Earlier in the summer I was discussing the UVF’s East Belfast battalion with a journalist from one of the daily newspapers in Northern Ireland. They were asking me about the state of play within militant loyalism 25 years on from the signing of the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement.
I posited that the UVF as a whole was up to its neck in drug money; if they were not directly benefiting from their East Belfast comrades involvement in the illicit drug trade then they would have stood down the unit.
Little did I know then that my words would prove prophetic.
It seems that the UVF have now responded to this criticism – rife amongst their own supporters – that they are merely there to make money off the backs of their own community. Defending it from attack and transforming its fortunes are secondary concerns, even if they factor at all.
With the latest revelations that the Shankill based leadership have stood down one of its rogue factions, has the worm finally turned?
It is impossible to keep track of how many times the Paramilitary Crime Task Force have raided East Belfast UVF linked properties, seizing drugs and cash and arresting suspected members of the unit former Chief Constable Sir George Hamilton once called a “mid range organised crime gang.” The number must run into the hundreds, if not thousands. With all these arrests it seemed to close watchers of paramilitarism like the UVF in that part of Northern Ireland had more members or suspected members than anywhere else. Perhaps even more members now than 30 years ago!
The sort of scrutiny the East Belfast gang, known colloquially to some of us as “The Yardies” (a play on Jamaican gangs in London and the close proximity to the shipyard cranes in East Belfast) have been under has also been felt by the UVF on the Shankill and in other areas.
UVF representatives in places outside Belfast have been challenged by their families and communities for their suspected involvement in criminality ever since I first became involved in assisting the group to move beyond violence over 20 years ago. Then the UVF’s involvement in the drugs trade was a lot less pronounced than the Provisional IRA’s and, certainly, the dabbling of the INLA or UDA. All paramilitary groups had split personalities in them; people who would tell you in one breath that “you can’t be a loyalist and a drug dealer” – and, yet, frequently they were both.
In my critically acclaimed book, UVF: Behind the Mask, I detailed – probably in a less harsh way than they deserved – how the UVF in North Belfast and East Antrim had started to sell drugs in a bid to open up a new revenue stream for themselves in 2003-04. It had allegedly been the initiative of one younger member in Monkstown who had considerable sway with older leadership figures. Selling drugs could give them the flash clothes, new cars and disposable income they never really had. It was an easy route that ended with the Shankill leadership standing the area’s leadership down and it almost killed off a conflict transformation initiative I led on with Billy Mitchell, the former UVF Chief of Staff in the mid 1970s who had become the key strategist for the Progressive Unionist Party after his release from prison in 1990.
Yet the death-knell for the “Mitchell process” was not the dealing of drugs but the publication of a Police Ombudsman’s report into the murder of former UVF member Raymond McCord Junior who was part of the feared Mountvernon gang led by Mark Haddock and Gary Haggarty.
Haggarty was subsequently outed as a Covert Human Intelligence Source (CHIS) by the PONI report, which led to me and a member of the PUP being summoned to Mountvernon to be interrogated about what we knew of Haggarty’s treachery. Billy Mitchell had died the previous July thereby removing our mentor and protection for the East Antrim Conflict Transformation Forum (EACTF). The honest truth and answer then was we knew nothing. Billy had trusted Haggarty and was betrayed. We all were. And the EACTF initiative floundered with the UVF deciding not to end their armed campaign formally until 2009. As far as I was concerned Haggarty had been the UVF Brigade Staff’s choice to take over from Rab Warnock and Billy Greer, the former brigadier and his deputy who ruled the local UVF from their powerbase in Monkstown. I knew both men very well and got to know Haggarty after he was introduced to me by Billy Mitchell.
I understood that to get anything done – i.e. getting the UVF to disarm and demobilize – we needed to work with the local commander to persuade him and his team of the merits of going out of business. Importantly, like Billy Mitchell, we could see the corrosive effect of drugs and criminality on the local communities we were trying to transform and how it risked keeping the UVF in place longer as its members diverted their attentions to illicit money making schemes separate from what they regarded as their first principle to defend their communities from militant republicans.
By appointing Haggarty, the UVF seemed appeared serious about stamping out drugs.
The reality was they were not. I recall meeting with Gary Haggarty and Billy Mitchell at the LINC Resource Centre in North Belfast where I challenged Haggarty over a story in the Sunday World that alleged he had overseen the importation of several kilos of cocaine from France in 2004 (the drugs were allegedly smuggled in the coach of UVF members returning from the Somme in July that year). I was livid and told Haggarty that he was not serious about transforming the UVF or loyalist communities beyond violence, criminality and leeching off his community. The other person in the room – who was close to Haggarty and Mitchell – said Mitchell was surprised yet impressed that I had the confidence to dress down a UVF commander, something he hadn’t seen in all his time involved in militant loyalism.
What made this all the more remarkable was that I was nobody other than a concerned member of the community who believed the time had come for all paramilitary groups to disband.
I still believe that all these years later.
And so, following my evidence to the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee on 18 October, it is why I am celebrating the decision by the UVF to do what I never thought they had the confidence to do: stand down one of their most notorious units who have criminality hardwired into their DNA.
Many people who have been terrorized by the East Belfast UVF gang will say that the Shankill leadership should have expelled the faction years ago, though I understand the paramilitary dynamics that made this difficult.
Some years ago I spoke to two alleged UVF commanders outside Belfast – in different parts of the province – who both said that to stand down the East Belfast UVF would provoke an “LVF moment”. I knew what they meant for the UVF had only ever stood down one of its units once before when they accused Billy Wright of treachery – he went against the peace process – and expelled him and his Mid Ulster UVF in the mid-1990s.
Justifiably, there is concern today that the East Belfast UVF – including the real leader who is said to stay in the shadows in North Down and whose name is never mentioned in public – will seek to wreak vengeance on the UVF’s Shankill-based Brigade Staff.
What form that retaliation takes will worry those in the working class communities who want paramilitaries to go away for good.
My own sources anticipate a violent response. They have taken precautions to increase their personal security.
However, the ball is now firmly in the court of the PSNI and the Paramilitary Crime Task Force – and their partners in MI5 – who need to step up and neutralize any threat of internecine feuding.
For years loyalists who I know have accused the security services of stoking tensions by paying agent provocateurs to sow division within loyalism. Therefore, there is an onus on law enforcement and the intelligence agencies to protect the integrity of the group transition process finally underway.
That the UVF have responded to the challenges I and others have leveled at them to completely leave the stage is to be welcomed.
Yet, when all is said and done, it will be for working class communities to judge for themselves whether the UVF has truly cleaned up its ACT or whether this is simply another way to obfuscate and resist their eventual move towards total disarmament, demobilization and reintegration.
Only time will tell whether the strategic decision taken by the UVF Brigade Staff will pay dividends for the peace process.