On Behalf of Class–The Officials and The UVF: Connal Parr

Connal Parr is a PhD candidate, teaching assistant and freelance writer based at Queens Ubiversity, Belfast.  Since completing his undergraduate Modern History BA at Oxford University and MA with Distinction at Queen’s, he has been published in academic journals ( Irish Political Studies, Irish Studies Review ) and printed and online media ( Fortnight, the detail ).  Connal is the Grandson of former SDLP politician and Westminster MP Paddy Devlin.

On Behalf of Class – The Official IRA and UVF

 

 

Introduction

 

Relations between Loyalists and Republicans should not be romanticized. The largest and deadliest paramilitary group during the Troubles – the Provisional IRA – tended, at best, to look down on Loyalists as a ‘lower class’ of combatant. As part of Sinn Féin’s retrospective, largely dubious ‘socialist’ analysis, the British security forces have been revised as the main problem while Loyalists have increasingly been cast as part of a (duped) ‘fellow working class’. However the only fraternal relationships of substance to spring up in the jails during the Troubles occurred between the Official IRA and UVF. This dialogue was mirrored on the outside when, from 1972 until 1974, Chief of Staff of the Official IRA Cathal Goulding met regularly with UVF leaders Gusty Spence, Ken Gibson, Jim Hanna, and Billy Mitchell in Belfast and Dublin to discuss areas of mutual political agreement at the height of some of the worst violence of the Troubles. According to private papers of Gusty Spence, the UVF leadership voted to meet both the Provisional and Official IRA in January 1974, and at subsequent meetings at the Old House Pub in Albert Street the UVF and OIRA swapped captives – Protestants held by the OIRA and Catholics captured by the UVF (Irish News, 30 April 2012). Some of these meetings were curtailed following the Dublin and Monaghan bombings in May 1974 (Tiernan, 2006: 141–5), but the Officials kept channels to progressive Loyalist leaders throughout the 1970s, especially inside Crumlin Road Gaol and Long Kesh (see Nelson, 1984: 105; Garland, 2001: 119–28, 213–4; Novosel, 2013: 73–5).

 

At the beginning some of the relationship was sustained by the misguided belief that the Official IRA could take on the Provisionals and eventually overwhelm them through force of arms (Nelson, 1984: 121). In early 1973 the OIRA ceasefire led to the release of the organization’s internees, and the increasing focus of the security forces against the Provisionals gave rise to suggestions that the ‘Stickies’ were ‘almost as strong’ as the PIRA in Northern Ireland (Patterson, 1989: 149). This of course never materialized and also underestimates the political approach the Officials were developing which deliberately scaled back their armed operations. However, along with Gusty Spence’s considerable contacts with the Officials in the Maze, other ex-UVF volunteers such as the current Progressive Unionist Party (PUP) leader Billy Hutchsinson have regularly spoken of how instrumental his discussions with Officials were in forming a class-based analysis of the conflict, as well as reinforcing his commitment to disengage from political violence (Hall, 2005: 21; Novosel, 2013: 216).

 

 

Seamus Lynch – ‘You’ve heard the old saying the good guys lost, right?’

 

A longstanding advocate of Official Republican contacts with Loyalists was Seamus Lynch, who met with Loyalist combatants both in and outside Long Kesh throughout the 1970s and 80s. It is clear that Lynch’s confidence in these discussions was linked to his trade union background, which was of paramount importance in terms of developing an understanding of the Protestant working class:

 

As someone who lived in the area with Protestants and Catholics, in our area poverty

didn’t go down three Catholic houses and then jump to Protestant houses and what

have you. So even being involved in the trade unions at the docks and the ITGWU, you

were fighting continuously on conditions. If you look at that stage and perhaps still

today, the bone of the trade union movement was from Protestant working-class areas:

the shipyard, all the places like that, and how we organized the trade union movement.

We asked ourselves these must be thinkers; well if they’re prepared to stand up for

their rights in the workplace, and we’re saying to them look you know the Catholic

community are being deprived of their rights in housing, and jobs and all of those

areas. Surely they’ll understand that. So let’s at least open the dialogue with them and

see where they’re coming from.

