Tag Archives: Fórsa Óglaigh Uladh (Ulster Volunteer Force)

Margaret Thatcher And The “Valiant” UVF

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Joint footpatrol of British UDA terrorists and British Army soldiers

Joint footpatrol of British UDA terrorists and British Army soldiers, British Occupied North of Ireland, 1970s

Throughout the late 20th century and into the early 21st century the Ulster Volunteer Force or UVF was one of the largest British terrorist organisations on the island of Ireland. From its establishment in 1965 to its cessation of attacks in 2007 the grouping was responsible for thousands of acts of major and minor terrorism. Indeed the forty year war which blighted the north-east of Ireland under the euphemistic title of “the Troubles” began in 1966 with a series of gun and bomb attacks by the UVF that left several people dead, including a 74 year old grandmother and an 18 year old teenager.

Yet the organisation was intimately connected to the British military and paramilitary forces in Ireland, and beyond them the British government itself. Many members of the UVF were serving or former members of the British Army or of the Royal Ulster Constabulary, the notorious paramilitary police in the Occupied North of Ireland. They served as soldiers and policemen by day – and gunmen and bombers by night.

Margaret Thatcher touring the British Occupied North of Ireland in 1981 wearing a beret of the UDR, an infamous British Army militia responsible for scores of terrorist attacks during the 1970s, '80s and '90s

Margaret Thatcher touring the British Occupied North of Ireland in 1981 wearing a beret of the UDR, an infamous British Army militia responsible for scores of terrorist attacks during the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s

From the early 1970s onwards the British military and intelligence services organised, trained, armed and financed all the main British terrorist factions in Ireland including the UVF. However, despite the fact that they supposedly fought as part of Britain’s counter-insurgency war against Irish Republicanism the British terror gangs rarely targeted other combatants. Tellingly some 86% of the UVF’s victims were members of the civilian population: Irish men, women and children.

This was not counter-insurgency. This was state-terrorism.

So much so that by the late 1970s even the British no longer could tell the difference between their military, paramilitary and terrorist arms in Ireland. From the Irish human rights organisation, the Pat Finucane Centre, come’s this revelation about Margaret Thatcher’s knowledge of the war against the “Irish liars“:

“As Margaret Thatcher is laid to rest we thought it appropriate to publish two documents we found in the British National Archives. Both have been published before in the chapter we contributed on Loyalist [British terrorist] infiltration of the UDR.

The first document contains the minutes of a meeting between the then head of the Conservative opposition in 1975 (Margaret Thatcher) and the then Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, just weeks after the Miami Showband Massacre involving members of the UDR. At page 3 the following fascinating admission is made:

the Secretary of State said….

‘Unfortunately there were certain elements in the police who were very close to the UVF, and who were prepared to hand over information, for example, to Mr Paisley. The Army’s judgement was that the UDR was heavily infiltrated by extremist Protestants, and that in a crisis situation they could not be relied on to be loyal.’

Let no-one claim that the levels of collusion between the RUC, UDR and Loyalist paramilitaries was not known at the highest levels of the British Government and opposition.

The second document also concerns the UVF only by this stage, 1979, Thatcher is the Prime Minister. In a hand written note she urged mention of the‘Volunteer Ulster Defence Regiment (? Is that the name)’. Her officials clearly had difficulty reading her handwriting and the typed version of her comment reads.

(viii) The Prime Minister would also like to see some reference to the valiant work being carried by the Ulster Volunteer Force.

Apparently neither she not her officials were fully cognisant of the difference between the UDR, the largest regiment in the British Army, and the UVF, a Loyalist paramilitary group. On this point at least she found herself in agreement with the [Irish] Nationalist/ Republican community.”

Indeed.

The British government acknowledges the infiltration of the RUC and the UDR by the British terror factions in Ireland, London, 1975

The British government acknowledges the infiltration of the RUC and the UDR by the British terror factions in Ireland, London, 1975

British prime minister Margaret Thatcher confuses the UVF, a British terrorist group in Ireland, with the UDR, a British Army militia in Ireland, 1979

British prime minister Margaret Thatcher confuses the UVF, a British terrorist group in Ireland, with the UDR, a British Army militia in Ireland, 1979

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Unionism Closes Ranks

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Anti-UDR poster highlighting the British Army's links to British terror gangs in Ireland

Anti-UDR poster highlighting the British Army’s links to British terror gangs in Ireland

Interesting to note that the DUP leader Peter Robinson and UUP leader Mike Nesbitt have agreed a joint “Unionist Unity” candidate, Nigel Lutton, for the Mid-Ulster by-election, and the furore that has emerged around it. Lutton is a former liaison-officer with the Northern Ireland Police Fund, a former volunteer with the Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen and Families Association (run by the British Ministry of Defence), a former British Army reserve soldier, a co-ordinator with the group South Down Action for Healing Wounds, a member of the Orange Order (the anti-Catholic, Protestant fundamentalist society) and a former researcher with the DUP.

He is also the son of Frederick “Eric” Lutton, a former member of the Royal Ulster Constabulary or RUC, the British paramilitary police force in the North of Ireland disbanded under the Irish-British Peace Process and the Belfast Agreement of 1998. Frederick Lutton had resigned from the RUC shortly before he was shot dead by the Irish Republican Army in May of 1979. Around the time of his killing rumours in the local Irish Nationalist community insisted that Lutton had been forced to resign by RUC management due to concerns about his family connections.

In fact his brother, Joey Lutton, was a British Army soldier with the Ulster Defence Regiment or UDR during the same period, a militia raised from within the British Unionist community (and also disbanded in the wake of the Belfast Agreement). This particular Lutton was convicted in 1979 of participating in a number of terrorist atrocities carried out by a British terror group known colloquially as the Glenanne Gang. It was made up of members of several British terrorist organisations, principally the UVF and UDA-UFF, most of whom were also former or serving soldiers and police officers with the British Army, UDR and RUC.

Joey Lutton’s offences included his involvement in the May 1976 bomb-attack on Clancy’s Bar that left three Irish civilians (Felix Clancy, Sean O’Hagan and Robert McCullough) dead and several others wounded, and a subsequent gun-attack on the nearby Eagle Bar resulting in the murder of Frederick McLaughlin and the wounding of numerous others. Lutton was widely suspected of involvement in a number of other murders in the Armagh region, many of which were carried out using ammunition and weapons later traced back to British Army stocks.

In 2007 the DUP MP David Simpson, who is a cousin and close associate of the “Unionist Unity” candidate Nigel Lutton (as well as an Orange Order member and proponent of “Creationism”), used legal immunity granted by the British parliament to claim in the House of Commons that prominent Sinn Féin politician, Francie Molly, was suspected of involvement in the assassination of Nigel Lutton’s father, Frederick.

Francie Molly is the Sinn Féin candidate in Mid-Ulster and Nigel Lutton’s opponent.

A “Unionist Unity” candidate is just about right.

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The Violence Of The British Anti-Democrats In Ireland

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Northern Ireland - The Last Remnant Of The British Colony In Ireland

Northern Ireland – The Last Remnant Of The British Colony In Ireland (Original Photo: The Five Demands)

Well the worse weekend yet of rioting and violent attacks by anti-democracy protesters from the British Unionist monitory in the north-east of Ireland. Days (and nights) of sustained disturbances in several areas, notably the city of Belfast, dozens injured, homes and businesses damaged, hijacked cars set alight, roads and streets blockaded, and as always assaults on the Irish Nationalist communities of the North, in particular the besieged enclave of the Short Strand.

The reasons for all this? Because the British Unionist minority in Ireland says’s no to democracy, as they have always done so, and through violence and the threat of violence they attempt to enforce their political views on everyone else in the country. Several weeks ago a majority of the elected members of Belfast City Council voted to reduce to the number of days the British national flag would fly from the rooftop of the city hall. From an original motion of no flags at all the council agreed a compromise motion of seventeen designated days when the British flag could be flown, thanks to discussions with the liberal Unionists of the small Alliance Party. These days were generally ones deemed to be of special significance to the city’s British Unionist community: the official birthday of Britain’s head of state, royal births and marriages and other ceremonial events.

Most councillors clearly believed that this was a fair compromise that generously favoured the Unionists since it gave no room for the majority Irish Nationalist community in Belfast to display their national identity in the city’s official architecture. But for the Unionist mob, initially urged on by the political leaders of Unionism in the form of the DUP head Peter Robinson and UUP boss Mike Nesbitt, even this half-hearted equality was too much to stomach. They wanted continued Unionist domination in Belfast and were quite prepared to risk anarchy on the streets to get it. And anarchy is what they achieved.

As the result of over a month of civil unrest by a militant minority from the British Unionist population in the north-east I have learned that further attempts to place both main communities in the city of Belfast on an equal footing have now been shelved. In particular private discussions between Sinn Féin and SDLP councillors to agree a motion to be submitted to the council’s policy and resources committee calling for the Irish national flag, the Tricolour, to be flown beside the British national flag on Saint Patrick’s Day (the 17th of March ironically being one of the “designated days”) have been suspended for fear of drawing even further Unionist violence.

So the anti-democrats of Unionism have won the flags’ issue in a sense. On March the 17th 2013, the feast-day and holiday of Ireland’s national saint, the British national flag will fly once again from the rooftop of Belfast City Hall. But the Irish national flag will not do so. For as usual, violence and the threat of violence by the British Unionist minority on the island of Ireland will have succeeded.

UPDATE: FJH has his own take on the rumours around the flying of the Tricolour on St. Patrick’s Day in Belfast.

Beating Drums Instead Of Burning Crosses, Orange Sashes Instead Of White Hoods

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British Nationalism In Ireland – Racism And Sectarianism As The Orange Order Identifies With The Ku Klux Klan (KKK) – One Reflection Of British Anti-Irishness

A few readers have contacted me asking why no post on the Ulster Covenant centenary march held in Belfast on Saturday. A fair question, I suppose, but what is there left to be said?

What can one say about a parade held to commemorate the early 20th century armed rebellion by the British ethnic minority on the island of Ireland against the clear and democratic wishes of the majority of the country’s inhabitants for some form of independence, whether limited Home Rule within the so-called United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, Dominion Rule within the British Empire or a sovereign Irish Republic separate from both? Over 80-85% of the Irish people desired a new constitutional arrangement with Britain, with far greater autonomy for Ireland. Judging by later electoral results, both national and local, its likely that at least 60% of the population of the island favoured complete independence in the form of a republic. Yet 15-20% of the population, through violence and the threat of violence, attempted to thwart any and all political moves away from a regime of British colonial rule.

And why? Because they regarded themselves as Ireland’s British colonial elite, in their minds the God-given rightful rulers of the island of Ireland. Superior in language, culture, religion and ethnicity. Superior in race. Because they and their ancestors were British, and the natives Irish.

And still it goes on.

Orange Order bands and similar echoing their Lambeg drums down the narrow streets of Ireland proclaiming the superiority, the greatness, of those who follow them. Warning the inferior natives, the lowly indigenous, to bide their place, to bow and scrape and give thanks for the British civilization that permits their continued existence. Beating drums instead of burning crosses, orange sashes instead of white hoods, screaming bandsmen instead of howling lynchmobs.

Stephen Moore, BNP activist, Nick Griffin, BNP leader, and Rev. Robert West at Ulster Covenant centenary parade, North of Ireland, 2012 (Photo: Bangordub)

The truth is self-evident. The heart of Unionist culture, of British culture, in Ireland is poisoned by a triple infection of sectarianism, racism and colonialism. Nick Griffin, the leader of the far right Neo-Nazi British National Party or BNP, knows that all too well which is why he attended the Ulster Covenant “celebrations”  at Stormont along with his fellow travellers. His comment on the day came to us via Twitter:

“So Ulster pics have upset my republican stalkers. Tell you what, the bodhran can’t match the lambeg, you Fenian bastards.”

Nick Griffin, British far right BNP leader, and his Fenian Bastards tweet

Meanwhile the supporters of the British murder gangs, the terrorists who began decades of renewed conflict in response to a rising civil rights movement from the “natives” during the mid and late 1960s, had their day too selling UDA, UFF and UVF merchandise to the eager crowds of law-abiding Unionists.

British terrorist merchandise for sale, the Ulster Covenant centenary rally 2012 – finance a gunman near you (Photo: Squinter)

Ah yes, British and Unionist anti-democrats, fascists, racists, colonial supremacists and terrorists. A day worthy of celebration.

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Ulster Resistance – Unapologetic British Terrorism In Ireland

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Joint footpatrol of British UDA terrorists and British Army soldiers, British Occupied North of Ireland, 1970s

The Seeds Of The Northern War

We’ve seen a lot of outraged (and outrageous) speeches in recent days from politicians representing the British Unionist minority in the north-east of Ireland demanding an “apology” from the government of Ireland for its alleged role in fostering the divisions in the Irish Republican Army in the late 1960s that led to the establishment of the breakaway Provisional Army Council in December of 1969. Some Unionists claim that the Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA) was the direct result of Irish government policies in relation to the growing conflict in the British Occupied North of Ireland and an attempt to arm and direct a growing anti-British insurgency in the period from 1969 to 1970. In fact, of course, the conflict began many years earlier in 1966 when attacks by British terrorist gangs on Irish communities across the northern part of Ireland led to several deaths and injuries, and the destruction of property north and south of the border. The oldest victim was 74 year old Matilda Gould, a Protestant grandmother murdered by “mistake”, while the youngest was Peter Ward, an 18 year old teenage boy gunned down with two others. The violence was the work of the Ulster Volunteer Force or UVF which was led by several ex-members of the British Armed Forces who had earlier been active with a local anti-Irish and anti-Catholic vigilante group founded in 1956 called the Ulster Protestant Association. That organisation’s most famous member was the Reverend Ian Paisley, a firebrand fundamentalist preacher who founded his own Christian sect, the Free Presbyterian Church of Ulster, in 1951.

