Testimony to Courage

The History of the Ulster Defence Regiment, 1969–1992

John Potter

• Publisher: Leo Cooper
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781783379842
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Irish History
• Index: History

The story of the British regiment created in Northern Ireland after the Troubles erupted in 1968, and the members who were killed amid the violence. The outbreak of "The Troubles" in Northern Ireland in 1968 found many of the local police and army auxiliary units outmoded or discredited. A new and unique force of part-time soldiers was created: The Ulster Defence Regiment. Drawing on roughly 125 interviews, A Testimony to Courage vividly describes the threat under which not just the soldiers but their families had to live, and records the murders of some of the 197 members killed as a result of terrorist attack. It addresses how the Regiment became mainly Protestant as a result of the loss of Nationalist support and recruits, and the constant criticism of the Irish government and Nationalist politicians. A final chapter records objectively the lessons to be learned from this unique experience. This book is not an official history, but a thorough record of the UDR's dramatic twenty-three-year existence and the experiences of its brave members.

CHAPTER ONE

The Ulster Special Constabulary

Warminister, in Wiltshire, the minutes ticking away to midnight, 30 June 1992. Rain has been falling steadily since a thunderstorm broke in the afternoon. In the white light of searchlight beams soldiers of the 1st Battalion The Royal Irish Rangers and The Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR) are drawn up in front of a mock fortification. The Commanding Officer of the Rangers gives the order “No more parades, march off”. The two guards wheel and march away, the band and pipers playing the marches of the two Regiments. The gates of the fort close behind them. From that moment the titles of the Royal Irish Rangers and the Ulster Defence Regiment have ceased to exist in the order of battle of the British army.

It is exactly 22 years and 91 days since the UDR came into existence, 22 years and three months of continuous operational duties. In that time a Regiment that began as a largely untrained, amateur part-time body of volunteers, motivated by their duty to protect their country against terrorist attack rather than by any enthusiasm for military service, had developed into a professional force, half of them full-time soldiers, and all of them regarded in their anti-terrorist role as the equals of the Regular Army soldiers sent to Northern Ireland on emergency tours. Successive General Officers Commanding (GOCs) have said that without the UDR the forces at their disposal would have been inadequate to contain paramilitary violence. The aim of this history is to gather together the story of the Regiment before memories dim and old soldiers fade away.

The UDR was unique. Never in modern times had a part-time force been raised as an integral part of the British Army to carry out military operations in its own country. Inevitably mistakes were made, by no means all the fault of the Regiment. Wherever the blame lay, the UDR came under sustained criticism throughout its existence. Much of this criticism was politically motivated, over-stated, and too often a distortion of the facts. So this history has a secondary aim – to set the record straight and to do justice to the loyalty, courage and steadfast determination of some 40,000 men and women who served in the ranks of the Regiment. Thirdly it is an attempt to describe to others what it was like to be a member of the UDR.

In December 1918, a month after the Great War had come to its weary end, a General Election was held throughout the United Kingdom. In Ireland the results were a decisive victory for Sinn Fein. Refusing to take up their seats in the British House of Commons, the successful candidates assembled at the Mansion House in Dublin on 21 January 1919 to set up the first independent Irish parliament, Dail Eireann.

Coincidentally on the same day a group of volunteers of the Irish Republican Army ambushed an explosives convoy at Soloheadbeg. It was not a very grand ‘convoy’, a horse and cart, the driver and a second council employee, and two policemen of the Royal Irish Constabulary. The two policemen were shot dead; their shooting was sanctioned in retrospect by the Dail. The first shots had been fired in the bloody Anglo-Irish War.

Initially the IRA concentrated its attacks on the Royal Irish Constabulary, a force composed of some 70% Catholics under a Catholic Inspector General. During 1920 176 policemen and fifty-four soldiers were killed, forty police barracks attacked, fifteen totally destroyed, and 351 of the smaller barracks, abandoned by their detachments, had been burnt out by the Volunteers.⁽¹⁾ The Constabulary, depleted by these attacks, by intimidation and by the inevitable drying up of new recruits, was reinforced in March 1920 by the Black and Tans, a paramilitary force composed mainly of ex-servicemen recruited in Britain, and, later in the summer, by a small Auxiliary Division of 1,500 ex-British Army officers. Their coming saw the beginning of a campaign of terror and counter-terror, with the excesses of one side matched by the excesses of the other.