 

With the rejection of physical force solutions (‘because we seen out of a million and a half of the population a million people are Protestant and Loyalist’), Official Republicans endeavoured ‘to create an understanding within that society of what the important issues were (Seamus Lynch, interview with the author, 19 January 2012).

At this point it is worth returning to the period immediately preceding the Troubles and the failure of former physical force campaigns which compelled a major shift in the thinking of the Republican movement, which embraced a distinctly Leftist curve from the early 1960s. This was based, in part, on the failure of the Border Campaign (1956–62), as Lynch recalls:

There were very clear instructions to the Volunteers: no activity in Belfast. There was a

Border Campaign and you know, written into what it was all about – with Sean Cronin

as Chief of Staff – was we don’t want sectarian strife. So they were conscious of it at

that stage even, but that wasn’t there with the Provos because a big percentage of the

Provos joined to do that.[1]

 

With the furore of events in 1968 and 1969 came large numbers of young males joining the paramilitaries in both communities. Lynch is adamant that the conditions which gave rise to young men joining the paramilitaries in Northern Ireland were universal:

 

I watched these boys in the New Lodge, growing up I think when I was about 24, 25,

26 when the Troubles broke out – so I would have known a lot of people in these areas,

in Unionist areas. You could’ve really told who joined the paramilitaries, ‘I bet you

he’s in the UDA, he’s in the UVF’. And the perfect example of that was in the New

Lodge there was a guy called Campbell. Bit of a thug about the dance halls. And his

mate was Jim Craig, a very prominent Loyalist, who was the same – bit of a fighter, bit

of a hard about the dance halls, beating people up and that. I could have sat, when these

organizations were springing up, and tell you now ‘He would have joined the UDA, he

would have joined the Provos’. Bobby Campbell, who was Craig’s mate about these

dances – he’ll be a Provo.’ They weren’t politically motivated, they weren’t thinkers,

they were just physical. So here’s these two guys, Troubles break out, and they retreat

back into their camps, join the paramilitaries, but still meet at the weekend to have a

drink and a gamble and that kind of stuff.

 

Also across the board was a sense that some of the young men were not entirely aware of the ramifications their actions and membership of paramilitary groups might bring: ‘This wasn’t people that sat down and said – “I’m going to join because of my politics or what I want to achieve”. Many of them would find themselves in prison for long periods: “I didn’t know this was going to happen”. You know realizing then, their marriages breaking up, their children growing up and not even knowing them. So you had the same thing within Loyalism as well’ (Seamus Lynch, interview with the author, 19 January 2012).

In the summer of 1971 the first of many bitter feuds between the Provisional and Official IRAs erupted. The two factions despised one another so much that it was deemed safer for Official IRA prisoners to share cells with Loyalists rather than their fellow Republicans in Crumlin Road, the UVF agreeing to protect incoming OIRA volunteers (Crawford, 1999: 36). Seamus Lynch himself was interned in October 1971 (Hanley & Millar, 2009: 170–1), but after his release the following year would return to consult with his Official cohorts as well as other incarcerated paramilitaries in the Maze. It was during these visits that he came to meet Gusty Spence:

 

I remember one stage, actually the Prison – well the Northern Ireland Office –

facilitated discussions under the auspices of ‘Prison conditions in Long Kesh’. And that

was the first time I ever met Gusty Spence. And it was a powerful experience, because

I was going back into Long Kesh, and I was able to walk out later on which was great!

It was Malachy McGurran and myself. And there’s this guy comes up to me in a three-

piece pinstripe suit, who I thought was one of the Prison Governors – it was Gusty

Spence. ‘Hello lads, pleased to meet you’, and I was just blown away by this. And then

you had the UDA man Sammy Smyth who was there from the outside, and he didn’t

like the idea of Gusty kind of holding centre stage, and external representatives of all

these groups all sitting round the table spent about half an hour talking about prison

conditions and then onto the main pitch, where do we go from here, what are youse

doing and all that? Our lad there was a guy called (Adrian) Clarke from Armagh. And

indeed there was a little contact that was made arising from that, but you were aware at

all stages that these people don’t fully control their leadership. With our leadership, we

said ‘the organization is with us’. And the fear of their leadership of this getting out

and what it may mean to them from within, that was always a problem. So we had a

situation whereby, and when you’re in prison you’ve a lot more time to think and read

and everything’s all eyes – inside, outside, upside down – everything. And the

feedback we were getting from the discussion with the UVF was in the main quite

positive.

