composition in the mid-1960s, it had a long association with Protestant militancy that stretched back to the late eighteenth century. The Orange Order was formed not far away at the Diamond near Portadown, in 1795. It had been established at a time of great uncertainty. Revolution abroad, sectarianism at home and debates over constitutional issues and the fear of invasion brought the Order together.2 It was also a time when militia-based organisations flourished, with the predominantly Presbyterian United Irishmen raised a few years earlier to agitate for religious freedom for Catholics and dissenters. Both organisations had a resemblance to earlier, agrarian-based secret societies, like the Peep O’ Day Boys and their rivals, the Defenders.
As the antagonism between these revolutionary and counter-revolutionary groups developed, the United Irishmen became imbibed with a culture of popular radicalism common in Britain and America at the time. Meanwhile, Orangeism became more aggressively anti-Catholic and reactionary. Opposing social and political outlooks soon triggered conflict between both organisations. To Protestant vengeance groups, ‘the entire Catholic population became defined as the enemy’.3 Portadown, in North Armagh, was the epicentre of the trouble and would remain so for the next two centuries.
As the carload of Belfast men made their way along the rolling countryside, with its narrow country lanes, prominent hedgerows and wide-open emerald green fields, they passed workers’ cottages and farms scattered along the side of the roads. This was farming country and, on the surface at least, places like Pomeroy appeared all but immune from the modernisation programme gripping Northern Ireland in the 1960s.4 Some Protestants, in fact, harboured a deep-seated feeling of bitterness, anger and fear as the winds of change blew through their land. What would they usher in, other than the creeping hand of Irish nationalism, which had always aspired to gain a foothold in their beloved Ulster? To the more militant-minded Protestants, change of any kind pointed towards dark days ahead for their homeland.
The terrible weather conditions on that November night in many ways matched the foreboding that had been percolating down to the Protestant grassroots who resided in the surrounding rural hamlets of Cappagh, Carrickmore and The Rock. Chief amongst these was the feeling that the Unionist government at Stormont was far too liberal and soft on those who, hardliners believed, were dedicated to the destruction of the Northern Ireland state. Evidence of this existential threat came in the form of a summit a year earlier between the Northern Ireland Prime Minister Terence O’Neill and the Irish Taoiseach Seán Lemass. The meeting was held in private, but did not escape the prying eyes of a thirty-nine-year-old lay preacher Ian Paisley, the rabble-rousing leader of the Free Presbyterian Church, a fundamentalist Christian sect formed in 1951. Born in Armagh in 1926, another citadel of Orangeism, Paisley burst onto the scene in the late 1950s when he formed Ulster Protestant Action (UPA), a sectarian-based organisation that lobbied against unemployment within the majority Protestant population.5
By 1964, Paisley was threatening to lead a Protestant mob to the offices of Irish Republican election candidate and Irish Republican Army (IRA) leader Liam McMillan in West Belfast. McMillan had placed an Irish tricolour in the window of his office on Divis Street. It caused uproar amongst Protestant extremists in the neighbouring areas. In a bid to quieten tensions, the RUC intervened in the dispute and removed the flag. When it appeared back in the window a short time afterwards, Paisley brought a Protestant mob back onto the streets, provoking a three-night riot with local Catholics and the police.
Paisley had always made sectarianism the leitmotif of his political protests. Apart from agitating on exclusively Protestant issues, he opposed attempts by the Roman Catholic Church to reach out to other Christian denominations in a spirit of harmony. Paisley and his followers found ecumenicalism abhorrent and, as a result, set themselves against it just as firmly as they had done the rapprochement between the two governments north and south of the border. Underpinning this acrimony was an undercurrent of violence, a spectre that continually haunted politics and society in this part of the world. Paisley warned that the IRA, which had dumped arms in 1962 after its six-year border campaign fizzled out, was still waiting in the wings. McMillan’s defiance in West Belfast proved as much, Paisley told his supporters, despite IRA guns having fallen silent amidst widespread apathy from the northern nationalist community.6 With the approach of the fiftieth anniversary of the failed Easter 1916 rebellion against British rule in Dublin, further impetus was given to militant Protestants who feared the ‘unholy alliance’ between the Irish government, Roman Catholic Church and the IRA.
A propensity for regular elections in Northern Ireland – there were seventeen local government, Stormont and Westminster parliamentary elections between 1945 and 1965 – gave Paisley the opportunity to test his paranoid claims on the voting public. Something was stirring amongst Ulster Protestants, and Paisley erroneously tapped into it. He was fast becoming the midwife in the rebirth of a noxious strain of militancy that was prepared to take the law into its own hands. By doing so, millenarian Protestant fundamentalists who identified with Paisley saw themselves as a bulwark against greater encroachment of British liberal democratic norms on their state. Paisleyites, as they soon became known, departed from this inclusive form of liberal unionism, preferring to hold fast to the belief that Northern Ireland should govern only on behalf of one section of its divided population. For these extremists, Northern Ireland was truly a ‘Protestant state for a Protestant people’. The faith-based ideology expounded by Paisley blended an extreme loyalty to the Crown with a narrow and exclusive interpretation of Ulster unionism and, above all, a rabid hatred for all things Roman Catholic.
By the mid-1960s, Paisley had attained cult-like status. His stirring speeches whipped his wide array of followers into a frenzy, and helped galvanise street protests. On one level, his oratory was certainly effective in winning over adherents, but his ‘swift rise to prominence occurred because fertile ground awaited the seeds of his bigotry’.7 He was an effective speaker, but he acted principally as a lightning rod for angst, frustration and fear amongst the Protestant working class.
***
The car carrying the Belfast men pulled off the minor B-road and followed a country lane towards a series of farm buildings, including a large barn. Outside, hurricane lamps swung violently in the wind. Men mingled in small knots. Some smoked cigarettes, while others avoided being drawn into small talk by looking at their feet. Those gathered outside only averted their eyes into the darker recesses of the surrounding undulating landscape when they spotted the car carrying the Belfast men approaching. As the vehicle pulled up next to the barn, the driver let the engine idle for a few moments before finally switching it off. The doors flung open to reveal the four visitors. They climbed out of the car with bearing and purpose. The Belfast men were greeted by an organiser, who had been expecting them. They exchanged pleasantries before being shown inside to the poorly lit barn. Shadows disappeared into the ambient light of the lamps which dangled from high wooden beams.
About forty men had gathered from different parts of the country on land owned by a prominent family in the area. The men stood side by side as they were brought to attention by a former British Army colonel and told to raise their right hand as they were sworn into a newly rejuvenated grouping, which was to become known as the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), tracing its lineage back to the paramilitary organisation formed in the early twentieth century.8 While the objective of the old UVF was to oppose the British policy of Home Rule for Ireland by ‘any means necessary’, this new UVF was raised to oppose ‘an assumed threat’9 from physical force republicanism. In reality this new private army was formed by elements within the right wing of the Unionist Party as part of a wider conspiracy to oppose O’Neill’s liberal unionist agenda.10
These were desperate times, said the faceless men presiding over the secret ceremony, and they called for desperate measures. The visitors from Belfast readily agreed. Some of them had seen the dangers posed by subversive movements in far-flung colonial outposts, like Cyprus; others were led to believe they were joining an underground organisation, preparing for a doomsday scenario in which armed republicans would be fielded in an attempt to seize control of the local state and impose upon them an island-wide Irish republic.11
***
A few weeks before the swearing in ceremony in Pomeroy, the Honorary Secretary of the East and Mid Tyrone Unionist Association had written a gloomy letter to the Minister of Home Affairs, Brian McConnell, to inform