analysis presented in this book.
In closing, I would like to put on record the enormous support from my family over the years – my mother and father, Barbara and Jim; my brother and sister, Ryan and Stephanie; and the wider Edwards and Graham clans – who all helped sustain me throughout some very challenging times indeed. This book would just not be possible without their forbearance. I am also indebted to the love and direction provided by my late grandparents, May and Jackie Graham, who kept us all safe during the troubles. This book is dedicated to their memory. As my grandfather was fond of telling me, ‘Always be a good listener.’ I hope this is reflected in the book you now hold in your hands.
FOREWORD
BY MARTIN DILLON
Sometimes when I begin reading a book, I sense that I was wise to have opened it. This was the case with UVF: Behind the Mask by Aaron Edwards. From the first chapter I was persuaded that he has a genuine grasp of a very complex topic at the heart of the ‘troubles’, namely the significant political and violent roles of the highly secretive Ulster Volunteer Force.
With an eye for detail and an intimate knowledge of political nuances at work in Northern Ireland’s tribal environment, he succeeds in unpacking the genesis of the UVF. He takes his reader on a journey to a genuine understanding of an organisation that created an aura of mystery while its members engaged in organised crime and terror, often displaying a propensity for the most grotesque violence, especially in the multiple killings by the Shankill Butchers. Aaron Edwards weaves his personal knowledge and experiences of having grown up in Belfast into his explanations about the origins of the separateness of the two communities and the violence they inflicted on each other.
Like any good historian, he strips his findings back to basics for the reader, making expert use of the eyes and memories of witnesses. He offers a fine analysis of the inherited prejudices, fears and dreams of his subjects. He skilfully avoids the trap of succumbing to oral history distortions of the past. Instead, he confronts head-on the UVF’s adoration of the cult of the gunman, its glorification of violence, and its tendency to manufacture history while often ignoring facts.
Always remaining true to the data and to his sources, Aaron Edwards questions the truthfulness of sources, while maintaining his focus on the broader context and parameters of the conflict and its impact on society as a whole. His research skills are impressive in his outlines of the re-emergence of the UVF against the fast-evolving landscape of protest, tribalism, sectarianism, paranoia and fear in 1960s Northern Ireland. He cleverly navigates a path through the violence emanating from both communities, displaying an intimate knowledge of the shorthand for the political machinations of all the players. He also explains the ways the UVF often denied its role in terror and how it came to realise that making peace came with a cost to its unity and existence.
Great historians are good storytellers and Aaron Edwards belongs in this class. His account of the modern UVF’s history is told without embellishment. Facts are carefully woven into the troubles’ historical tapestry. He is aware that UVF supporters will not see the UVF as he does. For them, it will always be the last line of defence in a loyalist community that continues to embrace a siege mentality on an island with unresolved divisions and a violent past. UVF: Behind The Mask is an excellent addition to the written history of the troubles.
Martin Dillon,
California, May 2017
PREFACE
For much of the afternoon of Tuesday, 11 September 2001, I was engrossed in conversation with veteran members of the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), an illegal Northern Ireland-based terrorist group responsible for hundreds of deaths and thousands of injuries during the ‘troubles’. We were meeting in a neatly refurbished working man’s social club, which served as the powerbase of the organisation’s East Antrim Battalion, situated in Monkstown, a working-class estate on the outskirts of North Belfast. As we sat discussing the finer points of English premiership football and horse racing, we were suddenly interrupted by news from one of the bar stewards that two planes had crashed into the World Trade Center in New York. I vividly remember standing transfixed as the images were beamed onto the club’s huge projection screen. The irony was not lost on me as I watched these events unfold on the other side of the Atlantic. Mass-casualty terrorism was unleashing its devastating killing potential across the most iconic skyline in the world while I sat quietly and comfortably opposite men who had probably been responsible for sustaining one of the longest-running campaigns of terror in British history.
The new UVF was reconstituted in 1965 as a preemptive defence mechanism against a perceived Irish Republican Army (IRA) threat, though its main purpose was as an instrument to put pressure on the ruling Unionist Party that was seen as weak on Irish republicanism and far too liberal in its views on northern Catholics and the Republic of Ireland. In a world of half-truths and paranoia, the reality was somewhat different, of course. The IRA would remain moribund until the outbreak of serious intercommunal violence between Protestants and Catholics in August 1969. While Al-Qaeda could now claim to have killed more innocent people in one day than any other terrorist organisation in history, the UVF could certainly claim the dubious title of being one of the world’s oldest and most resilient terrorist groups, which, on 11 September 2001, was still very much in existence.
The UVF has cast a long, dark shadow over life in Northern Ireland. During the troubles it killed 564 people, mostly Catholic civilians, and injured thousands more Protestants and Catholics between its first killing in 1966 and its most recent in 2010. Its violence – like that perpetrated by the IRA and its nearest rivals in the loyalist Ulster Defence Association (UDA) – has left behind a bloody legacy of almost 4,000 deaths and ten times as many injuries in a relatively small region of only 1.8 million people. Yet the physical and psychological scars on Northern Irish society are apparent to anyone who has taken the trouble to look. Had the same violence been unleashed on the population of Great Britain, the proportional numbers killed would have stood at 100,000, and, if it happened in the United States, the losses would have peaked somewhere in the region of the astronomically high figure of 1 million.
Today, most people think that Northern Ireland is at peace. After all, a ‘peace process’ was indeed begun in the early 1990s, culminating in the signing of the Belfast Agreement in 1998 and the establishment of power-sharing institutions a decade later. Crucially, it is important that we acknowledge the limitations of this process. For one thing, it has not completely ended the conflict and removed the causes which gave rise to it in the first place. Almost twenty years on from the peace accord brokered between Unionist and Nationalist politicians, loyalist and republican terrorist groups are still in existence. What is more, they have shown a willingness to become involved in civil disturbances, intimidation, threats, physical violence, particularly within their own communities, and even murder, whenever the situation demands it.
For this reason, you will find much of what you read here shocking. It is a story of young men (and occasionally young women) who turned to violence, some in the heat of the moment and others in more premeditated circumstances. At the time and since, many of these individuals would give their motives for doing so as indicative of wanting to ‘hit back’, to ‘defend their country’ or to ‘return the serve’ against Irish republicans. Others, less troubled by the trappings of patriotism, engaged in violence because of the promise of power, money, and the status it gave them in the deprived working-class communities where they try to carve out lives for themselves and their families. No matter what the motive, the collective sum of all parts of this violence was to contribute to the continuation of the Northern Ireland conflict from its outbreak in the 1960s – via the intense violence of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s – to the present day. There were other motives, of course, and this book is aimed at uncovering what they were.
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As a professional historian, I draw inspiration from the advice passed on to future generations of writers by one of the twentieth century’s most influential historians, the French intellectual and resistance fighter Marc Bloch. Bloch was a man of action as well as a man of letters and – as a direct consequence – paid the ultimate price for his activism when he was captured, imprisoned and subsequently machine-gunned