 

Intriguingly, Lynch differentiates between Loyalists inside long Kesh and those who did not experience Spence’s guidance: ‘If you look at the UVF leadership it was only when Gusty in prison was giving these young prisoners energy and stuck it to them, involved them politically, get them involved in political discussion…there wasn’t the same degree of political development within the UVF (on the outside).’ Something important therefore was inculcated by the experience of prison itself, and gave birth to future leaders within Loyalism:

 

Prison is a great place, strange as it might sound, to get your thoughts together, to start

reading and realizing where you are. Gusty took that role and started engaging with the

right people in political debate, reading this and discussing. So by the time the Ervines

of this world and the Billy Mitchells came in – because he was an icon – he had the

capacity to take them boys under his wing and start to develop them politically. You’ll

find that from the Troubles, from 69 onwards, the Ervines, started to think, talk. That’s

the first real political development worth talking about. You had Ken Gibson, who

stood on a ticket the UVF-funded, but again it was just going forward with no political

platform. He couldn’t articulate. Ervine was one of the best operators. And what Ervine

appealed to was the thoughts of the Protestant working-class, how they felt loyal – but

‘we’ve been left behind. We’re seen as the bad guys, as the crooks, as the drug-

pushers, we’re not – and all we want is…’, and he could articulate that (Seamus Lynch,

interview with the author, 19^th January 2012).

 

 

The Hunger Strike Period

 

When the second Hunger Strike commenced in 1981 the Workers’ Party and independent socialists like Paddy Devlin and Gerry Fitt – both by then exiled from the SDLP – refused to support the protest, paying the price for it within their own community.[2] Lynch outlined his reasons for not backing the H-Block campaign:

It was to support the 5 demands, or do you not? If you didn’t support them then you

were quite happy for these people to die, and the point we were trying to make was we

are much more concerned about the prisoners per se than a group who are going on

hunger strike; we’re not going isolate them from prisoners or people that may have

been arrested and imprisoned for thieving or whatever, maybe to feed their family or

because of the hardship they’re enduring elsewhere. So you couldn’t differentiate –

prison is prison, the big difference made was “they’re there for political reasons”. Now,

Paddy and myself had made the point that the people who were in prison for other

misdemeanours are there for political reasons. Because the government of the day isn’t

creating the employment, the atmosphere, the economic circumstances to allow them to

have a proper job, to feed their family, and to have an adequate standard of living. So

we seen them as political prisoners. If it hadn’t have been the economic circumstances

that they had to endure, they wouldn’t have been in prison either. So the definition of

political reasoning works across the board (Interview with the author, 19 January

2012).

 

This authentic socialist analysis of the Hunger Strike period is echoed by Noël Browne. Recognized as one of the most formidable figures on the Irish Left in the 20^th century,[3] Browne was approached by Southern sympathizers of Sinn Féin to support the H-Block protest:

 

I agreed to do so. There was but one condition: that the campaign for civilian clothes

for prisoners be extended to all prisoners in our jails. As a socialist I believed that the

majority of persons in our jails were products of broken homes, unemployment,

illiteracy, poverty and hunger. The reply from those in charge of the hunger campaign

was that the Provisionals would not accept my socialist analysis of the origins of

criminality (Browne, 1986: 233).

 

Aside from the immediate political ramifications, Lynch also found the wider reverberations of the hunger strike abhorrent:

 

At the height of the hunger strike, at the top of the New Lodge Road, there was a

milkman’s son got attacked by a mob. Delivering the milk, his 14 year old son was

helping him, and they threw stones and bricks and what have you. And the milkfloat

crashed and it killed the young 14 year old boy, outright. And the father died in

hospital two or three days afterwards.[4] Now I was devastated, devastated. This was my

constituency and to see these people in my constituency behave, not them all but. So I

did an in interview with television, condemned it, ‘fascism’ against people doing

service to the community. So I thought to myself, I’m going to go to this boy’s funeral,

and it’s in Rathcoole. And the abuse I got over that from the Catholic community.