One unexpected side-effect of this intermittent Unionist reign of terror was the burgeoning Civil Rights movement by Roman Catholics opposed to the apartheid-state of “Northern Ireland” established by the British through the partition of the island of Ireland in the 1920s (the movement itself drew inspiration from contemporary organisations in White-ruled South Africa and the southern United States). In the form of “Northern Ireland” the British colony in Ireland had been shrunk down to a microcosm of itself but with all the worse aspect of British colonial rule in the country given renewed impetus as the British Unionist and mainly Protestant population attempted to sustain their position as an unassailable colonial elite. Under continuous one-party Unionist rule the north-eastern part of the country became synonymous with a police state, a dictatorial regime hiding behind a paper-thin façade of gerrymandered democracy and selective rule of law.

By the late 1960s and early 1970s this quasi-colony of Britain perched on the edge of Europe could no longer be sustained – or defended. The Unionist regime at Stormont implemented draconian measure after measure to smash the Civil Rights organisations, principally through the actions of the Royal Ulster Constabulary (the RUC, a paramilitary police force drawn exclusively from the Unionist population) and various related armed militias, official and unofficial. The latter were more numerous, including the Ulster Volunteer Force and other shadowy groups whose record of state-sponsored terrorism on behalf of the Unionist statelet in Ireland and of Britain itself was unparalleled in post-WWII European history until the ferocity of the Balkan wars in the 1990s.

It is in this context that we must place the ideological and policy divisions of the Irish Republican movement in Ireland during the 1960s and early ‘70s and the emergence of the Provisional Irish Republican Army (or more correctly simply the Irish Republican Army) as the prime insurgent force opposing the continued British Occupation. The IRA, “Provisionals” or “Provos”, were in the beginning little more than a community self-defence force, protecting the Irish civilian population of the North of Ireland from attacks by the Unionist and British state during the suppression of the Civil Rights’ movement. Ill-armed, ill-equipped, lacking in organisation and training, a loose group of serving and former IRA Volunteers formed the core of the organisation. Many were aged veterans, whose military careers dated to the 1940s or ‘50s. Around them coalesced others, mostly raw recruits, teenagers doing the unthinkable and defying the Stormont regime and the community it represented after decades of servility. What little support came from “the south”, be it governmental or personal, was barely sufficient to meet the ongoing crisis. As Unionist mobs, with the connivance or encouragement of Stormont ministers and the RUC paramilitary police, swept through Nationalists communities implementing the old tactic of “pogrom” (what today is better known as “ethnic cleansing”), thousands fled across the border into temporary refugee camps set up by the Irish government and Red Cross. In Belfast and elsewhere entire streets went up in flames, the perpetrators often being serving police officers or local members of the British military.

It is hardly surprising then that the government of Ireland, with a constitutional, legal and moral duty to protect its citizens, did what it could to help the hundreds of thousands of Irish citizens trapped in the collective dictatorship of “Northern Ireland”. Despite the clams of Unionists, and their fellow travellers in Britain, it is clear that there was no attempt by Dublin to organise an armed resistance to the British Occupation or to force a British withdrawal by military means. Instead such direct efforts as were made were entirely aimed towards the self-defence of besieged Irish communities – and at a time when the British forces of law and order in the North of Ireland were on a murderous rampage throughout the region. Even the deployment of the British Armed Forces did little to halt this orgy of Unionist destruction. As quickly became apparent to all, the British Army was there to defend the last remnants of the British colony in Ireland in whatever form it took  – not to keep the peace or oversee its reform. Within weeks of deployment the British military were on the attack, terrorising the Irish populace alongside the existing British Unionist organs of terror, be they the RUC or UVF. Nothing had changed. Instead of peaceful progress towards mutual agreement between both communities in the North of Ireland and between the two nations of Ireland and Britain, what occurred was a reigniting of the Irish War of Independence in the north-east of the country and Britain’s counter-insurgency response. It was a return to the default setting for the British in Ireland: defend the British colony and the British colonists at all costs.

Peter Robinson caught on camera in late 1984 during a visit to the Israel-Lebanon border with an automatic assault rifle

The Formation Of The Ulster Resistance

In this historic setting must be placed the actions of British Unionist politicians in the 1980s when the governments of Ireland and Britain, in the aftermath of the Hunger Strikes and the growing political power of the Irish insurgency (and the reluctant realisation by the British that their war in Ireland could not be won), signed an international treaty to normalise relations between both states and facilitate progress towards a peaceful political settlement in the North. The Anglo-Irish Agreement of November 15th 1985 saw Britain tacitly secede a portion of its sovereignty over “Northern Ireland” to Ireland by accepting Irish input into its administration as the “guarantor” of the Irish populace of the region. From then on Irish civil servants would have an advisory role in the North of Ireland through various inter-governmental bodies and a permanent secretariat based outside Belfast.

This attempt by both governments to lay the groundwork for eventual peace caused outrage amongst the local British Unionist population which responded with a year-long series of political and violent protests and a renewed campaign of murder by the British terror gangs. At this time the frayed relationship that had developed over the previous decade between the RUC paramilitary police and Unionist terrorist groups was patched up and given a new momentum, as both reflected the opposition within their community to the Anglo-Irish détente. Similarly Britain’s Intelligence services, principally the Security Service (better known by the acronym MI5) and its various military equivalents stepped up their support for Unionist terrorist organisations as many within the British state expressed outrage at the perceived “surrender” to Irish Nationalism.

On the 10th of November 1986 many of these forces of opposition came together in the Ulster Hall in Belfast where 3000 delegates attended a by-invite-only meeting. Amongst those organising  the gathering were the leaders of the Democratic Unionist Party (or DUP) including the Reverend Ian Paisley, Peter Robinson and Reverend Ivan Foster (who were all members or clergymen of Paisley’s self-styled Free Presbyterian Church of Ulster). Paisley and Foster had been founders in 1981 of a previous Unionist militia, the Third Force, and Foster had a long history as a pastoral figure in the Free Presbyterian congregation, presiding at the funerals of several slain Unionist terrorists who belonged to it. Peter Robinson had earlier in the year established his militant credentials when on the 7th of August 1986 he led 500 members of the Third Force in an invasion of the small Irish village of Clontibret in County Monaghan, across the border. During the incursion, which terrified the inhabitants, the local station of the Gardaí (the unarmed, Irish civilian police service) was attacked, two Gardaí were surrounded and badly beaten, and a military parade was held on the main street. The invasion was only repulsed when Garda reinforcements arrived, the gangs fleeing back across the border during which a number of shots were fired. These actions made Robinson a hero in Unionist circles and he remained a central figure in militant Unionism in the years that were to follow. Another leading attendee in the Ulster Hall was Alan Wright, the Chairman of the Ulster Clubs, a quasi-paramilitary organisation founded in November 1985 that shared considerable cross-membership with the Third Force.

During the meeting a new organisation was unveiled by Ian Paisley, the Ulster Resistance, a paramilitary army to oppose the Anglo-Irish Agreement and any further attempts to resolve the northern conflict through negotiations between both governments and communities. Paisley and his deputy, Peter Robinson, were later photographed in the distinctive Ulster Resistance red berets, and Robinson in camouflage fatigues as well. The Ulster Resistance quickly subsumed other previous groupings, including the Third Force and Ulster Clubs, forming itself into nine battalions, and established informal links with the existing British terrorist organisations in Ireland, principally the banned Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) and the then still legal Ulster Defence Association or UDA (this large grouping used the title of the Ulster Freedom Fighters or UFF for its terrorist attacks, which led to repeated calls for its banning by the International community which the British government steadfastly refused until August of 1992 – after 22 years of terrorism).

Peter Robinson leads Ulster Resistance militants in a rally, British Occupied North of Ireland, 1987, including Noel Little, UDA terrorist and arms smuggler

Arms Smuggling From Lebanon

In June of 1987 the UVF staged an armed robbery at the Northern Bank in Portadown which netted the organisation in excess of 300,000 pounds sterling. The money was then added to funds gathered by the UDA and Ulster Resistance from various criminal activities and donations from Unionist businessmen and community leaders to purchase arms from a black-market weapons-dealer in the Middle East which arrived at Belfast docks in December 1987 in crates marked as containing ceramic tiles after a long sea voyage from the Lebanon. Though the exact quantity and types of weapons imported are unknown sources give the following lower estimates:

  • Over 200 Czech-made VZ.58 automatic assault rifles
  • 94 Browning 9mm automatic pistols
  • 12 or more RPG-7 anti-armour rocket launchers and between 60 – 150 warheads
  • 400 – 500 RGD-5 fragmentation grenades
  • Over 30,000 rounds of assorted ammunition

The masterminds behind this arms smuggling operation were not the leaders of the British terrorist movements in Ireland. Instead the inspiration and drive came from Brian Nelson, a former British soldier turned senior UDA terrorist who was also an agent acting on behalf of the Force Research Unit, a secret group operating within the British Army’s Intelligence Corps. Co-operating with the Security Service (MI5) both organisations wished to derail the Anglo-Irish Agreement and the increasingly friendly relations between Dublin and London by strengthening the counter-insurgency campaign of their Unionist paramilitary proxies.

The Czech-made VZ.58 automatic assault rifle imported by British Intelligence to arm British terrorists in Ireland

Through Nelson it was the Security Service that had put the UDA in contact with arms-smuggling networks in the Middle East, which up to then had been quite beyond their capabilities (and ever since). These included organising meetings between the UDA and the Apartheid-era South African National Intelligence Service (NIS) and its associate in the region, the American-born arms-dealer Douglas Berndhart, who also worked for the South African arms industry. Berndhart organised the supply of the weapons for the Unionists through a Lebanese gunrunner named Joe Fawzi, the arms coming from PLO stocks that had been captured by the Lebanese Christian Phalangist militias when Palestinian guerrillas had been expelled from south Lebanon in 1982 following the Israeli invasion. Berndhart was in close contact with the Israeli intelligence services, whose allies were the Christian militias, at a time when South Africa and Israel regularly traded arms technologies and security information. In fact much of the smuggled weapons had been sold on to South Africa by the Israelis for use in its border wars with its African neighbours. This has led to the obvious conclusion that the Israelis must have given the go-ahead for the shipments despite deteriorating relations between the two countries at a governmental level in the late ‘80s.

The munitions imported from Lebanon were transported to a rural location between Armagh and Portadown to be stored and later distributed to the UVF, UFF and Ulster Resistance. On the 8th of January 1988 part of the UDA’s share was unexpectedly intercepted by a Royal Ulster Constabulary checkpoint during transport from Portadown to Belfast in a convoy of three cars. 61 assault rifles, 30 handguns, 150 grenades and over 11,000 rounds of ammunition were seized and three UDA men arrested. Davy Payne, the UDA’s North Belfast leader and another former British soldier (a paratrooper), was later sentenced to 19 years in prison and the two others to 14 years each. An Ulster Resistance member, Noel Little, a former British Army soldier (in the notorious Ulster Defence Regiment or UDR) and the Armagh chairman of the Ulster Clubs was arrested in connection with the find but later released without charge.

Subsequently rumours circulated in Unionist terror circles that the three car-loads of weapons had been “sacrificed” in order to allow larger consignments to get through, a deliberate act of misdirection to distract those RUC factions who disagreed with the rearming of Unionist paramilitary gangs. Others pointed towards long-standing rivalries within the British Intelligence community over government policy in Ireland, and the possibility that the British Secret Intelligence Service (commonly known as MI6) had leaked what they knew of the smuggling operation to contacts within the RUC. Certainly it later emerged that the British navy had been tracking the smuggling vessel in the Mediterranean but had somehow mysteriously “lost” it en route to Ireland in circumstances that have never been explained.

In February of 1988 another part of the UDA’s weapons store was uncovered in North Belfast with the recovery of an RPG7 rocket launcher and 26 warheads, 38 assault rifles, 15 handguns, 100 grenades and an unprecedented 40,000 rounds of ammunition by the RUC.

The Ulster Resistance’s share of the munitions was discovered in November of that year by RUC searches at a number of locations in County Armagh. In a large haul of military equipment the RUC found an RPG7 rocket launcher and 5 warheads, 3 assault rifles, an automatic pistol, 10 grenades, 12,000 rounds of ammunition, combat uniforms and other items including Ulster Resistance berets and badges. Unexpectedly components of a British-made Javelin surface-to-air missile (SAM) were also found. These had been stolen in October from the Short Brothers factory in Belfast where they were produced and which had an entirely Unionist workforce. The parts consisted of a detailed model of the missile’s aiming system facilitating copying by competitors. It quickly emerged that the technology had been stolen by Ulster Resistance activists as part of the “payment” to South Africa for the supply of weapons and ammunition to the Unionist terror gangs.

