support amongst the backbenchers of the British Labour Party and soon a Campaign for Democracy in Ulster was formed which gave political backing to NICRA. On 5 October 1968, a civil rights march was met by heavy-handedness from the RUC and B-Specials in Londonderry. Northern Ireland was moving closer to the precipice of major civil unrest.
As a means of upping the ante, the UVF and its allies in the UPV stood-to again, deciding to bomb a number of key installations around the province. Two explosions on 30 March and 21 April 1969 destroyed water and electricity sub-stations in Castlereagh, Belfast, and at the Silent Valley reservoir in the Mourne Mountains, County Down. The bomb attacks were designed to exaggerate the threat posed by the IRA and, hopefully, to bring down O’Neill.37 In response, O’Neill mobilised the B-Specials to protect key installations. By then it was too late. O’Neill looked weak. The UVF–UPV plot worked, with even O’Neill coming to believe that the UVF had ‘literally bombed me out of office’.38 He resigned as Prime Minister on 28 April.
UVF subversion was not without its dangers. One volunteer, Thomas McDowell, was found badly burned on 19 October, having been electrocuted by 5,600 volts as he attempted to fit a bomb to a hydroelectric power station near Ballyshannon in County Donegal. McDowell had been pulverised by the extremity of the electric charges surging through his body; succumbing to his wounds in hospital two days later. A committed Paisleyite, McDowell was a close associate of Billy Mitchell. Mitchell later explained his thinking at this time:
In the years leading up to the outbreak of civil unrest, which erupted in August 1969, I had come to believe that the Ulster Protestant had a traditional and unalienable right to resist ‘by any means under God’ the supposed enemies of our Ulster heritage and distinctive protestant way of life; and I felt that my views on this were adequately confirmed by the public and private pronouncements of many ‘pillars of society’ and by ‘men of the cloth’. The much-loved phrase – ‘by all means under God’ – was simply a synonym for ‘by force of arms’ but with the added thought that God himself would approve of such action. In the early days of the troubles, and for several years before, threats of armed resistance together with a ‘holy war’ philosophy was put across in religious phraseology, in traditional slogans linked to the old 1912-UVF, and in sermons based on the warfare of the Old Testament. [Sermons which could be taken literally or figuratively – whichever way you wanted to take them].39
For Mitchell, the piety of religious fundamentalism fused with his new-found militant mindset:
It was this carefully insinuated idea that the Ulster Protestant was a modern-day Israelite and the Irish Roman Catholic was a modern-day Philistine that gave me, and many more like me, the firm conviction that force of arms was legitimate in the struggle for Ulster’s continued existence as a Protestant state for a Protestant people. The only real difference between the battle plans and weaponry of the Old Testament Israelites and the Ulster Protestants being that of modern technology and military strategy.40
With the political situation now descending into anarchy by late 1969, Mitchell quickly drifted into the ranks of TARA, a religious fundamentalist group led by the aggressive homosexual and paedophile William McGrath.
Hence, when the Troubles finally did escalate into open-street warfare I was a natural candidate for paramilitarism, and quickly joined TARA [an Orange Order based group] and, later, the Ulster Volunteer Force. It is interesting to note that the TARA leadership opened and closed their meetings with prayer and had other religious trappings, and that most of them claimed to be evangelical Christians. Another interesting point – they were mainly from the middle-class strata of society, or, at least, from the upper working class. ‘Could these cultured and respectable folk be wrong?’ I wondered. I always answered in the negative. ‘No, of course not. They were only following our traditional Protestant way of resisting the enemy’. My brief experience of TARA reinforced my belief in the legitimate right of Protestants to use violence.41
As TARA became more of a ‘talking shop’, than a conservative armed group, Mitchell sought refuge alongside like-minded individuals, many of whom had decided to leave and join the ranks of the Shankill UVF.
The tragic irony of UVF violence was that it actually prompted republicans to rejuvenate the IRA to defend the Catholic community against militant loyalist attacks. One of the IRA’s new recruits was Tommy Gorman, who would later rise to prominence in its ranks. He recalled how intercommunal rioting intensified in August 1969, and prompted the return of the IRA, which:
… was in a pretty bad state. I think in Divis Street that night [in 1969] there were a couple of short arms and a sub-machine gun. But … at that time it was moribund. And it was in the influx of new recruits and all these older people who had been retired and had gone out back to their farms or something and had suddenly reappeared again and gave us some sort of structure.42
There has been some dispute amongst republicans, academics and journalists over the exact size of the IRA in the 1960s. Estimates vary from 30–120 members in Belfast.43 In early April 1966, Scotland Yard intelligence reports placed the numbers at 1,000, which would explain why the RUC’s Crime Special Branch believed they were facing a concerted subversive campaign. In reality, the IRA only had 1,039 members in the Republic, 251 of whom were Border Campaign veterans. Around 300 members were concentrated in Dublin.44
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More than anything else, UVF activity between 1966 and 1969 fed intercommunal fears and whipped up emotional reactions from hardline republicans and their supporters. The IRA may have remained somewhat inert in this period, but unionists believed that it had been plotting subversion and the appearance of the NICRA marches served to confirm as much in the minds of hardline unionists at the time.
Roy Garland was one of those who believed the dire warnings. Garland was second-in-command of TARA at the time. ‘I mean, you didn’t know what to make of some of this stuff,’ he said. ‘There was talk of a coming doomsday situation and “You’re going to have to defend Ulster.” And the politicians, the sort of moderate accommodating politicians, were prepared to “sell out” so we would have to defend Ulster.’ Garland, like Mitchell, believed that the ‘doomsday situation’ was just around the corner. Paisley’s predictions were coming true. ‘I went to Paisley’s church and so on – but I didn’t find him inspiring,’ said Garland. ‘The whole leadership of TARA though did. But … to me he wasn’t an inspiring person. He didn’t inflame me with zeal or anything. But it was just the idea.’ The idea, as Garland, put it, was like an unquenchable thirst, which the fall of O’Neill in April 1969 did little to satisfy.
By the summer of 1969 violence became more organised and widespread. ‘James Chichester-Clark at one stage said it was an insurrection, referring to republicans on the Falls Road, and others talked in that sort of terminology, and if they were saying it, [we said] “look, well, obviously it’s true”.’ For Garland and other Protestant extremists, the UVF and TARA were hardline groupings with only one objective – defending their beloved Ulster from all enemies, from wherever they came. ‘That was centrally important from where I was coming from. Coming from the sort of religious background ... that can’t be underestimated. There were doubts in your mind about things.’ Garland believed that his faith was being ‘sold out’.45 Recognising an easy way to get hold of arms, the UVF under Samuel ‘Bo’ McClelland, began to infiltrate TARA. ‘When TARA came along,’ reported Irish Times journalist David McKittrick, ‘these men eagerly seized the opportunity for organised action again, but it was not long before they became restive. The main reasons for this disquiet were the religious fanaticism of the TARA leadership and the organisation’s reluctance to engage in “procurement activities” – a common euphemism for robberies.’46
In McClelland and the UVF, Billy Mitchell saw great promise. When he was given the opportunity, Mitchell jumped ship and, along with other UVF men, took ‘much of the equipment with them’, later to be interpreted by informed observers as the UVF’s strategy all along.47 Roy Garland admitted that the real reason why McClelland ordered his men to leave TARA was triggered ‘when evidence was received … of McGrath’s homosexual abuse of young men, along with rumours of his reliability’.48 It has been said that McClelland was so infuriated by McGrath’s transgressions that he burnt the TARA membership book, which