That’s when I lost my seat in ’81. It’s because we were standing up and saying ‘This is

wrong. This is a wave of emotion with tribal tendencies. Ok, people have been killed,

but you’ve spent the last lot of years killing people’.

 

Some members of the Workers’ Party were even more unequivocal in their contempt for the hunger strikers. With the upshot of dead Provisional IRA and INLA men, Des O’Hagan confessed, ‘The only thing I wish is there’d been more of them on it!’ (Interview with the author, 15 June 2012). Interestingly Official IRA prisoners mirrored their Loyalist counterparts in the way they began to recognize criminalization from March 1976 onwards (Hanley & Millar, 2009: 397–9), issues which came to a head during the H–Block protest. After much discussion on the outside, those Official IRA volunteers convicted after the Spring of 1976 began to accept criminal status in exactly the same manner as Loyalists did, despite the fact prisoners of both groups had enjoyed Special Category Status and those who had been convicted before were still incarcerated under these terms. The reason for their acceptance of criminalization was identical: neither group wanted to be seen to be on the same side as the Provisional IRA prison protest.

Perhaps most unfortunately, Lynch recalls that the period from 1977 to 1981 was an encouraging time for Belfast City Council:

 

We had the wee group (including Frankie Millar, Harry Fletcher, John Carson and  

          Hughie Smyth, as well as Fitt and Devlin).[5] We were leading the agenda. It wasn’t

structured officially or anything like that, it was an unofficial caucus that made real

progress on those socio-economic issues, on the whole closure of the Gas Department,

on the whole threat of redundancies, and fought that in turn – unheard of on the City

Council. The Fire Brigade went on strike. I went round to the Fire Brigade’s Union,

come back to the council and put a motion to the council that this Council supports the

Firemen’s strike. Paddy and Fitt and all in behind me. And on the night you’d firemen

hanging from the rafters. That’s the first time in the history of Belfast City Council that

they supported an official trade union strike, because all the firemen were walking past.

So that was the way the whole thing developed, and it illustrated to me, because the big

issue, the big argument that many neutrals, some academic would make: ‘Seamus, the

reality is that Northern Ireland would never have changed to the way it is today if the

Provos hadn’t embarked on their campaign of terror’. The Hunger Strike undermined

everything. It intensified the sectarianism. The period on Belfast City Council from ’77

to ’81, and all sides will tell you, that was the most progressive, productive council in

years. But from ‘81 to ’85. Disaster, total disaster.

 

After losing his seat in the 1981 municipal elections Lynch concentrated on his trade union duties building up the second branch of the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union, working successfully with Paddy Devlin to expand its Protestant membership and improve its cross-community credentials.

Lynch regained his seat on Belfast City Council for Oldpark in 1985, and the following year polled one of the Workers’ Party’s best ever results in a Westminster election in a three-way by-election for North Belfast. He retained his Council seat in 1989 prior to slipping out of political life following the Workers’ Party split which produced Democratic Left. He comments on the present dispensation, and understands the frustration felt by the Protestant working-class in modern Northern Ireland:

 

The years of the Troubles has created the circumstances to allow a class-consciousness

to develop among Loyalists in Northern Ireland that they never developed before to the

extent that they have it today. What they lack today is the leadership to articulate that.

So what has developed now is working-class Loyalism recognizing how they’ve been

used and abused, and treated as second-class citizens. That people who already were

became extremely wealthy and in all the political and important positions in society on

the back of Loyalism. Today, from the death of Ervine, the development in class-

consciousness within the Protestant working-class lacks a structure and a leadership to

articulate that. Like we’re sitting with 108 members in an Assembly, and no Loyalist

voice is heard to articulate the feelings. So what I’m trying to say to you is that the

duration of the Troubles has indirectly educated the Protestant working class on a class

basis to an extent about poverty, social deprivation, and indeed over that duration you

had the traditional industries disappearing, shipyard flat. So their natural job positions

has disappeared. So they no longer have this. The best jobs that the working-class used

to go to no longer exist. So we get about 300 kids in the Shankill Road doing the 11-

plus and a handful of them have passed it.

