Who is “Winkie Irvine”, really?
A source I spoke to in the wake of my revelation that Winkie Irvine had been expelled from the UVF confirmed to me just how disliked the former UVF commander actually was inside his own paramilitary group.
Then he said something very interesting.
“Many people,” he told me, “believed there were two sides to Winkie and you only ever saw one of those.”
I agree.
In fact, I would go further and suggest that there are in fact two Winkies.
Let me introduce you to both of them.
Winston Gibney Junior was born on 30th June 1975 to Winston Gibney Senior and his partner Elizabeth Irvine (nee Braiden). Winston Junior grew up in Hopewell Crescent, just off the Crumlin Road.
He spent his early years, by some accounts, doing what some wayward youth typically did: drinking, allegedly getting high on glue, and generally being an all-round nuisance to the local community.
He was just the sort of person ripe for recruitment.
The question is by whom?
By the time Winston Gibney was in his mid-teens in the early 1990s, the UVF had begun to wind down its military campaign as it engaged in a twin-track approach of talking and killing.
It is alleged he was ‘press-ganged’ into the organisation around this time for some minor anti-social behaviour transgression.
This was a time when the UVF was extremely active, outpacing its rivals in terms of killings.
It was also the time when individuals like Mark Haddock and Gary Haggarty were working their way up the ranks of the UVF in the Mountvernon area of North Belfast.
They had similar profiles to Gibney and, although older, were just as impressionable.
It was into this maelstrom that young Winston Gibney became acquainted with the UVF.
Some former members of the UVF’s B Company ‘team’ recall him as a bottle boy in the Liverpool Club. A few members of the team referred to him, rather unkindly, as “Gunga Din” after the water-carrying protagonist of Rudyard Kipling’s famous poem – “It was ‘Din! Din! Din! / ‘You ’eathen, where the mischief ’ave you been? / ‘You put some juldee in it / ‘Or I’ll marrow you this minute / ‘If you don’t fill up my helmet, Gunga Din!’”
On 13th October 1994 the UVF called a ceasefire following several years of secret talks with republicans and Irish government officials.
By now Winston Gibney was going by an alias, “Winston Irvine”.
Some say he felt his mother’s married name sounded “less Catholic” than his father’s name. In any event, he made a shift from being a water carrying bottle boy to being the secretary of the Liverpool Club in record time.
Throughout the remainder of the 1990s young Winkie Irvine established himself in a position of influence.
By the late 1990s the Liverpool’s former chief bottle washer positioned himself to take over from the local B Company commander who was accused of stealing money from the club’s coffers.
It was in the years afterwards that Winkie Irvine, as he was now calling himself, rose to prominence within the wider West Belfast UVF.
He began to make a name for himself.
Many of those opportunities he managed to manufacture, though they would have deadly consequences for the community around him.
Perhaps the most infamous came in the summer of 2000.
In August 2000 Irvine was drinking outside the Rex Bar when a UDA affiliated band was attacked. They had been carrying an LVF flag when, it is alleged, Winkie attacked them, thereby kicking off the Shankill feud.
Winkie soon developed a reputation for hand-to-hand combat when, a few years later in 2003, he was involved in serious disorder in France following a clash with what the media reported were “supporters of Jean Marie Le Pen.” Then he was attending the inaugural trip of the 1st Shankill Somme Society to the French battlefields.
A year later the Sunday World reported how some of those from the UVF-affiliated Somme group were involved in smuggling illegal narcotics. I know what some of you may be thinking – the Sunday World! Well, I thought the same at the time. In fact, in my role as a community activist working with Billy Mitchell, the former UVF Director of Operations turned PUP strategist, on the East Antrim Conflict Transformation Forum (EACTF), I asked for a meeting with the newly installed UVF commander for the local area, Gary Haggarty.
In a meeting between me and Haggarty, facilitated by Mitchell, I put the allegations to Haggarty.
I demanded to know if they were true, after all he was supposed to be backing the EACTF initiative and seemed to be talking from two sides of his mouth on conflict transformation while engaging in criminality.
Haggarty admitted it to me that the story was true. I was angry with the UVF for they had stood down Billy Greer and Rab Warnock because of similar allegations about drug dealing.
I realised then that the UVF was not serious about “leaving the stage” and instead was becoming more deeply involved in criminality under the guise of “conflict transformation.”
In the turn towards greater criminality one name began to find its way into conversations with people around me. Someone with a reputation for being “dangerous” who we should be “wary of at all times”: Winston Irvine.
In the years after the Somme debacle, Irvine had climbed to prominence.
He was alleged by some to have been involved at some level in the serious rioting that took place on the Springfield Road in September 2005.
Readers may remember this as a time of severe inter-community disorder and the last time the British Army was deployed onto the streets. The Secretary of State, Peter Hain, even went as far as to designate the UVF’s ceasefire over.
A few months later Winkie was ‘in action’ again.
As the newspaper report below indicates 2006 saw Gibney rack up more convictions when he attacked police officers.
It was in the context of these street brawls that members of the EACTF were being summoned “up to the Shankill” where Winkie Irvine was in a key position to close down their initiative and wrest control of its networks.
It didn’t help in all of this that the EACTF’s architect Billy Mitchell died.
Nor did it help when Gary Haggarty was exposed as a state agent in the aftermath of the publication of the Police Ombudsman’s Operation Ballast report, which looked into allegations of collusion surrounding the murder of Raymond McCord Junior a decade earlier.
And, so, dear reader, by 2007 the field had been cleared of any meaningful opposition to UVF plans to take over the EACTF initiative, and, in Billy Mitchell’s memorable phrase begin their “colonisation of the community sector.”
Winkie became instrumental in the incorporation of the EACTF model into the so-called ACT initiative, first on the Shore Road and later on the Shankill.
Incidentally, 2007 was also the year when 31-year-old Winston Gibney changed his name by deed poll to Winston Irvine.
And, there, dear reader, the rest is history. Or is it?
To be continued…