At this time the South Africans were under an international arms embargo over the issue of Apartheid and White Minority rule which had led the country to developing its own indigenous arms industry in the guise of the Armaments Corporation of South Africa (Armscor) which had very close ties to similar companies in Israel. Dick Wright, an employee of Armscor, was an uncle of Alan Wright, the leader of the Ulster Clubs and a co-founder with Ian Paisley of the Ulster Resistance. He had met the leadership of the UDA in east Belfast during a visit home to Ireland in 1985 and made an offer of arms from South Africa in return for money or British missile technology from the Shorts armaments factory in Belfast. The UDA boss John McMichael instructed Brian Nelson to travel to South Africa in 1985 where he was taken to a warehouse in Johannesburg filled with weaponry that could be supplied to the UDA in return for it’s co-operation in smuggling out of the North of Ireland British munitions’ technology for the Apartheid regime.

A second two-week trip by Nelson in June of 1987, following the fund-raising bank robbery, sealed the deal. During it Unionists agreed to use their own money to part-pay for the initial purchase and smuggling of the arms, with stolen missile parts or blueprints paying for the rest. The South Africans agreed to sell the first round of armaments at less than half-price, with an agreement to supply more weapons for free and up to one million pounds sterling to fund an intensified British terrorist campaign in Ireland if all went as planned. Due to the persistent work of dedicated journalists and lawyers it later emerged, incredibly, that the British Ministry of Defence had paid for Nelson’s South African trips at the request of British Military Intelligence.

During 1988 a technical officer at the South African embassy in Paris, which was now “handling” the UDA and Ulster Resistance contacts, arranged for three Unionist terrorists to receive arms training in France, including the use of the RPG-7 anti-armour rocket-launchers. During the course of renewed negotiations the South Africans offered to pay several million pounds sterling for access to the newest and most advanced British missile system, Starstreak, as well as more weapons. At least 50,000 pounds was handed over as a down-payment on this.

In early April of 1989 parts of a Blowpipe missile went missing and another was stolen from a British Army base in Newtownards. Subsequently three members of the UDA, Noel Little, previously arrested in connection with the 1987 importation of arms (and photographed with Peter Robinson in Ulster Resistance uniform), James King (like Little a member of Paisley’s Free Presbyterian Church and DUP party) and Samuel Quinn, a British Army sergeant and weapons’ instructor at the Newtownards military base, were arrested at the Hilton Hotel in Paris on the 21st of April 1989 along with a diplomat from South Africa, Daniel Storm, and the agent and arms dealer, Douglas Bernhart, by the then French security service DST. French police recovered various missile parts, most of which seemed to be non-functioning.

The three Unionists were charged with arms trafficking and associating with criminals involved in terrorist activities, while several South African embassy officials were expelled by the French authorities. In October 1991 after more than two years on remand the three were convicted though they received suspended sentences and fines following representations on their behalf by British Intelligence officials to their French counterparts.

In September of 1989 a 33 year old man from Poyntzpass and a 35 year old man from Tandragee were jailed for storing and moving weapons and explosives on behalf of the Ulster Resistance. In January 1990 a 32 year old former British Army soldier (another ex-UDR militiaman) from Richill was jailed for 12 years for possessing Ulster Resistance arms and explosives.

Shortly afterwards, as the political pressure mounted on the DUP, Ian Paisley issued a statement claiming that his party had severed links with the Ulster Resistance in 1987, news that took many observers by surprise.

Ian Paisley in an Ulster Resistance beret at a rally, British Occupied North of Ireland, 1987

The Ulster Resistance – It Hasn’t Gone Away You Know 

To this day up to a third of the South African-supplied arms imported by the British Intelligence services into the north-east of Ireland remain unaccounted for. In particular it is thought that the majority of Ulster Resistance weapons and ammunition were turned over to the UDA and UVF in the early 1990s in the lead-up to the first IRA ceasefire of 1994 when Unionist terrorist killings of Irish civilians reached levels not seen since the early 1970s. Many of these weapons are thought to have been excluded from the so-called Decommissioning Process. There are also strong suspicions that smaller quantities of munitions were smuggled into the North via South African contacts the details of which remain unknown.

What is known is that the South Africans were also using the Unionist terror gangs in Ireland and Britain to target European-based anti-Apartheid activists in return for military equipment and funds. With their strong links to far right racist and Neo-Nazi groups in Britain, as well as the British state itself,  the UDA and UVF were perfect allies for the South African regime. Additionally throughout the 1950s, ’60s, ’80s and 1990s much of the British Unionist minority in Ireland had remained politically supportive of the White Minority governments in Zimbabwe and South Africa, seeing parallels with their own status in Ireland. Certainly all the main Unionist parties opposed economic and military sanctions against South Africa, including the international boycott, and championed various campaigns defending the Apartheid regime. The significant ex-pat Unionist population in the country, some of whom served in the government or security forces, also created a strong basis for a mutual alliance.

By the early 1980s the South African Intelligence services were also aware of the close relationship between Sinn Féin and the African National Congress (or ANC). In the late 1970s the ANC’s leadership had instructed activists living in Ireland to request Sinn Féin’s help in contacting the Irish Republican Army, seeking military assistance and advice. Eventually it was arranged for two field commanders of the guerilla organisation Umkhonto we Sizwe (better known as MK) to travel to Dublin where they received two weeks of intensive military training from the IRA in a secret camp. These men travelled back to South Africa where they crossed over the border into Angola to impart their skills to new and existing MK fighters.

In the latter half of 1979 senior members of MK suggested an idea that would eventually become one of the highest profile operations in the struggle against White Minority rule. The plan was to sabotage the massive oil refinery run by the company Sasol which was vital to the economic existence of the Apartheid state. Unsure of the best way to go about such an elaborate attack MK again requested IRA assistance and in 1980 two munitions experts travelled from Ireland to Sasolburg in the ironically named Free State Province to reconnoitre the site. In June of that year the attack took place and though the regime immediately issued statements claiming the resulting damage was minimal few believed it, providing an enormous propaganda boost to both MK and the ANC.

It is not unreasonable to suggest that a fear of continued IRA assistance to MK and the ANC was one of the reasons why the South Africans reached out to the British terror gangs in Ireland. The possibility of causing chaos in the North of Ireland was probably one hoped outcome of the alliance with the UDA-UVF-UR axis, as well as striking back at the anti-Apartheid campaign in Europe.

This latter result can be seen in the attempted assassination of the South African-born Queen’s University lecturer, Dr Adrian Guelke. The 44-year-old academic was shot in the back, after UDA gunmen burst into his South Belfast home at around 4.30am on September 4th, 1991. The lecturer was an outspoken critic of the Apartheid dictatorship and it was later revealed that South African military intelligence had used details from a leaked RUC Special Branch file to make him a target for Unionist terrorists. The file had been supplied by the South African agent, Leon Flores, who flew to Belfast via London in the autumn of 1991, contacted the UDA, and provided its south Belfast brigade with the RUC intelligence report.

There are also rumours of Unionist involvement in the assassination of Dulcie September, a well known anti-Apartheid campaigner and ANC member, murdered by an unknown gunman outside the ANC offices in Paris on the 29th of March 1988.

An apology is certainly due in relation to the decades of politically-motivated pain and suffering the people of Ireland have endured. But it is the leaders of British Unionism in Ireland who need to make it. And their allies in Britain.

Recent photo of Ulster Resistance terrorists, one armed with a stripped-down British Army issued SA80 assault rifle

UPDATE 15.10.2012: The British Guardian newspaper carries yet another media exposé of Britain’s state-sponsored terrorism in Ireland and the South African arms importations.

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Qualified Condemnations Of Attempted Murder Ring Hollow

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A few days ago I reported on the attempted murder in East Belfast of an 18 year old Irish teenager, James Turley, by a frenzied mob led by known members of the UVF, the second largest British terrorist group in Ireland. Turley and several other youths were attacked by the group while working on a movie set in the area and after being chased through the streets the teenager was caught by the gang (apparently with the help of a local resident who offered seeming sanctuary to the terrified young man only to allow his pursuers to catch up with him), beaten and left for dead in a wheelie bin.

Incredibly, rather than condemning this racist attack outright, several political representatives of the British separatist minority in the north-east of Ireland, which fosters the UVF terror gangs, have offered what can only be described as a series of “qualified” condemnations. These have ranged from statements implying that James Turley and the other teenage boys provoked the assaults by working on a film set in a “Loyalist area” (where no one with an Irish identity or citizenship is welcome), to comments that the injuries received by the youths were minor and the incident was “blown out of proportion”. The website Slugger O’Toole carries more on this story, including some of the nastiest and most insidious commentary you’re likely to see outside of a British nationalist pub crowd.

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British Ethnic Terrorists In Ireland – Still At War?

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While in recent months the main focus of the national and international news media has been on the actions of Resistance Republicans, various terrorist groups belonging to the British separatist minority in Ireland have continued to operate a low-intensity conflict that rarely makes the headlines. The South Belfast News or SBN (via the Belfast Media Group) carries a report detailing the latest attack by the British militants in the north-eastern part of the country with the attempted murder of an Irish teenager, James Turley:

“Loyalist paramilitaries [ethnic British terrorists] were behind the vicious attack on a Catholic teenager working on a film set in South Belfast this week, the SBN can reveal.

UVF thugs embarked on the brutal assault on an 18-year-old film extra in the Village last Friday (January 6), after discovering Catholic teenagers from the Short Strand were working on the film.

Since the vicious attack, which saw the teenager badly beaten, placed in a wheelie bin and left for dead, local UVF men have visited a local community centre which hosted the film crew to warn them not to bring anyone else into the area “without their permission”.

The paramilitary group also ordered community workers not to speak to the press about the attack, saying “there would be consequences” if they disobeyed.

The crew, which was filming for a number of days for the movie The Good Man starring The Wire actor Aiden Gillen, were in and around Frenchpark Street and Ebor Street on the day of the attack. They had been using the nearby Windsor Women’s Centre as a base of operations while continuing to film around the Village.

However around 3.50pm, a group of loyalists confronted the crew, hurling sectarian insults and threats. As the crew went to drive off, 18-year-old James Turley was caught by the mob who beat him severely before placing him in a wheelie bin. The vicious assault only stopped when his attackers thought he was dead.”

Do not expect see this story being reported or followed-up in most of the Irish, British or global news media. It doesn’t match the agreed narrative of life in the “new” North of Ireland. And it certainly doesn’t match the British government’s insistence that the British terrorist organisations in the north-east of Ireland are on “ceasefire”. An insistence that grows ever more hollow with each passing week.

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Lies, Damned Lies And The War In Ireland

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Journalist Martina Devlin sets the readership of the Irish Independent (and others) fairly hopping with outrage over her latest opinion piece. Can she be long for the Indo Group? One suspects not. In Ireland’s news media élite being More-British-Than-The-British is considered de rigueur. But it’s fun while it lasts:

“It’s the blatant revisionism that gets my goat: the deception being peddled that the IRA was solely responsible for the Troubles and therefore culpable for all the evils of the Northern state.

According to this false gospel, the IRA initiated the violence and continued it alone. Sooner or later those nice unionists would have realised it was wrong to deny equality to their fellow citizens, and knuckled down to cut a deal with the SDLP. But the IRA’s self-serving agenda derailed the potential for agreement to be reached, delaying the formation of a just society.

Herman Melville’s novel ‘White-Jacket’ contains the following passage: “You are the moderate man, the invaluable understrapper [underling] of the wicked man. You, the moderate man, may be used for wrong but are useless for right.” Melville was suggesting that moderates allow iniquity to be perpetuated because they do not challenge the status quo, and never support what is sometimes necessary to expunge tyranny — such as the tyranny of the Northern state, where ethnic cleansing lite was tolerated and citizens were denied fundamental human rights. There is more than one kind of violence.

This acceptance by revisionists of subjugation in the North allows them to claim it was wrong to resist the status quo, except peacefully. Conveniently, they forget how the agents of the state used rifles and batons to force civil rights campaigners off the streets. They ignore statistics showing how one sector of Northern society was favoured for jobs and housing at the expense of another. Left to them, the Northern state would have stayed gerrymandered, defective, deviant.

Politicians in the Republic countenanced gross inequalities in the state on their doorstep, perpetuated against people who defined themselves as Irish. Few commentators or voters called them on it. Yes, IRA violence was remorseless, but what caused it — and, more important, who helped bring it to an end? As history books about this period are written, whose names figure on their pages?

My final thought on the North is this: peace-makers are thin on the ground compared with bomb-makers.”

Just for the record, and to meet head-on the propagators of counter-factual myths that pass for history in the Anglomedia ranks, some salient facts.

The so-called “Troubles” did not begin at the end of 1969 with the formation of the Provisional Irish Republican Army, or in the early months of 1970 with the first attacks by PIRA units (the first British soldier was not killed until 1971!). In fact the conflict had been going on for several years previous to this (the Provisional IRA came into existence on the 28th of December 1969. The day before on the 27th the UVF carried out a bomb attack in Dublin city!).

The first violence, the first killings, the first shootings, the first bombings of the Troubles began in 1966. Over a period of several months terrorists from the British separatist minority in Ireland, the UVF, murdered three people, two Roman Catholic men and a Protestant woman, as well as injuring a number of others and causing substantial damage to property. The objective was simple, something they made clear in a statement issued to the general public:

“From this day, we declare war against the Irish Republican Army and its splinter groups. Known IRA men will be executed mercilessly and without hesitation. Less extreme measures will be taken against anyone sheltering or helping them, but if they persist in giving them aid, then more extreme methods will be adopted… we solemnly warn the authorities to make no more speeches of appeasement. We are heavily armed Protestants dedicated to this cause.”

And the cause? Killing Irish men, women and children, and driving those who survived from the last remnants of Britain’s colony in Ireland. This is the start of the Troubles. The British ethnic minority in Ireland using violence and the threat of violence to intimidate and terrorise the majority population on the island. As it was throughout the last 300 years.

