Top Issue 1-2024

15 January 1998 Edition

Resize: A A A Print

Respectable fingers on the trigger

By Mary Nelis

The RUC were still keeping an open mind on the murder of Terry Enright, when David Ervine of the PUP announced to the media that this latest sectarian killing was the work of the LVF.

He elaborated on his statement by alleging that someone considered ``respectable'' in the community, is directing the activities of the LVF. We presume by `community' he means the loyalist/Unionist people.

No one in the Republican/Nationalist community will be surprised by Ervine's announcement. There is an abundance of factual evidence linking the British government, Unionist politicians and respectable individuals to the murky world of the security services, both MI5, MI6 and all the spin-off groups that have been involved in counter-insurgency in Ireland, since this conflict began.

It is a recorded fact that the murder of Irish nationalists even predates partition. In the last century, the rise of the Orange Order was the signal for a Holy War in Belfast. The Orange Card was played again and again, to subvert and control any aspirations by the increasing Catholic community in the North to equality and recognition of their rights to exist.

Home Rule signalled an outpouring of sectarian hatred against Catholics and even Protestant radicals, resulting in years of murder, arson, looting and terror for the struggling nationalists of the North East.

The political wing of the Orange Order, the Unionist Party, was born out of the bloodletting violence of the 1886 riots. The ``call to arms'' by the Unionist Party respectables, heard so often during the past 35 years, was used most effectively in 1893 when the second Home Rule Bill was introduced. The birth of the UVF in 1912 had its aftermath in partition.

In 1922, thousands of armed Protestant, watched benevolently by the British government, launched vicious attacks on the Catholic population of Belfast. Over 230 people were killed, 172 of them Catholics, and over 1,000 people were injured.

Political murder was the birthmark of the Six Counties and the structures of the state were organised in such a way that collusion between the official and unofficial murder gangs became central to its very existence.

Loyalist paramilitaries found a ready home in the various Orange Lodges and in 1965 the meeting between the two Prime Ministers, Sean Lemass and Terence O'Neill, was again perceived as a threat to the Union which heralded yet another era of Catholic persecution and brought the UVF and the guns once more onto the streets of Belfast.

Those respectable politicians who directed the attacks against the Civil Rights Movement could safely claim that they were defending their Protestant state for their Protestant people. Who would stop them after 50 years of benign approval from Westminster?

Any moves by Nationalists to effectively challenge such an undemocratic entity, irrespective of whether it was peaceful, constitutional or violent, was met with armed opposition by the apparatus set up by the respectables in control of the government.

The arrival of British soldiers to protect Britain's interests in its colonial entity reinforced the existing milita of the RUC and B Specials. The B Specials were replaced by the UDR, a modern, highly trained and effective military organisation, which later became as notorious as the organisation it replaced. Its most respectable member was the Official Unionist politician Ken Maginnis, a major in the UDR who claimed that ``I never came across a bad apple in the UDR, only bruised apples.'' Ken's ``bruised apples'' later found their way into the murder gangs of the UDA, who formed the paramilitary support for the loyalist workers strike, which oversaw the collapse of the Sunningdale Power sharing government.

Other ``bruised apples'' were involved in the Miami Showband murders, and the Shankill Butcher gangs of the early 70s.

The close links between Unionist politicians and the intelligence services were exposed by the former military intelligence officers Colin Wallace and Fred Holroyd. ``Respectable'' names have surfaced continually in the past 30 years in the illegal activities of groups like Tara, Ulster Resistance, the Ulster Clubs, the Inner Circle and other shadowy organisations. Their activities have been recorded in books by Kennedy Lyndsay and Colin Wallace and in a new book soon to be published in the USA. We know their relationships with people like Nelson, Ginger Baker and the late Billy Wright.

We know as we move towards peace and an end to conflict, they will be doing what they know best, organising the killing of Catholics. We know the British government know who they are.

David Ervine should come clean and tell the truth about the relationship between the loyalist military command and the British and Irish intelligence services. He should also name the respectable directors of murder whose mouths proclaim peace but whose fingers are always on the trigger.

An Phoblacht
44 Parnell Sq.
Dublin 1
Ireland