Belfast’s Cave Hill Mountain, which could be seen some way in the distance towering above the city. Billy knew everybody and everybody knew Billy. Nothing, except death it seemed, could remove him from the place he called his home for over half a century. Greer had been the quintessential community activist, frequently interviewed by local newspapers, whether it was about his campaign of dispensing free personal alarms for the elderly or urging the removal of unsightly paramilitary murals in Newtownabbey.
It was his positive contribution to returning this place to some semblance of normality that left people aghast when they learned of the extent of the actions of the area’s UVF leadership. I had heard that some of these men had joined the UVF for political reasons, while others were there to line their own pockets. Greer had been in the former category. He had joined the UVF at the very beginning, prior to the outbreak of the troubles, and he would later rise to prominence in the 1970s, when the IRA began its armed campaign. Now, three decades later, he had fallen on his sword for the men around him. In the two years after he was replaced, Billy became a different man. He stopped drinking and, though he was still the life and soul of the company he kept, he had become isolated inside the organisation he loved.
On the day of his funeral, though, he was just another fallen comrade. The UVF had put its internal squabbles aside and forged a united front. A clear signal was being sent out. Whatever had happened in the past had now been consigned to the dustbin of history, of relevance only to the naysayers who had a vested interest in derailing the accomplishments of the UVF’s internal consultation process. The strife wracking the inner circles of the UVF died with Billy Greer, or so it seemed on this occasion. In time, a different story would emerge, one more complicated than people realised. It would leave little doubt in some people’s minds that Greer’s departure from the leadership of the East Antrim UVF was seen by some as a cynical attempt to reverse the UVF’s decision to move towards a permanent disengagement from political violence.
***
Seven days after Billy Greer died, another former UVF leader passed away. His name was Billy Mitchell. At one time he had also commanded the East Antrim UVF and, subsequently, became a member of the group’s ruling Brigade Staff. Like Greer, I knew Billy Mitchell very well. He had been a mentor to me as we worked together on peace-building projects in the divided communities across Belfast and East Antrim in the last years of his life. If Billy Greer imbibed the UVF’s militaristic ethos throughout his entire life, Billy Mitchell embodied the political dynamism of a far-reaching catharsis that took him on a personal odyssey from militarist to politico.
‘How could you not like Billy,’ said ‘The Craftsman’, said to be one of the top two most senior UVF Brigade Staff officers. Like Mitchell, The Craftsman became involved in militant loyalism sometime in 1966 in the belief that the IRA were about to launch an armed coup to take over the government of Northern Ireland and subsume it into an all-island republic. It was astonishing to think that in the same year Beatlemania was sweeping the world, when Carnaby Street represented a new departure in British culture and when the world was changing dramatically amidst a Cold War, old shibboleths were returning with great vigour in Northern Ireland. Mitchell’s route to embracing extremist views began when he came under the spell of Reverend Ian Paisley, a fundamentalist Protestant preacher, though he had already been indoctrinated into loyalism by way of other, less prominent, religious extremists who belonged to the Flute Band he joined in his early twenties. Born in Ballyduff in 1940, Billy’s father died soon afterwards and the family went to live with his mother’s parents on the Hightown Road, close to Belfast’s Cave Hill. By 1974 Mitchell was on the UVF’s Brigade Staff, the only non-Shankill man ever to have served in that capacity. ‘I couldn’t tell you what role he played on Brigade Staff,’ The Craftsman told me. ‘I remember Billy turned up to a Brigade Staff meeting in the 1970s in his overalls. I think he worked [as a truck driver] at the time. He had the air of a country man about him.’ It is likely that Mitchell served as the organisation’s Director of Operations, following the death of Jim Hanna in April 1974. That he commanded one of the most active units inside the UVF meant he had a foot in both the Shankill and East Antrim.
When Mitchell was arrested by the Security Forces in Carrickfergus in March 1976, he had ring binders full of information used by the UVF for targeting. He told detectives that there was an innocent explanation for the material found in his possession. The truth was that he was double-hatted as the UVF’s Director of Intelligence at the time, responsible for targeting his organisation’s enemies, wherever they were to be found. Unbeknown to the CID detectives who questioned him, they had arguably the UVF’s most important leader in their custody. Here was the organisation’s top strategist, its chief scribe and its quintessential man of action. It is rare for guerrilla or terrorist organisations to have men who possess both the military aptitude and the political astuteness in their ranks. It is even rarer for them to be concentrated in one person.
During his long period of incarceration between 1976 and 1990, Mitchell spent his time wrestling with his conscience and attempting to unravel the puzzle of what had propelled him into the ranks of the UVF. After a few years, he would come to reject his paramilitary past, commit himself to Christianity and give up his coveted Special Category Status to enter the newly constructed H Blocks as a Conforming Prisoner in the early 1980s. There was little Billy conformed to. He had been a senior UVF commander who had been responsible for leading the organisation through its darkest years, when it was responsible for murdering several hundred people, thirty-three of whom were killed in a single day in bomb attacks on Dublin and Monaghan. He had even talked to the highest-ranking members of both wings of the Official and Provisional IRAs. It was part of the UVF’s twin track of ‘talking and killing’ he told me thirty years after those turbulent events. Yet, by 1979, he had given all of that up.
When he emerged from prison in 1990, Billy dedicated himself to rebuilding the communities the UVF had helped to shatter with their violence. He was committed to this and, as one of his friends would remark in his funeral oration, not only did he ‘walk the walk but he demanded that people walked with him’. This was the Billy Mitchell I knew. The man who could in one room bring together sworn enemies from across a deeply divided community. IRA members, UVF members, Irish National Liberation Army (INLA) members, even some from the so-called dissident hinterland – all had come into contact with him in his years as a peace-builder. It is little wonder, therefore, that as people gathered to pay their final respects to Billy Mitchell at his funeral service, they represented the broad spectrum of Northern Irish society.
As we look back on its fifty-year history, we see that the history of the UVF is a very rich and complicated one. It is at its heart a story of ordinary men like the two Billys, Greer and Mitchell, who became involved in paramilitary activity for a variety of reasons. They both rose to prominence through their ability to get the men and women under their command to do things they wouldn’t have otherwise done. Yet, their stories also demonstrate why some individuals remain involved in militarism, while others go against the grain and ask serious questions of what had brought them to the point where they advocated, planned and participated in violent acts.
This book charts the shifting contours in Ulster loyalism, and explains how and why men like these came to make the choices they did and what the consequences were for the world around them.
1
THE BISHOP
‘In such cases, where law and justice fail him, the Ulster Protestant will infallibly take his own measures for his protection. He is built that way. His resolution and his courage are unshakeable. He has all the unflinching determination of his border ancestors and by a question of principle he will stand to his last gasp.’
Lord Ernest Hamilton, The Soul of Ulster, 1917.1
It was a stormy night in mid-November 1965. Snow was forecast, as gale-force winds continually battered Northern Ireland. A car carrying four men steadily made its way from the Shankill Road in Belfast, south-west via the towns of Lisburn, Moira, Lurgan and Dungannon to the outskirts of the rural County Tyrone village of Pomeroy, some eighteen miles from the Irish border. It was a long and slow journey, as the roads got increasingly narrower and the bad weather made it difficult to navigate as the driver turned off the main A-road out of Dungannon. While Pomeroy was