted that there was far more sectarian intimidation associated with the 1977 strike than with its 1974 counterpart.

28. Barr was still banging on about Ulster UDI on Channel 4 television, as well as in New Ulster Defender, in the 1990s.

29. The absence of a centralised British Army command structure in the UDA doesn’t prevent its leaders from affording themselves preposterous titles like ‘Brigadier-General’, borrowed from the senior ranks of the British Army.

30. These arrests formed part of Roy Mason’s crackdown on paramilitarism, including the IRA. Unlike his predecessors, and whatever his political faults, Mason grasped that the military defeat of the Provisional IRA was a necessary component of a durable political initiative and peace. This also alludes to the absurdity of Paisley’s 1977 strike. Called on security grounds, it occurred at a time when the British Army and RUC were having more success against the IRA than ever, bringing violence down to what was perversely called ‘an acceptable level of violence’ for the first time.

31. The ‘Day of Inaction’ was what Rodin, in the UDA’s Ulster magazine, called it at the time. Rodin also (correctly) denounced the Ulster Clubs and Ulster Resistance as reactionary initiatives associated with Ian Paisley; which didn’t prevent the UDA and UVF using Ulster Resistance for arms procurement. (BBC, Panorama)

32. Unlike David Ervine, Billy Hutchinson was convicted for a sectarian murder and was politically radicalised in prison – one suspects after 1977. He did read for an Open University Degree in prison as did most of the PUP leadership. He sends his children to an integrated school. In the 1990s Billy became very close to the Socialist Party but back-pedalled suddenly, when the Socialist Party softened its stance on Sinn Fein. A turning point here was when Jimmy McLaughlin, a Socialist Party councillor in Omagh, supported a DUP motion passed after the Omagh bombings, that called on the British government to send the SAS into Dundalk and hunt down dissident republicans by deadly force. As Irish Home Affairs Minister Brian Cowan was in secret talks with dissident republicans at the time and the Garda Siochana were prevented from dealing with dissident republicans appropriately, Johnny McLaughlin was right. He was nonetheless hounded out of the Socialist Party and smeared as an alcoholic. Billy Hutchinson’s position would be that he is probably to the left of David Ervine on socio-economic issues but still committed to the existence of the UVF, while Ervine is not. He is also the leader most likely to call off the UVF cease-fire in any future conflict with the UDA, LVF or republicans.

33. The UDA and UVF were jointly involved in arms procurement from the Lebanon, but the UVF had to organise the bank robberies to pay for this, after the UDA’s attempts to steal Stingertechnology for South Africa’s Armscorps collapsed. Dick Wright of Armscorpscame from Portadown and his brother, Alan Wright, ran the Ulster Clubs. Their father was a murdered RUC Officer.

34. His son, Gary MacMichael, went on to become the first UDA leader with ‘A’ Levels.

35. Spring, a political reactionary who made Tony Blair look like a Bolshevik, had previously expelled the Militantfrom the Irish Labour Party in order to facilitate coalition with Fianna Fail. In alienating David Ervine, he undermined months of negotiations involving trade unionist Dereck Hudson from Dun Laoghaire, (an associate of this writer, one of whose closest friends died in the Miami Showband massacre) and Fergus Finlay of the Irish Examiner.

36. Hutchinson regularly went on holiday in Cork as a child and shared a number of platforms, e.g. on anti-racism, with both the Irish Communist Party and the Socialist Party.

37. See Liam Clarke: Broadening The Battlefield: The H-Blocks and the Political Rise of Sinn Fein (Macmillan and Gill, 1989).

38. Up to 1946 it was possible for parties such as the Communist Party to affiliate to the Labour Party in Britain. Herbert Morrison changed this after the Communist Party called for a coalition government under Winston Churchill in the 1945 election and supported candidates other than Labour in rural constituencies (Bornstein and Richardson, 1982; 123-141).

Bibliography

• Barr, G and Chicken, H : Beyond The Religious Divide (Belfast: New Ulster Political Research Group, 1982)
• Bornstein, S and Richardson, A : Two Steps Back: Communists and the Wider Labour Movement, 1935-1945: A Study in the Relations Between Vanguard and Class (London: Socialist Platform, 1982)
• Bornstein, S and Richardson, A : War and the International: A History of the Trotskyist Movement in Britain, 1937-1949 (London: Socialist Platform, 1982)
• Boulton, D : The UVF, 1966-73 (Dublin: Torc Books, 1974)
• Bruce, S : God Save Ulster: The Religion and Politics of Paisleyism. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989)
• Bruce, S : The Red Hand (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992)
• Clarke, L : Broadening The Battlefields: The H-Blocks and the Rise of Sinn Fein (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan 1989)
• Crawford, C : Inside the UDA: Volunteers and Violence (London: Pluto Press, 2003)
• Cusack, J and McDonald, H : The UVF (Dublin: Poolbeg , 2000)
• Dillon, M : The Dirty War (London: Hutchinson, 1989)
• Farrell, M : Northern Ireland: The Orange State (London: Pluto Press, 1976)
• Fisk, R : The Point of No Return (London: Andre Deutsche, 1976)
• Foot, P : Who Framed Colin Wallace? (London: Macmillan 1989)
• Hill, J and Bell, A : The Other Face of Terror: Inside Europe’s Neo-Nazi Network. (London: Granada, 1988)
• Holroyd, F and Burbridge, N: War Without Honour (Hull: Medium, 1989)
• McCann, E : War and an Irish Town (London: Pluto Press, 1980)
• McDonald, H and Cusack, J : The UDA: Inside the Heart of Loyalist Terror. (Dublin: Penguin, 2004)
• Patterson, H : The Politics of Illusion: Republicanism and Socialism in Modern Ireland. (London: Radius and Hutchinson, 1989)
• Rumpf, E and Hepburn, A : Nationalism and Socialism in 20th Century Ireland (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1977)

Journals

• Combat (UVF)
• Common Sense (UDA Policy Document, February 1987)
• Lobster : Larry O’Hara on Third Position Fascism
• New Ulster Defender (UDA journal, 1990s)
• Searchlight
• Socialist Voice (Socialist Party, Northern Ireland.)
• UDA internal bulletin: on Roger Cook’s Worse Than The Mafia (1987)
• Ulster (UDA journal, 1980s)
• The Voice (Socialist Party, Irish Republic)

TV programmes

• Peter Taylor: States of Terror (BBC)
• Peter Taylor: Loyalists (BBC)