military operations. In one particular incident in the 1970s, Geordie recounted the circumstances that led a UVF team to drive a van into republican West Belfast loaded with two gunmen in the back. Dressed head to toe in boiler suits, masked and armed with sub-machine guns, the men believed they had been tasked with killing two republicans. The plan was simple. They were to drive up to the street corner where the targets had been spotted on a regular basis, slam on the brakes alongside them and the gunmen in the back of the vehicle would kick open the doors and shoot the two men dead. When they got to the scene, the UVF men kicked on the doors but they failed to open. The intended targets, hearing the commotion inside the van, ran off. The UVF team, dazed, confused and anxious to get away, ditched the van and reported back to their commander. ‘It was a farce,’ Geordie said, ‘The doors were not locked, yet they couldn’t open them. Such was the way many of these operations went.’
The UVF’s botched operations in the mid-1970s certainly pointed to the lack of forward planning and even bordered on recklessness, but they also highlighted the autonomy that individual members and teams had in targeting Catholic civilians with no connection to physical force republicanism.29 In some cases, this was due to a lack of specific intelligence on IRA members; at other times, Catholic civilians were deliberately targeted. Although Gusty Spence had set himself firmly against indiscriminate attacks on Catholic civilians, it appeared that some UVF volunteers were still prepared to adhere to his earlier dictum that, ‘If you can’t get an IRA man, get a Taig.’30
***
Antrim Road, North Belfast, Night, Saturday, 12 October 1974
Seventeen-year-old Ciaran Murphy spent the day drinking Guinness with his best friend Seamus Larkin in several bars in North Street in Belfast city centre. He looked old for his age, standing tall at 6'1". At the time, Ciaran sported an afro hairstyle that made him look like the Irish singer-songwriter Gilbert O’Sullivan. He was the youngest in a family of six children, three boys and three girls, and lived at the family home in Ardoyne with his mother Kathleen. His father, John, had passed away in 1967. Ciaran worked for G Plan Central Heating, a firm that gave him a small company van for his own personal use. He was spotted around the area on a frequent basis, often stopping to offer lifts to local people. Ciaran was a friendly lad, a young man full of boundless energy and of the hopes and dreams of many teenagers at the time. He had ambitions but loved to stay grounded by socialising with friends and family.
As evening passed into night in that cold October night, Ciaran and his friends made their way back to Seamus’ house, where they were picked up by another friend, Patrick Mulholland. All three travelled to the Saunders Club in Elmfield Street, arriving promptly at 7:30 p.m. It didn’t take them long to get into the swing of things in the club. Ciaran drank gin and tonic all evening. At 11:45 p.m., the three friends left to go home. Even though he had been drinking all day, Ciaran volunteered to drive so they could pick up takeaway food on their way back to Ardoyne. As they drew up behind some parked cars at the Wei Ping Chinese restaurant on the Antrim Road (known locally as ‘Provie Charlies’), Ciaran misjudged the distance and touched the back bumper of the rear car. Slightly shaken by the experience, he got out of the car and told his two companions that he couldn’t drive anymore. Before they could protest further, Ciaran walked off on his own, picking up some chips before making his way home to Ardoyne along the Cliftonville Road.
After a few minutes, Ciaran noticed a beige-coloured Ford Corsair drive past him. Inside were three UVF men. The car crawled along at a slow pace. The three men inside joked to one another about the drunk teenager they spotted on the other side of the Street. ‘Look at that idiot, let’s stop him and see who he is,’ shouted one of the men. The driver made a sharp U-turn in the road, before pulling up alongside the young man. Ciaran ignored them and carried on walking. He was drunk and staggered along eating his chips. ‘Do you want a lift then mate?’ the men in the car inquired. ‘Dead on, dead on,’ he replied, and one man opened the door. Realising in a split second the danger he was now in, Ciaran quickly changed his mind. Before he could protest any further, he was grabbed from behind and bundled into the back seat of the car. At that moment he dropped his chips, which spilt across the pavement. Two of the men sat either side of Ciaran holding him down. He tried to break free but his attempts to do so were futile. The men had no intention of letting their captive go.
