Read Voices from the Grave: Two Men's War in Ireland Online
Authors: Ed Moloney
Voices from the Grave: Two Men's War in Ireland (61 page)
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
…