The Facts of the Troubles the Media don’t want you to know:

The first shooting of civilian targets in the “Troubles”? British terrorists, 1966.

The first bombing of civilian targets in the “Troubles? British terrorists, 1968.

The first ethnic cleansing of civilian targets in the “Troubles”? British terrorists, 1969.

The first killing of a paramilitary police officer in the “Troubles”? British terrorists, 1969.

The first bombing of a capital city in the “Troubles”? British terrorists, 1969.

The first armed action of the Provisional IRA in the “Troubles”? 1970

The first killing of a British soldier in the “Troubles”? 1971

Do we need to go on?

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Fascists, Neo-Nazis And The British Unionist Minority In Ireland

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During a Far Right gathering British and German Neo-Nazis show their support for the UDA – UFF, the largest British state-sponsored terrorist group in Ireland, 2009

Interesting review in the Belfast Telegraph of Mathew Collins’ book, Hate, which charts his journey through Britain’s nationalist and Neo-Nazi movements, including the decades old links to the British separatist minority in Ireland. Journalist Henry McDonald writes:

‘Recalling his days selling race-hate literature in London’s East End, Matthew Collins says: “We took the traditional Brick Lane Sunday drink with the BNP that day, watching strippers and eating a selection of mussels and whelks off the bar.”

All they would have needed was a Cockney-style sing-song of Horst Wessel Lied and Deutschland Uber Alles around the old Joanna and that would have topped off a perfect National Socialist Sabbath for Matthew and his comrades.

There are, however, more sinister segments of the book and they include his relationship with Ulster loyalists who had latched onto the NF and other neo-Nazi organisations in Britain.

Of these the most prominent is Eddie Whicker, a UDA member from Belfast who became somewhat of a personality on the London far right scene at the time Collins was an active fascist. Whicker was one of the most militant of the extreme right street thugs taking on leftists, some of whom marched in pro-IRA rallies in the UK capital and other British cities.

There can be no doubting the connections established from the early 1970s onwards between the NF, BNP and the more extreme Combat 18 to the two main loyalist paramilitary organisations. On a political and, dare one say social level, the disparate British far right were the only supporters of the Ulster loyalist cause in Britain.

Apart from their traditional allies in Scotland, particularly within the Orange Order and the Rangers football team’s support base, loyalism’s allies were few and far between.

While loyalists across the sea could feel very much at home in parts of Scotland’s central belt or the Ayrshire coast, your average working class Ulster Protestant would feel a greater sense of isolation in English cities, particularly the multi-cultural/racial conurbations.

As Collins attests to in his book, the NF and other rival organisations at least provided a home for an Ulster loyalist away from home but still in touch with the cause.

There were a number of gun running plots such as the one involving Frank Portinari, an English UDA member of Italian Catholic extract in direct touch with ‘C’ Company and a friend of the UDA killer John White.

Charlie Sergeant, for instance, crops up several times in Collins’ book as a prominent Combat 18 thug and strong supporter of Ulster loyalists. Yet after Sergeant was tried and convicted of stabbing a rival neo-Nazi to death it transpired he was also a police informant whose work included spying on any potential loyalist arms smuggling operations in the south-east of England.

The Ulster Volunteer Force did, of course, meet with the extreme neo-Nazi Belgian VMO in the early 1980s. The Flemish fascists were fascinated with the home-made engineering skills of Ulster loyalists who were manufacturing their own sub-machine guns. In return, the VMO promised to hand over plastic explosives, as long as the UVF attacked a Jewish target in Belfast.

On a propaganda level the activities of a handful of loyalists in England like Whicker was undoubtedly damaging. It only projected and solidified the notion that the average loyalist was as much a bone-headed, shaven, beery-breathed bigot as their neo-Nazi buddies smashing up Brick Lane.

Observers of the far right will point to the career of Johnny Adair, who started his politico-paramilitary career in the NF.’

Despite some attempts to downplay the links between the British terrorist organisations operating in Ireland and the far right in Britain there can be little doubt that Neo-Nazi groups like the National Front, Combat 18, the BNP and others provided a political, social and financial milieu in Britain in which Unionist terrorists could move.

The financial aspects of this support was to become particularly crucial in the late 1980s when the British terrorist groupings in the North found it necessary to look beyond the clandestine funding of the British state and became heavily involved in what is now described as narco-terrorism. The UDA, UVF and LVF became the dominant force in the drugs trade in the North of Ireland at this time, effectively controlling all smuggling, distribution and sales, and in the process amassing vast fortunes for some leading members.

Nick Greger, a leading British fascist, poses with the infamous Johnny Adair, a former senior British terrorist with the UDA-UFF terror group

Nick Greger, a leading British fascist, poses with the infamous Johnny Adair, a former senior British terrorist with the UDA-UFF terror group

The social and organisational ties with the British extreme right was crucial in the earliest years of this new criminal exercise especially in Scotland and northern England. It also helped Unionist terrorists forge ties with the intelligence services of Apartheid-era South Africa which eventually led to the pariah state supplying the British extremists in Ireland with substantial quantities of arms.

The British Far Right movement, the EDL, displays a flag showing their support for the British Neo-Nazi terrorist group Combat-18 and the UFF terror gangs in Ireland

The full history of British Far Right links to British Unionism in Ireland were described in a 2002 issue of ‘No Quarter’, the magazine of the group Anti-Fascist Action:

‘Links between Unionists/Loyalists in the North and British Fascists go back over 80 years. As far back as the 1920s the ‘British Fascisti’ set up a group in Co. Down which led a pogrom against Catholics and in the 1930s members of the Glasgow fascist gang the ‘Billy Boys’ visited Belfast to take part in sectarian rioting during the 12th of July weekend. However this article will focus on links in recent years.

The convicted UDA terrorist Johnny Adair, recently released from Maghaberry Jail, is a man with a background even more sinister than that of the average death squad commander.

In 1994 Adair pleaded guilty to ‘directing terrorism’ and was sentenced to 16 years, serving only five until he was released under the Good Friday Agreement. In an interview he admitted to being the loyalist known as ‘Mad Dog’ and boasted of being involved in the sectarian murders of 20 Catholics. While in jail Adair forged close links with Billy Wright, leader of the LVF, and the UDA carried out sectarian murders of Catholics to avenge Wright’s death in 1997. Adair and Wright were also linked by their prominent involvement in drug dealing in the North.

But Adair, who rose to leadership in the Belfast UDA/UFF in the early 1990s, has a far longer political pedigree.

Belfast National Front 1980s

In the mid 1980′s there were about 200 National Front supporters in Belfast, one of them the young Johnny Adair. In September 1983 a National Front March took place in Belfast, attended by about 100 fascist skinheads. Prominent in the parade was Johnny Adair, along with his sidekick Sam McCrory. This march became known as the ‘gluesniffers march’, because many of the skinheads were drunk on cider and openly sniffing glue from plastic bags as they paraded from the city centre to the Shankill chanting anti-Black and anti-Republican slogans.

In April 1983 a group of young Loyalist skinheads from a gang called ‘NF Skinz’ killed a homeless alcoholic on the Lower Shankill. Patrick Barkey, a Catholic, died after being beaten unconscious and hit on the head with a concrete block. Three skinheads, William Madine, Clifford Bickerstaff and Albert Martin were charged with murder. Madine and Bickerstaff pleaded guilty to manslaughter and got two years and eleven months at a young offenders centre. Martin was found guilty of GBH and got a 12 month suspended sentence. Press reports stated that the skinheads were provided with character references by [unnamed] Belfast Unionist politicians.

The Belfast NF broke up anti-racist and punk gigs in the city. The NF was active around football and sold their publications at Northern Ireland games at Windsor Park. The NF youth paper ‘Bulldog’ published a ‘league of louts’ – detailing the most racist fans – Linfield and Coleraine featured regularly.

In January 1998 Mo Mowlam visited the Maze prison to meet the leaders of the loyalist prisoners. The UDA/UFF leaders in the Maze were Adair and Sam McCrory, both from the Shankill Road. At the time of Mowlam’s jail visit the media reported that McCrory has ‘White Power’ and ‘Skins’ tattoos on his right hand.

Investigations by Anti-Fascist Action revealed that in the early 1980s both ‘Skelly’ McCrory and Adair played in a Belfast Nazi skinhead band called ‘Offensive Weapon’. This band played a few gigs on the Nazi skinhead circuit in Britain in the mid 80s. In August 1998 the Irish News printed a photograph of Adair and McCrory on the ‘gluesniffers’ NF March in Belfast in September 1983. With them was Donald Hodgen, another skinhead who also became a UDA member and later a prominent activist in the now defunct Ulster Democratic Party.

Nearly twenty years later the 30 to 40 young skinheads who led the National Front branch in Belfast in the 1980s now form the core of Adair’s ‘C Company’ of the UFF. They moved on to more serious sectarian violence but never left behind their ‘white power’ beliefs. From a small gang of teenage thugs they turned themselves into so-called ‘defenders of the people’, which involved murdering scores of innocent Catholics. In 2000 they tore their community apart in a savage feud with the rival UVF. They are a classic example of what happens if fascism is not forcefully opposed when it first appears.

The early 1990s, when Adair was leader of the UDA/UFF on the Shankill, marked a period of increased contact between Northern loyalists and Fascists in Britain as close links developed between the UDA and London based Fascists. Eddie Whicker and Frank Portinari were both ‘UDA Organisers’ in Britain. Portinari was jailed in 1993 for gun running to the UDA. Portanari was involved in C18 in the 1990s but now heads a pro-UDA group in London called the British Ulster Alliance.

Charlie Sargeant, the former leader of Combat 18 now serving life in England for the murder of a fellow fascist, often boasted of his personal friendship with Johnny Adair.

In the mid 1990s C18′s control of the Blood and Honour ‘music’ network allowed them to put on several gigs in the North. ‘Blood and Honour’ magazine boasted of Welsh band Celtic Warrior’s visit to Belfast and published photographs of Loyalist bandsmen playing alongside them at a ‘White Christmas’ gig on the Lower Shankill Road. ‘Blood and Honour’ magazine also printed photographs of two UDA prisoners in Long Kesh, who sent greetings to C18 and said that they were ‘dedicated to keeping Ulster British and white’ and the loyalists’ prison journal ‘Warrior’ also published pro-C18 articles.

C18/LVF and Portadown

The annual attempt by the Orange Order to march down the Garvaghy Road, and the 12th weekend generally, has become a point of pilgrimage as English fascists from different groups visit the North to link up with their loyalist friends.

In July 1999 Combat 18 brought 25 supporters from Britain to Portadown. Combat 18 members attended at the unveiling of a memorial to Billy Wright and he is also idolised on C18 websites. On July 11th 1999 a ‘Blood and Honour’ gig was held in a social club in Portadown. The English fascist bands ‘Razors Edge’, ‘Chingford Attack’ and ‘No Remorse’ played alongside loyalist flute bands. According to a C18 report on the event:

‘A spokeswoman for the Loyalist Volunteer Force, who hosted the gig, took the stage and thanked Combat 18 officially for the support shown to her organisation and its prisoners of war both in C18 publications and financially. All the profits from the gig were donated to the LVF Prisoners’ Fund and links between C18 and the LVF were strengthened on the evening’. C18 members also attended the Orange march in Portadown and the demonstration at Drumcree on July 12th.

In July 2000 another C18 delegation attended the Drumcree march. The fascists, from Bolton, Burnley and Preston in the North of England, stayed with LVF members in Portadown’s Corcrain and Brownstown estates. A TV documentary showed a prominent Orangeman from Portadown, Ivan Hewitt, displaying his ‘Blood and Honour’, ‘SS’ and other Nazi tattoos. David Jones, leader of the Orange Order in Portadown, claimed that he did not know Hewitt.

British Nationalism In Ireland – Racism And Sectarianism As The Orange Order Identifies With The Ku Klux Klan (KKK) – One Reflection Of British Anti-Irishness

‘Free Johnny Adair’

In September 2000 a group of UDA supporters and English fascists, including convicted loyalist gun runners Terry Blackham and Frank Portinari, took part in a National Front protest in Downing Street demanding the release of Johnny Adair. A similar protest took place in January 2001.

At the funeral of Steven McKeag, a major drug dealer, on the Shankill in September 2000 a large wreath was carried which read ‘C18′. McKeag, who had died accidentally from drink and drugs, was the notorious UFF gunman nicknamed ‘Top Gun’. He was known to be personally responsible for at least a dozen sectarian murders. He had been a teenage member of the NF and Adair’s right hand man, taking over command of the Shankill UDA when Adair was jailed in 1994.

Greysteel Killer and C18 

In July 2000 Stephen Irwin, a Loyalist convicted of the murder of seven people in a UDA attack on the Rising Sun bar in Greysteel, Co Derry at Hallowe’en 1993, was released from the Maze. It was Irwin who shouted ‘Trick or Treat’ before he opened fire. Just four months after his release Irwin attended a C18 ‘Remembrance Day’ event in London and was photographed shouting slogans and giving the Nazi salute. While in prison Irwin had corresponded with other fascists and sent out pictures of himself for their publications.

The LVF 

The Loyalist Volunteer Force website has the following ad in its merchandise section ‘Our best item by far yet is the Billy Wright CD Which has been produced by Blood & Honour Combat 18 & has been largely in demand, the CD consists of many songs by prominent Blood & Honour bands with songs dedicated to the Loyalist cause’.