After driving a short distance to the 42 Club in the Silverstream area, the leader of the gang, a young man, got out of the car and strolled inside. In a loud voice he proclaimed, ‘We’ve got a taig.’ Upon hearing the young man’s boast, a senior UVF man threw him out of the club, believing he was drunk. Taking umbrage at the slight, the young UVF man returned to the car and ordered the driver to take them to the home of a UDA man, an infamous paramilitary who was nicknamed ‘the window-cleaner’ for his modus operandi of using a pair of ladders to climb through windows and murder people in their homes. The four men then travelled to Tyndale Community Centre. There, Ciaran was badly beaten, and had his watch, money, driving licence and rings taken from him. The men then stabbed him repeatedly with a small bladed knife. He fought back, holding up his hands as he tried to deflect the thrusting blows away from his body. Ciaran was beaten again before being dragged out to the car. Meanwhile, ‘the window cleaner’ had retrieved a Luger pistol from a nearby weapons cache.
The men took Ciaran to a quarry overlooking the city, where they lifted him out of the vehicle, making him take off his jacket to stand in the freezing cold. A pistol was thrust into his back and he was ordered to walk forward into the darkness. Ciaran was then told to kneel down. The men gathered around their prey, swopping like vultures. The young Ardoyne man was again punched and kicked. His knuckles were red raw as he tried desperately to shield himself as the blows rained down on his thin frame. He cried, probably for his mother, knowing that he had nowhere to go. The men made him pick himself up and kneel down facing away from them. One of the men cocked his pistol, then shot Ciaran in the back four times. His body slumped to the ground. On his way out of the quarry, one of the gang scrawled his nickname, ‘The Pope’, on the road.31 An employee of the quarry, Leonard Stewart, discovered Ciaran’s body at 8:30 a.m.
It was a few hours before Ciaran’s family were told of the horrifying news of his death. His twenty-year-old brother, Patrick, was at his home when his mother came to visit him at lunchtime, having returned home from Mass to discover her youngest son was missing. ‘When I saw her, before she even said anything, I think I knew something was wrong, and knew he was dead,’ Patrick recalled. After a brief visit to the Army Barracks in Flax Street, Patrick and a few friends were told that a body had been discovered matching Ciaran’s description and that they should go immediately to Musgrave Street RUC Station. There they were met by a CID officer, Detective Constable Jonty Brown, who took them to Laganbank Morgue to identify the body. When Patrick walked into the room he spotted three bodies on trollies to the left and one body on the right. Before the sheet was pulled back, he knew instinctively that it was his brother, his black frizzy hair was sticking out from under the white death shroud the mortuary staff had placed over his body.
The police detectives investigating the murder later traced the weapon used to kill Ciaran to two other shooting incidents, an armed robbery, a murder and an attempted murder. It was a weapon held and used by the UDA. On this occasion, though, it was used by members of the UVF to murder Ciaran Murphy, an innocent young man, killed for no other reason than that he was a Catholic.32 In 1977 the RUC charged one man with involvement in the attack. He pleaded guilty to Ciaran’s murder at Belfast City Commission on 11 September 1978 and was sentenced to life imprisonment.33 Drunk and vulnerable, his death would come to signify the deep visceral hatred harboured by many loyalist paramilitaries at the time.
Ciaran Murphy would not be the only young man murdered by the UVF that year. Up until that point, he was the sixty-fourth victim of the organisation. Seventy men, women and children would lose their lives at the hands of UVF members in 1974. Twenty had been shot, the remainder had died in bomb explosions, including the Dublin and Monaghan atrocities. The average age of the UVF’s victims that year was thirty-eight. The oldest victim was an eighty-year-old caught up in the Dublin bombings, and the youngest an unborn baby and her one-year-old sister, in the same incident. Although the vast majority of victims were Catholic civilians, French, German and Italian tourists were also killed by the organisation, at a time when it was apparently observing a ceasefire.