 

Loyalists also see ‘their traditional enemy in the Provos with a major influence on the way forward in Northern Ireland’, ironically as ‘you have this “revolutionary” organization participating in Northern Ireland and major cuts, implementing Tory policy – and walking out of the Dáil for the same thing in the South’ (Seamus Lynch, interview with the author, 19 January 2012).

 

 

Conclusion

 

The UVF’s relationship with Official IRA volunteers was significant for two reasons. First, it highlighted Loyalism coming to an accommodation with a political tradition other than its own, with two constitutionally opposing ideologies cohering on socio-economic issues. In such an arrangement the aspirations of republicanism were not embraced in any way by Loyalists, but those who were willing came to understand that the militaristic – and frequently sectarian – methods of the Provisionals were not the sole representative ethos of Irish Republicanism as a whole. As Roy Garland pointed out, ‘Loyalists could see that OIRA were not hung on a united Ireland tomorrow’, and both groups ‘shared a commitment to working-class politics’ (Irish News, 30 April 2012).

The way a Workers’ Party candidate like Francis Cullen contested East Belfast in Westminster elections during the 1980s was significant not for the result but the symbolism (Des O’Hagan, interview with the author, 15 June 2012). The Workers’ Party did not stand a chance of ever winning the seat, but the principle of campaigning as enthusiastically as possible in the East was emblematic of anti-sectarian broadmindedness, and they were rewarded in June 1987 with double Sinn Féin’s vote in the constituency. Similarly in August 1981, when the SDLP once again stood aside to allow Owen Carron a free run following the death of Bobby Sands, the Workers’ Party fought Fermanagh South-Tyrone (Hanley & Millar, 2009: 426–7).

The political links and contacts between the Official IRA and UVF had first been cultivated in the compounds of Long Kesh, sowing the seeds for future cooperation: ‘The relationship built between the UVF and ourselves to this day has never broken in that sense, because we and them lads, they benefited a lot from their release from prison and going out into the community. Our objective was to create the circumstances that produced David Ervine and Billy Hutchinson. Articulate spokespersons on social and economic issues on behalf of their class.’ The vital aim, always, was to help ‘develop a class-conscious awareness within that Protestant working class. Knowing that it was there, knowing that their fathers had worked as shop stewards and trade unionists in the shipyard and all that. It has to be – any working class community there has to be that class-consciousness will develop because of the levels of poverty and social deprivation, in all of those areas’ (Seamus Lynch, interview with the author, 19 January 2012). Billy Hutchinson himself would later confirm deliberations with the OIRA helped him develop a view of ‘our society as one community rather than two’ (quoted in Hall, 2005: 22).

 

 

Coda

 

At a British Labour Party conference in the late-1980s, Seamus Lynch featured on a panel discussion with Gerry Fitt and a representative from the Irish Labour Party. Afterwards an English journalist approached Lynch and began comparing him with Gerry Adams. Both were once in the republican movement together but had since gone in separate directions. The journalist asked him what he made of this, dismissively proclaiming: ‘He’s now an MP and you’re only a councillor’. Lynch replied:

 

I says but the big difference is I have my integrity, and I am consistent with my

republican philosophy. Adams is there on the back of highly tribal politics and on the

back of dead hunger strikers – I said that’s the big difference in our organization. And

I’ll go home to my wife and kids with no votes, and not even to the council, rather than

behave in a sectarian manner and the tribalism which he has engaged in.

 

On some level Lynch returns to that isolated plane located by so few in Ulster politics, forged by the Labour movement and hard lived experience, connecting him on class rather than religious lines, representing his defining education:

 

Let me say to you that somebody like me, the second eldest in a family of 12 – no

education no form of education in that environment. Your education was in the

backstreets, in the docks, which was a jungle. You had to take a dig in the ‘gub to

survive and all of that. So you’re learning the hard way, into the trade union, you’re

fighting as a shop steward. So you’re getting your political education you know, right

from wrong, and you’re living in an environment where the Protestant people next door

were in as much poverty as you were. So it was an informal education that has stood by

me all those years to know right from wrong (interview with the author, 19 January

2012).