Document released: British saw UDA as playing ‘constructive’ role

Jack Holland, jholland@irishecho.com, Irish Echo

January 15 - 21, 2003

The release of secret British government documents relating to Northern Ireland under the 30-year rule has revealed that London regarded the Ulster Defense Association as a useful and constructive “channel” at a time when it was engaged in one of the bloodiest sectarian campaigns in the history of the Troubles.

The unclassified documents go back to 1972. The media has focused mainly on government discussions about the possibility of moving hundreds of thousands of Catholics across the border, with a view to repartitioning the country. But the evidence of such a benign attitude on the part of the authorities to the UDA will be seen by many nationalists as either dangerously naïve or, more sinisterly, as proof of a policy of collaboration with loyalist death squads.

The evidence comes in the form of a line from a letter sent from the Ministry of Defense to the prime minister, who was then Edward Heath of the Conservative Party. It concerned government policy toward the UDA based on an assessment of the organization’s position. It stated: “An important function of the UDA is to channel into a constructive and disciplined direction Protestant energies which might otherwise become disruptive.”

It was dated Nov. 29, 1972. The very day it was written two UDA gunmen shot dead Gerard Gearon in Belfast. He was a 22-year-old Catholic barman who had the misfortune to use a taxi from a Catholic-owned company in North Belfast. His killers were two fellow passengers. Gearon is one of the forgotten victims of the Northern Ireland conflict. The month that he was murdered saw another 19 violent deaths, five of them at the hands of the organization described by the British as “constructive” and “disciplined.” But for the UDA, November had been comparatively quiet. In July 1972, the organization murdered at least 18 Catholics, and may have been involved in the deaths of several Protestants, mistaken for Catholics. December of that year was also an active month for channeling Protestant energies. In one attack alone on a Catholic pub in Derry on Dec. 20, the UDA murdered five customers, four of them Catholic. The UDA was responsible for another six deaths that month, among them one of the most horrible in the history of the conflict -- that of 32-year-old Patrick Benstead. Benstead, a mentally retarded Catholic from East Belfast, was kidnapped and severely tortured by an East Belfast UDA unit under the command of Ned McGreery. He had a cross branded on his back before being shot in the head.

Of the 121 sectarian assassinations carried out by loyalists that year, at least 71 were the UDA’s work. And that was just the beginning. The UDA continued its campaign of bloodshed and mayhem for another 20 years while still enjoying the status of a perfectly legal organization. From 1972-92, when it was banned, the UDA murdered another 300 or more people and, most famously, helped organize the overthrow of the first experiment in power-sharing government in Northern Ireland, in May 1974, a role involving widespread intimidation and sectarian assassination.

The question, therefore, arises, how it was that the British government came to have such a benign view of such a murderous organization? In contrast, the authorities had no problem banning the UDA’s rival for loyalist support, the Ulster Volunteer Force, even though in the murder stakes, some years it trailed way behind.

The UDA’s relationship with the authorities is undoubtedly a problematic one and has led to accusations from nationalists of deliberate collaboration, as in the 1989 murder of Patrick Finucane, the human rights lawyer for which the group claimed responsibility under the guise of the Ulster Freedom Fighters. The words of the MoD letter to Downing Street seem to reflect what became a constant of government policy toward the UDA. It was that the UDA’s leadership was in fact acting as a brake on the “hotheads” who wanted to unleash civil war. The UDA leadership did its best to cultivate this notion, often at the same time as giving the go-ahead to sectarian murder. In 1972, during the trial of UDA men John White and Charles Harding Smith in London on gunrunning charges, an assistant chief constable from Belfast sent a character reference to the court claiming that Harding Smith “had been of some use” to the security forces. Smith and White were acquitted and were allowed to return to Belfast, where they proceeded to help organize and carry out a string of murders, including that of a prominent Catholic politician.

UDA members were not targeted for internment until February 1973, and then never more than a handful were picked up. It took another 19 for the organization to be outlawed, though its front, the nonexistent UFF, was banned in June 1973.

In the early 1970s, when the UDA commanded about 20,000 members, and controlled whole areas of Belfast, it is possible that the British, acting on the advice of their security chiefs, simply avoided taking on the organization for fear of opening a second front in the war against terrorism. But that excuse vanished by about 1977, when the UDA dwindled. Yet it took another 15 years for the ban to be imposed. Until the late 1980s, the authorities were still briefing reporters that the UDA was not involved in violence.

Of course, the British were not the only ones to have illusions about the UDA. In the early 1970s, at the height of the sectarian murder campaign, the Official IRA offered to go on joint-patrol with the UDA to help stamp out sectarian killings.