In the Northern province of Ulster, and especially in the six counties which collectively had a Protestant majority, the IRA had been able to mount only limited attacks against the police. The main threat was the savage inter-communal rioting, breaking out in Londonderry in June, then spreading to Belfast. Violence erupted across the City and in July eighteen people were killed, some 200 injured, shops looted and homes destroyed. The Army and the RIC were heavily committed to restoring order, leaving the rural areas vulnerable to more IRA attacks. Fearing that these attacks would escalate and that events in the South were deteriorating to the point of anarchy, the Protestants in the North set up their vigilante groups, lacking any central direction. When the IRA stepped up its attacks on the police and rioting flared up again, in Lisburn in August and the city in the autumn, there was a very real fear of civil war. The military authorities in Dublin, recognizing that the RIC in the North was under intolerable pressure and that the Army was insufficiently strong to deal with both the riots and the IRA attacks, authorized, in the northern counties only, the formation of a Special Constabulary under the provisions of an already existing Special Constabulary (Ireland) Act.

There were to be three classes; Class A who were to serve full time and to be armed and equipped, uniformed and paid at the same rates as the RIC; Class B, a part-time force acting under the orders of the police; and Class C, who would be available for call-out in an emergency. Recruiting for the Ulster Special Constabulary (USC) began in November 1920. It expanded rapidly into a formidable force and by the summer of 1922 the total strength was 5,500 Class A and 19,000 Class B, plus a substantial number of Class C who were seldom used but allowed to keep their weapons at home.⁽²⁾ The insurrection reached its height in the first six months of 1921, with some 50,000 British forces, including 35,000 Regular Army, ranged against a total IRA strength of 112,000, of whom some 2,000 were actively engaged in the flying columns; but the columns’ weakness was their shortage of arms and ammunition.⁽³⁾ In Britain press and public were becoming increasingly disturbed by what seemed, so soon after the Great War, a continuation of a senseless slaughter, and by brutal incidents perpetrated by both sides. Influential members of the Establishment and the Church, including the Archbishop of Canterbury, spoke out forcefully against the policy of ‘authorized reprisals’. Parliament passed a bill, introduced by the Prime Minister, Lloyd George, the Better Government of Ireland Bill, under which two Home Rule Parliaments would be set up in Ireland, one for the six counties of North-East Ulster, the other for the remaining twenty-six counties. Elections were held in May, the Unionists in the North obtaining a commanding majority. A month later, on 22 June 1921, King George V came to Belfast to open the new Northern Ireland Parliament. The King had been deeply distressed by the war in Ireland. In a moving speech he appealed for reconciliation. The effect was immediate and dramatic. The President, de Valera, invited members of the Unionist government to a meeting in Dublin and on 11 July a truce was declared. It was an enormous relief to both sides. Over the eighteen months since Soloheadbeg some 600 members of the British forces and 752 IRA Volunteers had died and the total wounded exceeded 2,000.⁽⁴⁾

In October 1921, three months into the truce, Lloyd George and members of the Cabinet began a series of meetings at 10 Downing Street with an Irish delegation, led by Griffith, the Irish Foreign Minister, and including Michael Collins, who during the Anglo-Irish War had effectively controlled IRA operations. The British offered Ireland Dominion status within the Empire for the twenty-six counties, provision whereby the government in the North could opt out of the new state, a Boundary Commission to decide where the line between North and South should run. It was not the republic that the Irish had sought, but the delegation believed that, once they had gained independence, a republic would follow. They were right, though they had to wait another twenty-eight years. Indubitably they had won their central demand. Ireland, less the six counties, was a free country at last.

However, de Valera, who had taken care not to be a member of the delegation so that he could not be blamed if it failed, was bitterly opposed to the treaty terms. The country was split between Pro- and Anti-Treaty factions. The Dail voted for the Treaty by a small majority, a Provisional Government was set up and de Valera resigned from the Presidency. Within the IRA a powerful group of senior officers disowned the treaty. They formed their own military units and in April took over a number of buildings in Dublin, including the Four Courts, the centre of juridical control in Ireland. In June the army of the Provisional Government attacked the buildings, using two artillery pieces to bombard the Four Courts. The Civil War, which had been building up for two months, began in earnest. The pattern of the war was much as it had been against the British, with government troops organized in military units hunting down flying columns of Irregulars dressed in civilian clothes.