There have been revelations in recent years of strong links between the LVF and Nazis in the North West of Britain. These include C18 members and supporters within the British Army. In May 1999 C18 members distributed leaflets at Blackburn’s football ground attacking Rosemary Nelson, the human rights solicitor murdered by Loyalists.

Ian Thompson, a former soldier of the Royal Irish Regiment, was the LVF’s main linkman with Combat 18, he organised the visits of British Fascists to Portadown. He was arrested in March 2000 on suspicion of involvement in the murder of Rosemary Nelson. The RUC found the personal details of Combat 18 leaders and scores of Nazi music CDs in his home in Hamiltonsbawn, Co Armagh. In 2001 Thompson was sentenced to 9 years for arms offences.

The internet guestbooks of many fascist groups contain support messages for the UDA, LVF, Orange Volunteers, Red Hand Defenders, etc. A support group called the ‘Loyalist Prisoners Welfare Association’ holds fundraisers and events in Britain.

The second leader of the LVF, Mark ‘Swinger’ Fulton, was found dead in his cell in Maghaberry prison in June 2002. A post mortem showed he had committed suicide. Within hours fascist websites carried tributes to him, including one from C18 which stated. “Mark Fulton. Rest in peace comrade, you were a loyal soldier and brave warrior in our struggle for freedom. You will never be forgotten. Valahalla will welcome such a great man with open arms! condolences sent from all C18 units worldwide! 14/88″.

National Front 

In July 2000 the ‘White Nationalist Report’, a National Front newsletter, printed a report and picture of NF members selling their literature in the Sandy Row Rangers Supporters Club. The photo included Terry Blackham, their ‘National Activities Organiser’, who runs the NF anti-refugee campaigns in England. In 1994 Blackham was jailed for 4 years for attempting to smuggle sub-machine guns, a grenade launcher and 2,000 rounds of ammunition to the UDA in East Belfast.

British National Party 

The British National Party [BNP] has also been active in the North in recent years. It sells a magazine called ‘True Brit’ at Orange rallies and at Linfield and Glentoran matches. It is based mainly around Newtonabbey and has also been involved in intimidation of Catholics in Kilkeel, Co Down. In December 1998 it held a wreath laying ceremony at the grave of George Seawright, the DUP politician best known for saying that ‘Catholics should be incinerated’. His brother, David Seawright, has been active in both the NF and the UVF in Scotland.

The Ulster BNP plans to run in South Belfast in the next general election in the North and say it’s platform will be a return of the death penalty and an end to ‘bogus asylum seekers flooding over the border into Ulster’.

Andrew McAlorie has recently reappeared as a BNP spokeperson in the North. McAlorie, a teacher, was last heard of in 1986 when as NI treasurer of the National Front he was jailed for two years for his involvement in the petrol bombing of RUC homes during the ‘Ulster Says No’ campaign against the Anglo-Irish Agreement.

Ulster Independence Movement 

The UIM is a one man band led by David Kerr, formerly prominent in the Ulster National Front in the 1980s. The UIM supports the policy of the ‘Third Way’, an ideology that supposedly rejects both communism and capitalism. ‘Third Way’ is connected to the ‘International Third Position’ in Britain, a somewhat contradictory position as ITP leadership consists of traditionalist Catholics. The UIM also professes support for far right groups in America and sells pro-Confederate merchandise on its website. It also produces a magazine called ‘Ulster Nation’.

David Kerr ran as the ‘Ulster Third Way’ candidate both the General and local elections in June 2001. Describing himself as a ‘non-sectarian radical Ulster nationalist’, he gathered a less than spectacular 116 votes in West Belfast and a magnificent 28 in the council elections. His campaign may not have been helped by his stated policy of support for free over the counter sales of heroin and cocaine.

Conclusion 

The political, paramilitary and criminal links between Loyalism and Fascism should be no surprise, given that both ideologies are based on extreme right wing supremacist ideas. The regular exposure of such links lead to denials or tepid condemnation by loyalist politicians, but no serious attempt to end them.’

Right Wing Norwegian Mass Murderer Anders Breivik, Who Has Links To British Neo-Nazi And Terrorist Groupings

The links between British Neo-Nazis and the British separatist minority in Ireland coalesce around one of the most notorious assassinations in the history of the conflict, the killing of lawyer Rosemary Nelson. As the Guardian reported in 2000:

‘The names, addresses and telephone numbers of members of the neo-Nazi group Combat 18 have been passed to detectives investigating the murder of the Northern Ireland solicitor Rosemary Nelson.

Details of Combat 18′s links with the Loyalist Volunteer Force – the organisation which placed the bomb under Nelson’s car – were found during a search of the home of Ian Thompson, a loyalist who has been charged with an offence connected to the solicitor’s murder.

Thompson was arrested at his home in Hamilton’s Bawn, a Protestant village outside Armagh city, more than a fortnight ago. Senior RUC detectives said police in England planned to arrest and question several Combat 18 activists about their links with Ulster loyalists.

Along with the personal details of Combat 18 members, including their leader Bill Browning, a former British soldier from south London, the RUC found scores of race-hate CDs. The CDs of racist skinhead bands were being sold to raise money in Britain for the LVF. Browning has a conviction for assaulting a gay man and another for distributing race hate material.

Thompson, also a former British soldier who served in the locally recruited Royal Irish Regiment, was the LVF’s main link with Combat 18. He went to Wigan for an event organised by Combat 18 in 1998 which almost degenerated into a war between rival factions of the fascist group. Members from North-East England protested at Thompson’s plan to take over an LVF-aligned flute band to play at the function.

The North-East branch of Combat 18, organised principally around a core of Sunderland soccer hooligans, supports the largest loyalist paramilitary force, the Ulster Defence Association. When they learnt that an LVF-allied band was to play, they threatened to disrupt the social. The invitation to the band was quietly dropped.

The investigation into Combat 18′s connections to the LVF will focus on a nucleus of English fascists based in North-West England, particularly a group in Bolton. They include a tattooist who comes to Northern Ireland regularly to engrave the image of murdered LVF founder Billy Wright on to local loyalists.

It was Thompson who invited Browning along with 24 other neo-Nazis to Northern Ireland last summer for the loyalist marching season. While the Combat 18 delegation were staying in Portadown, the LVF’s Mid-Ulster stronghold, members of the neo-Nazi group attacked a Chinese family living in the town’s staunchly loyalist Corcrain estate.

One of the UDA’s English members, who was arrested on arms charges in the early Nineties, was Frank Portanari. Now out of jail, Portanari heads a pro-loyalist campaign group in London called the British/Ulster Alliance.’

BNP Politicians Giving Nazi Salutes At British War Memorial, Britain

The power and influence of the British terrorist organisations in Ireland has fallen considerably since their heyday at the height of the conflict when they were the cutting edge of Britain’s counter-insurgency war. Many have been abandoned by their old masters in the British state (or been turned upon). Yet, through renewed links to Neo-Nazi and fascist groups in Britain, they continue to exist and indeed may be on something of a comeback.

Racist And Neo-Nazi Propoganda Of The British Minority In Ireland, 2004

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Black Provos – The ANC And The IRA

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Sinn Féin and the ANC – Martin McGuinness, Nelson Mandela and Gerry Adams

One of the more famous descriptions of former ANC leader and South African president Nelson Mandela to have emerged in the last 30 years came from Frank Miller, a senior Ulster Unionist Party politician from the British ethnic minority in Ireland, who dismissed Mandela as a ‘black Provo’ (aka. Provisional IRA). Miller represented a view common amongst the British Unionist minority in Ireland, also shared with their right-wing nationalist contemporaries in Britain, which saw little difference between the political parties of the ANC and Sinn Féin, or the associated guerilla armies of MK and the IRA. All were left-wing, anti-colonial and progressive nationalist movements that had to be defeated. Indeed most members of the British minority felt a close affinity with the Boer minority in Apartheid-era South Africa: a centuries-old colonial community in a foreign land surrounded by a sea of ignorant, hostile natives, trying to preserve their own settler identity, language, culture and religion – not to mention complete political, economic and military hegemony over the natives.

In Britain the conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher impeded economic and political sanctions against the racist regime in South Africa, despite the condemnation of both the international community and domestic critics. She regarded the ANC as a ‘typical terrorist organisation’ and later explained on a visit to South Africa that her refusal to meet the imprisoned ANC leader Nelson Mandela was simple: ‘the Prime Minister of England does not talk to terrorists’. These sentiments were widely echoed throughout her government and party with Tory Party conferences proposing motions calling for Mandela to be executed while members wore suits with collars, ties and lapel badges emblazoned with the words ‘Hang Nelson Mandela’ (one of Thatcher’s closest political allies, Sir Teddy Taylor stated that Mandela ’should be shot’, a view Thatcher never disassociated herself from).

ANC / MK – SF / IRA

Even today, decades on, though the current Tory leader and Prime Minster of Britain, David Cameron, has admitted that Margaret Thatcher and her then government were wrong in their policies on Apartheid South Africa, there are still those in his party who remain wedded to their old views.

So it is probably with some outrage and a reaffirmation of their ancient prejudices that they heard today’s new revelations reported in the Irish Times of just how close the two liberation movements were:

‘THE IRA helped carry out one of the biggest bomb attacks against the South African apartheid government in the early 1980s, according to the memoirs of former senior ANC activist and politician Kader Asmal.

The former ANC cabinet minister and Trinity law professor, who died earlier this year, reveals in his memoirs published this week how volunteers recruited from Ireland carried out reconnaissance on one of the country’s most strategic installations – the Sasol oil refinery in Sasolburg, near Johannesburg, before it was bombed on June 1st, 1980.

The attack was carried out by Umkhonto we Sizwe, better known as MK, the military wing of the ANC, and struck a major blow against the apartheid state at the time.

In his book, Politics in my Blood , Asmal, founder of the Irish Anti-Apartheid Movement (IAAM), also claims Gerry Adams provided the IRA volunteers to carry out the mission after he contacted go-between Michael O’Riordan, then general secretary of the Communist Party of Ireland.

“I went to see the general secretary of the Communist Party of Ireland, Michael O’Riordan, who was a man of great integrity and whom I trusted to keep a secret. He in turn contacted Gerry Adams of Sinn Féin and it was arranged that two military experts would come to Dublin to meet two MK personnel and take them to a safe place for two weeks of intensive training. I believe the expertise the MK cadres obtained was duly imparted to others in the ANC camps in Angola.”

Asmal says he was later approached again by the MK high command who wanted two people to conduct a reconnaissance operation on the feasibility of attacking Sasol, South Africa’s major oil refinery, vital to the maintenance of the apartheid state.

“Once again, I arranged the task with Adams of Sinn Féin, through the mediation of O’Riordan. Though I no longer recall the names of the persons who volunteered, if indeed I ever knew them, they laid the ground for one of the most dramatic operations carried out by MK personnel.”

Recalling the 1980 attack as one the most daring acts of military insurgency in the struggle against apartheid, he writes: “. . . while the damage to the refinery was, according to the apartheid regime, relatively superficial, the propaganda value and its effect on the morale of the liberation movement were inestimable. Yet only Louise (my wife) and I knew the attack on Sasolburg was the result of reconnaissance carried out by members of the IRA.”

He added: “The attack on Sasolburg had nothing to do with the IAAM, and nobody knew about the story behind it except Louise and me.

“When the plant blew up, we were so excited I suppose some of the other IAAM people must have wondered if we had any connection or involvement.”’

The British Unionist minority in Ireland displays the banners of racist regimes from across history, including British Rhodesia, Apartheid South Africa and the Confederate States

Many years later the ANC played a crucial role supporting Sinn Féin in the Peace Process of the 1990s and early 2000s between the belligerent parties in Ireland and Britain , some of which was revealed by the Observer newspaper:

‘One of the last ANC militants to lay down arms after the war against apartheid played a leading role in convincing the IRA to move to its historic compromise over arms decommissioning last weekend, The Observer has learnt.

Sathyandranath ‘Mac’ Maharaj held a secret meeting with IRA leaders, including the hardline Marxist Brian Keenan, in Belfast in February, shortly after the British Government suspended the short-lived power-sharing executive. The one-time Communist ANC activist told Keenan and three other members of the IRA’s Army Council to ‘be creative’ over the arms issue.

According to republican sources, Maharaj’s advice helped propel the organisation towards its unprecedented offer to put arms beyond use and allow independent observers to monitor its weapons dumps. Maharaj was accompanied on the trip by Leon Wessels, a white member of the Cabinet who ran Pretoria’s security apparatus, but the former held the talks with the IRA leadership.

Maharaj is understood to have reported back to his ANC colleague and former trade union leader, Cyril Ramaphosa, that a breakthrough in the Northern Ireland deadlock could be achieved. Ramaphosa has since been appointed as one of the two observers to verify IRA arms dumps are sealed and guns have been put beyond use.

It is suggested Sinn Fein MPs Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness asked the ANC leadership to help them convince IRA sceptics to launch an initiative to break the deadlock.

Maharaj, like Keenan in Ireland, was initially sceptical about the politics of compromise at the end of apartheid. He was number three in the ANC’s military wing and laid down his arms only after Nelson Mandela had convinced him attacks on the security forces would damage reconciliation with the white community.

The IRA looks upon the ANC as ‘brothers’ in the struggle for national liberation and for more than two decades has maintained political links with the South African movement. However, there were never any formal military ties.’