The terror and counter-terror returned on an even worse scale. The Roman Catholic Church issued a pastoral condemning the actions of the Irregulars: “They have done more damage in three months than could be laid to the charge of British rule in three decades.”⁽⁵⁾ It had no effect. The Dail introduced emergency powers stating that anyone discovered carrying arms would be shot. Seventy-seven were executed, three times the number executed by the British in the Anglo-Irish War. Some 13,000 Republicans were interned. When the Civil War ended in May 1923 it had cost the new Free State £17,000,000 and an army of 60,000 men had had to be mobilized to defeat the Irregular forces⁽⁶⁾ The Civil War had achieved only many more deaths, great bitterness and an eighteen-month delay in forging ahead with the establishment of the new Ireland, the Irish Free State.

The truce, followed by the Treaty, did not bring peace to the North. Violent inter-communal rioting continued. The authorities were concerned about the threat presented by the IRA. Despite the outbreak of fighting between the Pro- and anti-Treaty factions, Collins, now commanding the army of the Provisional Government, and Lynch, the chief of staff of the Irregulars, agreed they must act together to bring help to the Catholics in the North, whom, they believed, were the victims of a Protestant pogrom. Officers who had gained experience of guerrilla war during the Anglo-Irish War were sent North to reinforce the local IRA. In May 1922 attacks were launched across the Donegal border into Londonderry and Tyrone, as well as from the Glens of Antrim and the Mourne Mountains. Police patrols were ambushed, barracks attacked, communications cut and the homes of prominent Unionist families burnt down, whilst in Belfast, following an attack on a Protestant funeral, a week-long gun battle was fought out between the Army and the IRA. Towards the end of the month an IRA force crossed the Border and occupied the isolated north-west corner of Fermanagh. Two Regular Army battalions, supported by artillery and armoured cars, counter-attacked and reoccupied the area without casualties, though the artillery had to be used to clear the invaders out of the old fort at Belleek.

Apart from this one deployment, the British government agreed that the Specials should be responsible for the defence of the Border, whilst the Regular Army garrison in the North should be held in reserve. It was a strange abrogation of responsibility, but the Army, still commanded from Dublin Castle, was in a difficult situation. The withdrawal of units from the South was well under way and the military authorities were anxious to avoid any action which could precipitate renewed IRA attacks on their depleted forces.

By the time the Treaty War ended and peace returned to Ireland forty-nine Specials had been killed. With the police committed mainly to dealing with inter-communal rioting, first with the RIC in disarray and then the new Royal Ulster Constabulary in its infancy, and with the Army reluctant to become too deeply involved, there is no doubt that it was to a large extent due to the courage and determination of the Specials that the new state was not plunged into a Civil War as bloody and pointless as the war that ravaged the Irish Free State. Inevitably they came to be regarded as anti-Catholic, charged with being the instrument of a Protestant government designed to subjugate the Catholic people. Although initially it had been foreseen that Catholic platoons would be formed to operate in Catholic districts, only a handful came forward to enlist. In the end the Specials gave up any attempt, little as that had been, to persuade Catholics to join them. In truth they were relieved not to have them in their ranks; the Royal Irish Constabulary, they believed with good reason, had been weakened by traitors in their midst. One of the most notorious was a detective in Dublin Castle. But, as time would show, by adopting that attitude, the USC sowed the seeds of their own fate.

The USC was retained over the next forty-six years but reduced to one Class, the part-time B Specials. What kept them together as much as the ever-present threat of a resurgence of IRA activity, was the opportunity for participation in competition shooting. The standard of weapon training was high and a shooting competition was held annually in which all subdistricts could participate. On occasion elements of the force were called out on temporary duties, such as in Belfast in 1931 when sectarian riots broke out again around 12 July. Shots were fired, the Army had to be brought in and the Belfast Specials, who, unlike the rural platoons, were trained more on the lines of normal special constables, relieved the police by assisting with routine duties and guarding barracks. Another eleven dead and 574 injured were added to the tragic litany of victims of two communities who, in the mean back streets of the city, could not learn to live together.

In the first half of the fifties the IRA carried out six major arms raids in military bases in Britain and in Northern Ireland. Most were highly successful, resulting in a boost to morale, an increase in funds from Irish-Americans in the States and an influx of young Volunteers. By 1956 the Army Council felt the organization was sufficiently strong to mount a new campaign across the border.