Of course we can now see that there were very formal ties between Umkhonto we Sizwe or MK and the Irish Republican Army or the IRA. In fact the struggle between Irish Republicans and Apartheid South Africa went much further, for it involved Boer-ruled South Africa directly engaging in state-sponsored terrorism in Ireland through the supply of weapons, explosives and money to the British Unionist separatist minority in Ireland in the 1980s and ’90s. As the report above continues:

‘In the Eighties it was other South Africans who helped fuel the Ulster conflict. Apartheid agents indirectly armed both the Ulster Defence Association and the Ulster Volunteer Force 13 years ago, enabling the two loyalist organisations to intensify their violence up until the 1994 ceasefires.

Douglas Berndhart, an American-born agent for Boss, apartheid’s secret intelligence agency, put loyalists in touch with a Lebanese gunrunner, Joe Fawzi, in 1987. The UDA, UVF and Ulster Resistance paid Fawzi around £300,000 (stolen in a bank robbery in Portadown) for a large consignment of weapons, including hundreds of AK47s that had fallen into the hands of Lebanese Christian militias. These weapons had been captured from the retreating PLO, which was expelled from south Lebanon in 1982.

Ulster loyalists made two further attempts to gain arms directly from the apartheid regime. The UDA sent Brian Nelson to Johannesburg in the same year to make contact with Ulster expatriates living in South Africa who supported the loyalist cause. The trip came to nothing, probably because Nelson was an agent working inside the UDA.

A more serious bid to procure weapons took place a year later when Ulster Resistance, founded but later disowned by Ian Paisley’s Democratic Unionist Party, tried to sell surface-to-air missile systems to apartheid agents in Paris. French intelligence arrested three Ulster men, Samuel Quinn, James King and Noel Lyttle, at the Hilton hotel as they were about to make contact with South African diplomat Daniel Storm.

Storm had offered Ulster Resistance weapons in return for stolen missile systems manufactured at Shorts aircraft factory in east Belfast. The apartheid government wanted the missiles to shoot down MiG aircraft flown by Cuban pilots in battles between Angolan Marxist forces and the South African Defence Forces. Ulster Resistance’s botched attempt to buy weapons from the Pretoria regime resulted in France and Britain expelling six South African embassy staff, including Storm, from their Paris and London missions.

The political leaders of the loyalist organisations that smuggled those Lebanese armaments into Northern Ireland have so far refused to follow the IRA’s lead and offer up a similar arms inspection deal. John White, a former UDA prisoner and now chief spokesman for the Ulster Democratic Party, said he would have preferred all paramilitary organisations voluntarily to destroy their arsenals.’

Peter Robinson caught on camera in late 1984 during a visit to the Israel-Lebanon border with an automatic assault rifle

The obituary of the notorious British Intelligence agent Brian Nelson provides even more details on those who connived in facilitating the support of Apartheid South Africa for the British ethnic minority in Ireland, the close involvement of the British military and intelligence services, and the years of separatist terrorism that stemmed from that:

‘Brian Nelson, who has died of a brain haemorrhage aged 55, features in today’s report by the Metropolitan police commissioner, Sir John Stevens. In the early 1990s, Stevens, then a relatively lowly deputy chief constable in Cambridgeshire, was asked to conduct an inquiry into the relationship between the British army and Protestant paramilitaries, notably the Ulster Defence Association.

He soon came across Nelson, a fanatical and sectarian Protestant from Belfast’s Shankill Road, who was recruited in 1985 by British military intelligence to act as an army agent in the UDA, which he had joined a decade earlier. Nelson, a former soldier, had served with the Black Watch, and later took a building job in Germany

He performed his delicate and dangerous new task with great enthusiasm. His house and car, plus £200 a week expenses, were paid for by the British army (the British taxpayer). In 1987, soon after his recruitment, Nelson went to South Africa to shop for arms for the UDA and supervised the shipment of two huge batches of arms, at least one of which ended up in the hands of the paramilitaries.

Throughout his time in the UDA, Nelson worked closely with army intelligence, whose policy at the time was shamelessly to take sides: for the Protestant paramilitaries, who were seen as pro-British; and against the IRA, who were seen as the enemy. This policy drew British military intelligence into a gang war. Drawing on his sources in British intelligence, Nelson would pass on the names and addresses of known IRA activists to the UDA, whose gunmen would promptly go out and “execute” thesuspects.

The success of Nelson’s work commended him to the UDA hierarchy, who appointed him “head of intelligence”. But his system did not always work. In May 1988, Terry McDaid, a bricklayer, was at home watching television when masked gunmen smashed into his home and shot him dead. It was a mistake. The gunmen were looking for Terry’s brother Declan, whose name had been supplied by Nelson.

The policy of consistent collusion between British army special forces and Orange assassins was bitterly opposed in the 1970s by Colin Wallace, an army information officer at Lisburn with strong connections to intelligence, and Fred Holroyd, a British military intelligence officer in Northern Ireland. Both men were denounced and sacked.

Wallace was framed, and jailed for killing his best friend. In 1996, 10 years after his release, his conviction was quashed by the court of appeal. When Stevens discovered the role of Nelson in paramilitary sectarian murders, he insisted on Nelson’s prosecution, and he was arrested.

This caused dismay in the British army and its undercover organisation, the Force Research Unit (FRU). Stevens was adamant that he could not condone Nelson’s behaviour, and frantic negotiations followed. For nearly two years, Nelson was held in the relatively comfortable police “supergrass suite” in Belfast.

A deal was finally clinched in January 1992. Nelson agreed to plead guilty to five conspiracies to murder, and at least four sectarian murder charges against him were dropped. In a bizarre court case lasting less than a day, Nelson’s real role was effectively covered up. After a moving tribute to his sterling work for the British army from a then anonymous colonel, Nelson got 10 years.

Speaking from behind a security screen, and brushing aside Nelson’s record as an accomplice to murder, the colonel stressed the lives Nelson had allegedly “saved”. Nelson was released after serving less than half his sentence, and spent the rest of his life under a false identity.

Stevens, however, was reluctant to leave the matter there. Assisted by Hugh Orde, now chief constable in Northern Ireland, he continued his inquiries into the complicity of army intelligence and the FRU with sectarian murder gangs. Nelson was always at the centre of his inquiries.

The Stevens/Orde report is likely to deal in detail with many sectarian murders of the time, including the appalling murder in his home in 1989 of solicitor Pat Finucane. Nelson’s premature death saves him from further embarrassment. The anonymous “Colonel J” has since been identified as Brigadier Gordon Kerr, now military attaché to the British embassy in Beijing.’

Hundreds of Irish men, women and children, citizens of Ireland, lost their lives or were injured as a result of the steady supply of arms from Apartheid South Africa to the British colonial minority in Ireland, a supply chain overseen by the highest echelons of the British state in what was, and is, Britain’s Iran-Contra Scandal. However, no one in Britain, be it politicians or journalists, have ever expressed any real interest in examining this campaign of state-sponsored terrorism waged on their behalf in Ireland. On the contrary some have been implicit in covering it up, as with much else that happened in Britain’s 30 year Dirty War.

Recent photo of Ulster Resistance terrorists, one armed with a British Army issued SA80 Rifle (the recent ‘A2′ variant only available to British Troops)

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British State-Sponsored Terrorism In Ireland

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The alphabet soup of British-state militias in Ireland in the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s – the UDR (now the RIR) and the RUC (now the PSNI)

The award-winning investigative website, The Detail, carries a lengthy report on British terrorism in Ireland, focusing on the activities of the Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR). Established in January 1970 as an infantry unit of the British Army the UDR acted as an armed militia of the British Unionist minority in Ireland until it was partially disbanded in 1992 through an amalgamation with another unit forming the new Royal Irish Regiment or RIR (this has been widely interpreted in retrospect as one of the reconciliatory gestures on behalf of the British government towards Irish nationalists and republicans in the lead-up to the Peace Process of the 1990s).

‘The British army has been accused of a ’cover up’ after it was disclosed that it has withheld evidence for more than three decades revealing that UDR units were being used to finance and support the UVF in Belfast, with at least 70 soldiers on one base linked to the loyalist terror group.

The Detail website can reveal top secret government papers which disclose that the UDR’s Belfast battalion was heavily infiltrated by the UVF in the late 1970s.

The `For UK Eyes Only’ documents, uncovered by the Pat Finucane Centre, reveal how:

• Army chiefs feared that 70 soldiers in one UDR unit were linked to the UVF in west Belfast, including one member of the notorious Shankill Butcher gang;

• One UDR unit was suspected of siphoning-off £47,000 to the UVF while UDR equipment was regularly stolen from another unit to support the loyalist terror group;

• UVF members were regularly allowed to socialise at the UDR’s Girdwood barracks social club;

• Army chiefs considered secretly testing firing UDR soldiers’ weapons to check whether they had been used in sectarian murders;

• The collusion investigation was then suspended after a senior UDR officer claimed it was damaging morale within the regiment.’

Amongst the finer points is the following:

‘Investigators found that some soldiers were also `borrowing’ army weapons to carry out criminal activities.

“There appears to have been theft of stores over a considerable period…There are indications that equipment stolen has been passed to the UVF.

“Control of accounting and key security (including armoury keys) has been poor.”

Investigators concluded: “The general impression gained is that, `D’ and `G’ Coys are the supply and financial support elements for local paramilitary organisations.”’

However though British Army chiefs had no problem with British soldiers carrying out terrorist attacks they apparently drew the line at ‘ordinary’ criminal activities, as they launched a cover-up:

‘…the British army took a deliberate decision to hide the fact that the UDR’s Belfast battalion had been so heavily infiltrated by the UVF.

Minutes of a meeting at British army headquarters in Lisburn in February 1978 discussed a “defensive press brief” linked to the massive security breaches.

“It would be desirable to avoid mention of the security investigation into UDR soldiers’ possible involvement with paramilitary organisations.

“No such restraint need be felt about the investigation into the fraud, and the SIB (Serious Investigation Branch) investigation should be used as far as possible to cover the security investigation.”’

The Loyalist Murderers - the British UDR militia and Britain's state-sponsored terrorism in Ireland

The Loyalist Murderers – the British UDR militia and Britain’s state-sponsored terrorism in Ireland

Among the more shocking revelations are the links between the British Army and the notorious British terrorist gang ‘the Shankill Butchers‘:

‘The late 1970s were some of the worst years of the Troubles, with the UVF’s notorious Shankill Butcher gang responsible for a sectarian murder campaign, which included the abduction, torture and brutally murder of 10 Catholics in north and west Belfast.

The RUC’s failure to apprehend the killers for 19 months lead to many within the nationalist community claiming that the Butcher gang was being protected from prosecution.

In 1979 loyalist Edward McIlwaine was jailed for 15 years for kidnapping and wounding the gang’s last Catholic victim.

It was only disclosed years later that McIlwaine had led a double life as a UDR soldier and Shankill Butcher.

McIlwaine had joined `10’ UDR in 1974, but within months had also become a trusted member of the Butcher gang.

The UDR soldier’s double life lasted for three years until he was finally arrested in June 1977 and charged with the kidnapping and brutal assault on Gerard McLaverty.

He remained a UDR soldier until August 1977, when it was claimed he had been discharged for `poor attendance’.’

Among the many innocent Irish citizens murdered in the most grotesque ways possible by the gang was 33 year old Rosaleen O’Kane, as described in this BBC report:

‘The burnt body of Rosaleen O’Kane was discovered in her Belfast home almost 30 years ago.

Her body had been stripped and set alight.

Miss O’Kane’s family said police had told them of a possible link with the Shankill Butchers to her killing.

The gang was a group of sadistic loyalist killers who conducted a sectarian reign of terror against Catholics in Belfast between 1976 and 1978.

It was led by Lennie Murphy and killed at least 10 people.

Many of the Shankill Butchers’ victims were Catholic men, abducted in a taxi as they walked home from pubs in the city centre.

The gang got its name from the butchers’ knives used to torture and kill its victims whose mutilated bodies were later dumped in loyalist parts of the city.’

This is not the first time that the close links between the British state and British terrorism in Ireland have been examined. In fact it has been one of the constants of the Northern conflict, though rarely have the British or Irish media establishments given acts of state-sponsored terrorism by Britain the prominence they deserved. The fact that it took a Belfast-based journalism site to highlight these latest revelations, revelations ignored by the news media of two nations, shows yet again how little has changed – in peace or war.

Joint footpatrol of British UDA terrorists and British Army soldiers, British Occupied North of Ireland, 1970s

Joint footpatrol of British UDA terrorists and British Army soldiers, British Occupied North of Ireland, 1970s

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British Unionists Target Irish And Immigrant Families In Portadown

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It has been reported that at least 100 British Unionist rioters were involved in overnight clashes in the contested town of Portadown, as they attempted to attack the homes of the local Irish Nationalist community. Using the excuse of the removal of British flags by local families with the agreement of the PSNI (the paramilitary police force) in an effort to ease communal tensions, British militants gathered in the area, armed with petrol bombs and other improvised weapons, and proceeded to attack both the PSNI and Irish civilian families. According to UTV:

‘Officers came under sustained attack from paint bombs, petrol bombs and other missiles – sledge hammers were also used to damage armoured PSNI vehicles.

A total of 19 plastic baton rounds were fired during the trouble which continued into the early hours of the morning.

No police and no members of the public were injured.

It is believed social network sites and mobile phones were used to gather people from outside the area for what was originally planned to be a peaceful protest by residents over the removal of loyalist flags.

As the violence continued into the night, police advised motorists to avoid the Corcrain and Ballyoran areas, Obins Drive, Union Street and surrounding areas.