Some 150 volunteers took part in the opening night on 12 December 1956. A BBC transmitter in Londonderry and the TA drill hall in Enniskillen were blown up, the court house in Magherafelt burnt down and two bridges destroyed on upper Lough Erne. Next night two Fermanagh police barracks were attacked. A similar attack on barracks in Brookeborough on New Year’s Day proved to be a disaster. The RUC sergeant, a former Irish Guardsman, repulsed the attackers with bursts from a Bren gun, wounding six, two of them mortally. The failure of the raid epitomized the state of the IRA at that time, enthusiastic and determined but inexperienced, inadequately trained and poorly organized. Some 1,660 B Specials were placed on full-time duties, whilst 12,000 part-timers patrolled the roads and the Border and guarded public utilities and police barracks. The Regular Army were hardly involved, though a reinforcement RA regiment was sent over from England.

Five years on the IRA was losing heart. Volunteers had set up over 600 incidents, but most were of a nuisance value – bridges, drill halls and USC huts, electricity transformers and telegraph poles. They had failed to enlist support on either side of the Border; in the Republic 130, including a number of the leaders, had been interned. In February 1962 they called off the campaign. Casualties had been light; six police officers and eight Volunteers had lost their lives.

With the failure of the IRA’s campaign, the future for Northern Ireland looked more hopeful than at any time since its inception. Substantial progress had been made in encouraging major British and American firms to bring in new factories to replace the waning shipbuilding and linen industries. Since his election as Prime Minister in 1965, Terence O’Neill had done much to improve relations between North and South and Protestant and Catholic. He had invited the Taoiseach, Lynch, to visit parliament at Stormont and introduced him to the Cabinet; he had been the first Prime Minister to visit Catholic schools and in the General Election in 1963 he canvassed in both Protestant and Catholic wards of Belfast. The election results were an emphatic endorsement of his moderate approach.

In 1963 a new figure had appeared on the political scene. The Reverend Ian Paisley, the 37-year-old son of a Baptist minister, had established the fundamentalist Free Presbyterian Church. A commanding figure and a skilled orator, he was a virulent opponent of the Roman Catholic Church and implacably opposed to O’Neill’s policy of reconciliation. When the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA) was founded in 1967, it was mainly Paisley who rallied militant opposition to the movement.

Membership of NICRA was open to all, but the majority of members were Catholic. A new breed of middle-class Catholic had grown up, teachers, lawyers, university lecturers demanding an equal place for their people in the North. Their basic demands were the introduction of ‘one man, one vote’ in local council elections, the ending of gerrymandering in the drawing up of electoral boundaries, fair allocation of jobs and public housing, the appointment of an Ombudsman to rule on complaints against the authorities, repeal of the Special Powers Act, introduced at the height of the troubles in 1922, and the disbandment of the USC.

Northern Ireland, born out of insurrection and with memories of sectarian killings still fresh in the minds of the older generation, was not yet sufficiently stable or mature to cope with the concept of peaceful protest. Londonderry was ripe for trouble. Discrimination in the allocation of housing and blatant gerrymandering in the drawing up of ward boundaries convinced the majority Catholic community that the Unionists were determined to hang on to control of local government at all costs.

In September 1968 NICRA proposed to hold a protest march into the centre of the city. The Loyalist Apprentice Boys applied to hold a counterdemonstration and both marches were then banned. NICRA determined to go ahead. Some 2,000 people gathered at the railway station, including a number of prominent Nationalists, among them Gerry Fitt, MP for West Belfast, and, at his invitation, three Labour ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Glossary
• 1 The Ulster Special Constabulary
• 2 The Formation of the Regiment
• 3 1970-1971
• 4 9 August - 31 December 1971 Internment
• 5 1972
• 6 The Regiment and the Loyalist Paramilitaries 1972-1973
• 7 1973
• 8 Formation of the Women's UDR
• 9 1974 Ulster Workers' Council Strike
• 10 1975 The Cease-Fire
• 11 1976 "The Way Ahead"
• 12 1977 "The Way Ahead" Implemented and the UUAC Strike
• 13 1978-1979
• 14 1980-1981 Tenth Anniversary
• 15 1982-1984
• 16 1985-1986 The Regiment Under Pressure
• 17 1987-1989
• 18 The Stevens Inquiry. 1989-1990
• 19 1991-1992: The Final Months
• 20 Conclusions
• Appendix A - Roll of Honour
• Appendix B - Welfare
• Bibliography
• Reference Notes
• Index