Sinn Féin MLA John O’Dowd said loyalists tried to attack nationalist homes during the disorder.

“What is known is that around 100 loyalists attacked police and attempted to attack nationalist homes in the Portadown area over several hours,” he said.

“I would appeal for calm to return to the streets of Portadown. I’m in no doubt that the vast majority of people, whether they are from the unionist or nationalist community want to see an end to this trouble. They want to see order restored and they want to be able to get on with their lives.”

Police have come under attack across parts of Northern Ireland in the past week.

Rioting already broke out in Portadown on Wednesday night, this time in the Garvaghy Road area.

In the early hours of Tuesday morning two police officers were injured after trouble also erupted in the Craigwell Avenue and Obin Street areas of the town.’

In something of an irony, the homes in the Irish Nationalist district of the town attacked by Unionists were in fact occupied by foreign nationals, as the Guardian notes:

‘Immigrant families from East Timor fled a Catholic area of Northern Ireland on Friday night when loyalist rioters tried to attack nationalist homes, a Sinn Fein councillor said today.

“Around 100 loyalists attacked police who prevented them attacking nationalist homes,” said John O’Dowd, who is a member of the Northern Ireland Assembly.

The families from East Timor packed their bags and ran from their homes in Portadown, Co Armagh on Friday night, when the area was engulfed in violence, he said.

For several hours, police were attacked by people armed with petrol bombs, bricks, bottles, fireworks and other missiles in the latest violence surrounding the high point of the loyalist marching season.’

The recent trouble in the North of Ireland also witnessed similar attacks on migrants most of whom tend to live in ethnically mixed or Irish Nationalist communities.

 

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We’re Alright Paddy, To Hell With You

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Well a relatively peaceful night has passed in the North of Ireland, with violence down to what we might almost describe as ‘peace-time levels’. This is in contrast to the events of Wednesday night when widespread street clashes were still occurring (albeit mostly confined to Irish Nationalist communities) involving confrontations between local youths and the PSNI (the British paramilitary police in Ireland). Though on a smaller scale than in previous days and confined to smaller areas (mainly Belfast and Derry) the conflict on Wednesday was serious enough, involving as it did large numbers of young men and women, hundreds of PSNI officers, and considerable damage to local homes, businesses and vehicles. As reported by the BBC:

‘Police have been attacked with petrol bombs, paint bombs and missiles in Portadown, Belfast and Londonderry [Derry].

A police car and two private vehicles were damaged during the disturbances in the Garvaghy Road-Ballyoran area of Portadown on Wednesday.

Police were also targeted in west Belfast and Derry.

Petrol bombs and stones were thrown at officers during a four-hour period in the Brandywell and Gobnascale area of Derry city.

In Belfast a petrol bomb failed to ignite when it was thrown at Tennant Street PSNI station. A police spokesperson said nobody was injured during the trouble.

There were also reports of a number of hijackings.’

Additionally, though underreported by local or international media, there was a slow but steady stream of violent assaults on Irish communities throughout the North by gangs from the British Unionist population, as can be seen in some of the areas of trouble mentioned above. In North Belfast clashes between the PSNI and Unionists on Wednesday happened as the result of attacks on nearby Nationalist homes.

A separate incident is described in a UTV report:

‘Two members of an Ardoyne-based football team have been seriously injured after they were set upon by an armed loyalist gang in north Belfast on the Twelfth of July, it has emerged.

The Crumlin Star football team were returning from a trip to Dundalk in Co Louth, to escape the trouble surrounding the annual Orange Order parade close to their north Belfast homes, when they were attacked by the 30-strong gang.

A gang carrying knives, golf clubs and sticks beat several members of the team, leaving them with stab wounds, a broken leg and facial injuries.

One player was held down and jumped on until his leg broke and his foot was fractured.

Ciaran Smyth, who plays for a cross-community football team, was attacked with a golf club while trying to help a friend.

“It was still daylight when we were attacked. Most of them were wearing Rangers football shirts.

“That gang were out to cause serious injury or even kill the first Catholic they came across and it just happened to be us.”’

One of the more amusing aspects of the last few days has been the editorials and commentary of the British media, the majority of which have downplayed the trouble, usually by comparing it to the height of the conflict when IRA bombs were devastating British city centres and IRA units were targeting British troops. Which of course for the British is the only thing that really matters. For as long as British towns and city centres are left untouched and British soldiers unharmed the average British journalist, or politician or citizen doesn’t give a damn about Ireland or any trouble in Ireland. To them that is peace.

A fact that others know all too well.

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Ireland Unfree Shall Never Be At Peace?

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Well, apologies to all those who’ve contacted me over the last few days in relation to the street clashes in and around the ‘Glorious Twelfth’ marches staged by the Orange Order, the British Protestant fundamentalist organisation in Ireland, ‘celebrating’  British colonial power in Ireland. Thanks to everyone for all the updates but as you can imagine it has been quiet busy, but will post your stories here as and when I can.

Each July 12th we witness the British ethnic minority in Ireland, mainly in the northern part of the country, marching in quasi-military parades (frequently involving British paramilitary-based bands) marking the presence and ascendancy of British rule in the north-east of the island (though originally over all of the island). This year we have witnessed exceptionally bad violence in what has always been a violence-prone part of the political calendar. So what have the press reported? In the Guardian it is ‘militant Republicans’ blamed for the violence:

‘North Belfast MP Nigel Dodds has blamed “militant republicans” opposed to the peace process for organising a sustained riot in the Ardoyne area’

This echoes the recent claims made in the BBC’s prime news and current affairs show, Newsnight, which implied that the series of assaults by British terrorist gangs on Irish civilian enclaves in Belfast and elsewhere, were the fault of ‘Dissident Republicans’ whose attacks on the British Forces and other targets had created a ‘reaction’ in Unionist militant circles. Which more or less repeats what happened in the earliest days of the Long War of 1969-1996 when British journalists blamed all violence on Irish Republicans, excusing or explaining way the murder and mayhem carried out by Unionist gangs as ‘reactionary’. So nothing’s changed then and nothing has been learned. The British media will always side with the British minority in Ireland, and with a few honourable exceptions, justify the violence of the latter – when they deem it worthy of reporting at all.

But the Guardian goes on:

‘Police officers came under attack for the second night running, with petrol bombs and missiles thrown by youths from Ardoyne. There were also pockets of trouble elsewhere, with two cars hijacked and burned in the nationalist Market area of central Belfast. A riot in Derry’s Bogside led to seven arrests, including that of a 14-year-old boy.

…Several police officers were injured, as well as a press photographer who was hit with a plastic baton round.

Police fired dozens of plastic bullets at rioters and repeatedly deployed water cannon after coming under attack from a crowd of up to 200 people.

The rioters also set fire to water cannon with petrol bombs.

The attackers kept up a constant barrage of stones, bottles and other missiles for several hours once a controversial Orange Order parade had passed the Ardoyne shops shortly after 7pm on Tuesday night.’

Notably while the collateral shooting of a photographer by a suspected Dissident Republican member in the attacks on the Nationalist enclave of the Short Strand received much British media attention (the intended target was nearby police officers) the shooting of photographer with a ‘plastic baton round’ (or bullet to you and me) by the PSNI paramilitary police has hardly been reported. Again, the British media siding with the British forces – regular or irregular.

So what to make of it all, this renewed communal conflict in a time of ‘peace’? Despite the promise of the Belfast Agreement, with its power-sharing regional assembly and authority in the North of Ireland between the Irish and British communities and cross-border bodies between Ireland north and south, the basic cause of the conflict never went away – the British presence in Ireland. That presence can be taken at its widest meaning, Britain’s continued colonial claim of sovereignty over part of the island of Ireland, or at its narrowest, the presence of a significant British ethnic minority on the island who form a local majority in the area the British claim as their own: the North of Ireland.

As the 12th of July parades aptly display that British minority is still unable to reconcile itself both to its historic and geographic positions: a small ethno-national minority, in the main descended from British colonial settlers, in a country that is not Britain or British. The British Unionist population continues to behave as if this was still pre-independence Ireland, a colonial possession within the so-called United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, where they were the holders of all power and privilege – as befits a colonial elite – surrounded by a sea of hostile ‘natives’.

There are of course some who try to present the conflict in the North of Ireland as a non-colonial paradigm, but rather as some sort of aberrant religious-based quarrel, a hangover of medieval politics, but this is to display a complete (and probably wilful) ignorance of the situation. The struggle in Ireland in terms of politics and communal conflict is no different from that in any other colonial or post-colonial nation or region around the globe. Just because it is Europe and the ‘natives’ have white skin does not make it any less a clash of colonist versus colonised, albeit one three centuries in the making.

It is only by addressing the fundamentals of the conflict that a permanent end can be brought to that conflict. And that can only occur when Britain withdraws its active political, economic and military support for the British settler minority in Ireland and places their future within the context of the nation of Ireland: where it inevitably, and rightly, belongs.

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Belfast Erupts – Irish Families Besieged By British Unionist Mobs Again

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East Belfast’s Nationalist enclave of the Short Strand has come under attack again from British Unionist mobs. Two weeks ago Unionist gangs several hundred strong were led by UVF terrorists in a series of assaults against the Nationalist minority in the area, which left three wounded by gunfire, dozens injured and widescale damage to local homes and businesses.

Now, following the ‘mini-Twelfth’ parade in the city by the Orange Order, the British and Protestant fundamentalist organisation, Irish families find themselves under siege again. The Guardian reports:

‘Homes in the Catholic Short Strand district were attacked shortly before 11pm, just a few hours after an Orange Order parade passed by the area.

Riot police had to be moved back into the interface between the Short Strand and nearby loyalist districts following an incursion into Mount Pottinger Road by more than a dozen loyalists.

The situation had been under control in part due to the presence of former IRA and Sinn Féin figures who, along with the police, had attempted to keep the peace on the sectarian fault-line.

But the trouble escalated later when a group of young loyalists beat up a local man on Mountpottinger Road and attacked a number of houses in the Short Strand.’

The Daily Mail states that:

‘Police were this morning trying to regain order in the streets of Belfast after rioting broke out.

Plastic bullets and water cannon were used by officers to disperse crowds in Castlereagh Street and Albertbridge Road, east Belfast.’

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Know-Nothings – The American Right And The New Anti-Irishness

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This week, under the thrilling headline question ‘Why Is Ireland Such a Bastion of Anti-Israel Feeling?’, long-standing Atlantic columnist (and former Iraqi War cheerleader) Jeffrey Goldberg highlights a piece by notorious Irish newspaper commentator Kevin Myers on the alleged anti-Semitism of the Irish people. The British-born Myers, a long time apologist for British violence in Ireland, historic or contemporary, complains that:

‘Israel – and its sole defender on the panel (is mise) – were then roundly attacked by members of the audience. But what was most striking about the audience’s contributions was the raw emotion: they seemed to loathe Israel.

But how can anyone possibly think that Gaza is the primary centre of injustice in the Middle East? According to Mathilde Redmatn, deputy director of the International Red Cross in Gaza, there is in fact no humanitarian crisis there at all. But by God, there is one in Syria, where possibly thousands have died in the past month.

However, I notice that none of the Irish do-gooders are sending an aid-ship to Latakia. Why? Is it because they know that the Syrians do not deal with dissenting vessels by lads with truncheons abseiling down from helicopters, but with belt-fed machine guns, right from the start?

What about a humanitarian ship to Libya? Surely no-one on the MV Saoirse could possible maintain that life under Gaddafi qualified it as a civilised state. Not merely did it murder opponents by the bucketload at home and abroad, it kept the IRA campaign going for 20 years, and it also – a minor point, this, I know – brought down the Pan Am flight at Lockerbie. Yet no Irish boat to Libya. Only the other way round.

And then there’s Iraq. Throughout the decades of Saddam Hussein, whose regime caused the deaths of well over a million people, there wasn’t a breath of liberal protest against him. Gassing the Kurds? Not a whimper. Invading Kuwait? Not one single angry placard-bearing European liberal outside an Iraqi embassy.’

This of course is the usual nonsense from Myers, overblown, verbose rhetoric with himself, as always, at the centre of the action. Next week he will be back to lecturing people on why Irish men and women with an Ó or Mac or Ní in their surname are genetically different from everyone else on the island of Ireland and are part of a violence-prone, intellectually challenged race of Untermenschen, unlike those on the island whose descent is of a pure, unsullied British line (and who vote Fine Gael or UUP!). The usual quasi-racist drivel that has become his forte and only refuge from sanity.

Which naturally makes Goldberg’s uncritical quoting of the mad ramblings of Squire Myers all the more remarkable. He could have examined the claims against the facts of Irish-Israeli relations over the last few decades or the long (and successful) history of the Jewish-Irish community over the last century and a half. He could have looked at the historic links between Irish and Jewish revolutionaries dating back to the mid-1800s, when Fenian and Zionist militants rubbed shoulders in the radical circles of London, Paris, Berlin and Rome. There could have been mention of the many Jews in Ireland who dedicated themselves to the cause of Irish freedom and democracy (and language and culture too). Where are the names of the Jewish members of the Irish Republican Army and Sinn Féin who helped free the greater part of Ireland and the greater part of the Irish people from British rule?

No mention of Robert Briscoe, an officer of the IRA and elected Sinn Féin politician who fought in the Irish Revolution, served in Dáil Éireann for decades, became lord mayor of Dublin, brought Ze’ev Jabotinsky, leader of Irgun, to Ireland for training in guerrilla warfare tactics, and ran weapons and explosives to Israel during its War of Independence? What about Michael Noyk, leading Sinn Féin lawyer, or the Chief Rabbi of Ireland, Isaac Herzog (the father of Chaim Herzog, President of Israel), a noted Irish language scholar who was dubbed the ‘Sinn Féin Rabbi’ by the British? Where is the mention of Éamon de Valera, an acknowledged friend of the nation of Israel who saw the similarities in the experiences of the Jewish people with those of the Irish, in the dispossession of our lands, their settlement by others and the great Diasporas that provided the road to nationhood once again?

Such simple facts could have been the beginning of an article destroying the fallacy of Ireland’s supposed anti-Semitism (amongst the American right wing) instead we get more of the same. For Goldberg’s Atlantic column then features a follow-up article featuring an email from one Andrew Exum, that apparently provides ‘some depth’ on the matter (try not to laugh while reading it):

‘There are a few explanations for why the Irish do not have a lot of love for Israel. Here are two:

1.  During the Troubles, Ulster Protestant politicians consciously identified with the Israeli side of the Israel-Palestine conflict, comparing their own struggles against Irish Catholic terrorism with those of Israel against Palestinian terrorism. Irish Catholics, especially in Ulster, often reciprocated by sympathizing with the plight of the Palestinians living under occupation. (The PIRA, quite separately, had close contacts with Palestinian militant groups such as the PFLP in the 1970s and 1980s.)

2.  A lot of Irish have served in southern Lebanon as part of UNIFIL. It is very difficult to serve in southern Lebanon as part of UNIFIL and come away with a positive view of the IDF and, by extension, Israel.  (Imagine spending six months in Baghdad in 2004 living with Iraqis and then drawing all of your conclusions about the United States and Americans from that experience.) It is a lot easier, by contrast, to strike up lasting relationships with the people of southern Lebanon. (There is a shop-keeper named “Rosie” in southern Lebanon who speaks English in the most incongruous and delightful County Cork accent as a result of decades of trading with Irish peacekeepers. She is a star of Irish radio – as a gag, they once put her on and had callers from all over Ireland guess where she was from by listening to her accent.)’

Seriously? ‘Irish Catholic terrorism’? Would that be like Islamic terrorism? Of course in Ireland we are very familiar with black-suited Roman Catholic terrorists blowing themselves up in Protestant churches while mumbling out a few decades of the Rosary or calling upon the congregation to follow the strictures of Vatican II in our ancient Gaelic tongue…

Jesus. Literally.

What Goldberg fails to mention before quoting from the email is that Exum is an ex-US military counter-insurgency and terrorism expert, a member of the Centre for a New American Security (‘Developing strong, pragmatic and principled national security and defense policies’, a conservative Washington think-tank), a very well known blogger on Islamic militancy (initially behind an assumed non de plume) and has attended the Department of War Studies at King’s College London. So much for American journalism’s much vaunted boast of ‘full disclosure’.

And what Andrew Exum could have mentioned in his email is perhaps at least one reason for the antagonism towards the state of Israel held by a minority of Irish people, namely the co-operation between Israel and Apartheid-era South Africa to supply weapons, explosives, funds and training to British terrorist groups conducting a campaign of violence in Ireland. Such actions tend to make for enemies rather than friends.

The supposed anti-Israeli (for which read, anti-Jewish) feeling of the Irish has become the big myth of the American right wing – usually the lunatic right wing – but as can be seen by this alleged piece of journalism it can make it into the mainstream too. The Atlantic is a relatively influential online publication on the American centre-right, small ‘c’ conservative and well respected for its journalistic ethics. Yet even it can succumb to this modern version of anti-Irish bigotry.

And as Kevin Myers proves the Irish themselves are not immune to it – or at least an anachronistic version of the Irish that hates all things Irish and looks to Britain for – well, everything. This atavistic type of British ex-colonial in Ireland has embraced the anti-Semite myth wholesale. Largely to prove that we really were better off under dear old Blighty. As student non-radical (and non-sequitur) Bernard Mccabe writes over on The Commentator:

‘Where does all this hatred come from? Are my compatriots Nazi sympathisers? Has Ireland been taken over by a radical Islam that makes Ian Paisley look as harmless as Christine Bleakley? No, the truth is that anti-Semitism in Ireland has a long history.

In the old days, it came from (as it did across Europe) an extreme Catholicism. Latterly, anti-Semitism has found its provenance from Ireland’s consistently pro-Palestinian position. Ireland was of course for 800 years oppressed by the evil hand of British rule (that brought us roads, education, some form of civilisation), and the fight to ‘free’ her could take as many lives as possible.’

Ah. Well now we are getting somewhere. The British civilized the uncivilized Irish? Of course, we Irish did have roads, and education and an advanced civilization that sparked the Renaissance across western Europe long before the British, but hey, Bernie, don’t let facts get in the way of a good diatribe. Really, don’t.

And I suppose it is the fault of the Irish people, really, for all the deaths caused by the Irish people trying to free, er, the Irish people. And apparently rape victims, like, ask for it. It’s true, really.

Actually, now that I think of it you don’t think that the Jews were actually to blame for the Holocaust, do you? Like they brought it on themselves? Hmmm, maybe we should ask Kevo or Bernie? It sounds like the kind of logic those guys could get down with!

Of course I have had my own run-ins with the extremist fringe of the American Christian fundamentalist right, that some American-Jews and Israelis now (foolishly) make common ground with. One article was so extreme that I found myself forced to comment, which led to a dialogue of sorts with the author of the piece that rapidly descended into the mindless white noise that the American extreme right deafens itself with. The original can be found here, though you might want to hold your nose before clicking on the link.

One of the great failings of the American people is that they don’t do history: they simply don’t get it. Theirs is a nation that lives in the now, a nation of the essential moment, which though admirable in some ways is also their great Achilles Heel. The Palins and Bachmans of US politics revel in their ignorance of historical fact over a-historical myth. They sneer at those who try and present the truth when they know that the Hollywood simplicity of the myth is all the greater and more malleable. You can have your myth and eat it too.

The alleged anti-Semitism of the Irish is the new myth of the American right. It is the new wisdom of the old Know-Nothings. It does not matter a whit that there is little or no real substance to it or that any (even casual) study of Irish history shows it to be a manifest lie. American ignorance of their own history is so vast that I suppose one can hardly expect them to be aware of anyone else’s. But when that ignorance becomes dangerous, not in the educational or cultural worlds, but in the political one, where lives and jobs and money matter – then it is a far more serious thing. For the Atlantic enjoys an influential readership in the conservative business circles of the United States. Circles where the conspiracy theories of the fringe can be taken as real if given airtime in the mainstream.

The editorial team of the Atlantic should know better. The sad part is they probably don’t.

The Beast In The East

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An interesting piece from journalist Henry McDonald in the Guardian on the recent attacks by Unionist paramilitaries on the beleaguered Nationalist enclave of the Short Strand:

‘…for the residents of the Short Strand, who were the main victims of the loyalist-originated violence, the assaults on their homes were terrifying and traumatic.

Once again, those living in this small Catholic/nationalist redoubt, surrounded by larger loyalist communities, found themselves vulnerable and in peril.

Many media commentators, some London-based… bought into the line that this latest conflagration was the result of spontaneous working class loyalist anger.

They argued that, because loyalist paramilitaries had no representation in the Stormont parliament or that because socioeconomic or educational attainment was low in poor Protestant areas around eastern Belfast, these communities suddenly erupted in anger.

In doing so, the commentators swallowed a fairy tale…’

He quotes the evidence of eye-witnesses to the assaults:

‘…all of those who attacked their homes were wearing surgical gloves, masks and combat uniforms, that they arrived with wheelie bins stuffed with bricks, bottles and other missiles, and that the entire attack appeared to be well organised.

The evidence from other Short Strand residents tells a similar tale, and suggests that the entire incursion was well planned and carefully executed. In addition, it is known that the Ulster Volunteer Force’s East Belfast battalion was behind the initial invasion of the Catholic area.’

And he then focuses on the well-known leader of the East Belfast UVF, the British terrorist organisation that organised and spearheaded the attacks, who the media has dubbed ‘the Beast in the East‘. Far from the public censure some claim has fallen on his head McDonald points out that:

‘Most of the locals on the Protestant/loyalist side of the loyalist were full of praise for the UVF’s actions…’

This is echoed by a report in the Irish Independent, which also refutes the claims that other leading ‘pro-peace’ UVF terrorist leaders had now turned their backs on the so-called Beast in the wake of the violence, after an earlier rift:

‘The UVF leader known as the ‘Beast of the East’, who is being blamed for the invasion of a nationalist enclave in east Belfast last week, has enhanced his standing within the terrorist organisation through his actions, sources in the unionist community say.

The 48-year-old gang leader has received public support from major UVF players…’

Indeed. Not to mention meetings with senior representatives of the DUP, the dominant political force of the British Unionist population in Ireland, and officials from the regional power-sharing administration in the North, which includes Sinn Féin.

Yet again, the British minority on the island of Ireland proves that it is violence, and the threat of violence, which gives it form and influence. At its crudest, for Irish politics it is British guns in British hands that carries the greatest weight – and gives the greatest rewards.

A lesson that is not lost on others.

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The C-Word Is… Collusion

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Incredible news today that an official investigation into the Loughinisland Massacre has concluded that there was no collusion or co-operation between Unionist terrorists and the Royal Ulster Constabulary or RUC, the disbanded former paramilitary police force in the North of Ireland. The 1994 attack on a local, rural pub in County Down resulted in the murder of six Irish civilians, including an 87 year old man, by gunmen from the British terrorist group the UVF. Since the killings speculation has been rife that RUC officers in the area covered up for and protected the terrorists. It has also been suggested the some members of the RUC were aware of the imminent attack before hand and allowed it to go ahead.

The report by the Police Ombudsman for Northern Ireland has concluded that, though vital physical evidence related to the crime was mishandled or destroyed and that no proper investigation was made into related Unionist terrorist activities in the region, there was no act of ‘collusion’ between the RUC and the UVF.

From RTÉ:

‘A report by Northern Ireland’s Police Ombudsman into the RUC’s handling of the Loughinisland atrocity 17 years ago has found there were failings in the police investigation into the murders.

Failures include the unauthorised destruction of the killers’ get-away car and the failure to investigate properly the link between the Loughinisland shootings and other terrorist attacks.

Al Hutchinson’s report says the original police inquiry lacked ‘effective leadership and investigative diligence’.

However, it said there is ‘insufficient’ evidence of collusion between the group behind the attack and the security forces.’

The Irish Times points out some of the failures in the original RUC investigation highlighted in the report including:

‘Records were missing.

The car used by the UVF was improperly destroyed 10 months after the attack after lying outside a police station exposed to the elements.

Police failed to investigate properly the link between the Loughinisland shootings and other terrorist attacks.

Failures in the management of the murder incident room in the early stages and in the management of the computer system used by the investigation may also have resulted in the loss of evidential opportunities.’

That the Ombudsman’s can claim, in the context of the conflict in the North of Ireland and the notorious record of the RUC, that there was no collusion between the official and unofficial arms of Britain’s counter-insurgency war in Ireland is beyond belief.

British paramilitary police in Ireland co-operating with British paramilitary terrorists in Ireland? Same old story, same old conflict.

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Northern Conflict Requires Thoughtful Analysis Not Lazy Clichés

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Journalist Fionola Meredith in the Guardian on some of the background to the UVF-led Unionist attacks on the Nationalist Short Strand enclave in East Belfast over the last two nights. In her opinion (echoed by others) the recent appearances of new Unionist paramiltary wall murals, banners and flags in parts of the city show that:

‘the skirmishes just down the road are not random or arbitrary outbreaks of inexplicable violence, as they may appear to outside observers, but the product of an increasingly visible loyalist rage. The appearance of tame-looking loyalist elder statesmen during Queen Elizabeth’s recent visit to the Republic gives no sense of the reality on the streets of inner east Belfast, where attacking their Catholic neighbours is a way for blood-hungry young loyalists to gain status and rank in the notoriously volatile command structure of paramilitary organisations.’

Furthermore,

‘It’s true that there is a palpable sense of discontent in loyalist communities, a kind of resentful longing for the old days of pride and primacy.

Yet that’s rather too glib. It implies that mounting orchestrated and unprovoked attacks on Catholic neighbourhoods is in some way an inevitable outworking of loyalist victimhood – an argument that conveniently allows the perpetrators off the hook.’

As I pointed out here, there is far more to this story than the lazy, glib soundbites that some in the mainstream media in Ireland or beyond are trotting out. Reaching for the well-worn clichés of ‘sectarianism’ and ‘tribalism’ is to fundamentally misrepresent what has happened in Belfast and to obscure the underlying causes of the conflict in the first place. We are watching the final death spasms of Britain’s colonial adventures in Ireland and it is only by viewing the conflict in that light that one can begin to understand where we are now – and where we may be going.

 

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PSNI Were Intended Target

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The PSNI paramilitary police in the North of Ireland believe injuries suffered by the Press Association photographer Niall Carson, who was shot in the leg while covering the UVF attacks in Belfast last night, may have been the result of collateral fire, and that the intended target was PSNI officers.

According to the BBC:

‘Just before midnight, a number of shots were fired and a press photographer was shot in his right leg.

[Assistant Chief Constable] ACC Finlay said it would be a “very strange development” if people were targetting journalists and said it was “more likely” that someone was trying to target police.

“It would be odd to target a journalist in this particular way, but it would not be odd to target police officers and there were police resources round about where those journalists were standing.”

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