UDR: Declassified

Micheál Smith

• Publisher: Merrion Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781785374289
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Irish History
• Index: History

In UDR: Declassified, Micheál Smith reveals what the British establishment, the British government and its armed forces knew and had to say about the regiment in recently declassified files. From its formation in 1970 as a locally raised militia, the Ulster Defence Regiment developed into the largest regiment in the British Army. For unionists, service in the UDR was a noble act and often a family tradition; for nationalists, an encounter with the UDR was frequently hostile, often brutal, and sometimes fatal. To the British Army, they were 'a dangerous species of ally', and a classic militia regiment which was part of a long tradition of the use of such forces by the British Empire. It was viewed as 'a safety valve' for the tempers of loyalist extremism, and it also served as the main source of training, weaponry, and intelligence files for loyalists throughout the conflict. UDR: Declassified is an evidence-based exposé of the UDR through the declassified files of Number 10, the MoD, and the NIO. The denial of access to history is a part of a continuum of British state efforts to obscure its colonial past. This book is a testimony to the value of defying such efforts and uncovering the truths behind our traumatic past.

CHAPTER ONE

‘A Dangerous Species of Ally’

The Good Friday Agreement in 1998 was a de facto peace treaty that ended a thirty-year armed conflict between Irish republicanism and the British state. Increasingly, that conflict is being situated by modern historians in the broader geopolitical framework of ‘an unfinished colonialism’.1 It is legitimate, then, to examine the role of the British military in Ireland through the prism of colonialism.

In the Franco–British negotiations over the division of West Africa in the 1890s, a key concern of both imperial powers was ownership of the best military recruiting lands.2 The European powers traditionally used locally raised militias to rule over their subjugated colonies. A good example is the colonial police in the British Gold Coast (now Ghana), which was partly modelled on the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC). The British recruited what they called ‘Hausas’, Muslim men from the northern interior of Ghana, and deployed them in further conquest of territory, and also in strike-breaking, in supervising convict labourers and in guarding banks.3

This, written of the Hausa, may sound familiar to Irish ears: ‘All too often a uniform seemed a license to loot and extort, and as a result … [they] were despised and hated by those they affected to police. Preeminently they were hated as unaccountable representatives of an alien colonial power imposing a range of new laws and measures of social control which lacked any semblance of popular consent.’4

Similarly in Ireland, from the end of the eighteenth century onward, the British found it preferable to leave the colonial policing of the population to locally raised Yeomanry – voluntary, part-time and locally organised groups of men, serving under commissioned British officers, paid, armed and equipped by the British government. The Irish Yeomanry, a force with a reputation for ‘ill-discipline and brutality’,5 provided armed strength to the Protestant Ascendancy, which was determined to maintain power through domination over the Catholic majority.

Allan F. Blackstock’s ‘A Dangerous Species of Ally’: Orangeism and the Irish Yeomanry reveals how the Yeomanry was often inseparable from the Orange Order.6 For example, Blackstock reports:

between 1809 and 1831 the Lurgan Infantry made recruits take an unofficial, de facto Orange oath. Their liberal Protestant captain, William ‘Papist’ Handcock, disapproved, but admitted that owing to ‘high political and religious feelings … it is found difficult to constitute a yeomanry force free from objection’. This corps was involved in various disturbances, eventually forcing Handcock to dismiss the permanent sergeant, a local Orangemen, for admitting unattested men and allowing arms to leak into the community. Thus the yeomen themselves became a ‘dangerous species of ally’.7

The dangers inherent in the Yeomanry are revealed in records of the governments of the day. In 1798 the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland lamented to the prime minister: ‘How impolitic and unwise [it was] … to refuse the offers of Protestants to enter with the Yeomanry … yet how dangerous [was] even any encouragement to the Orange spirit.’8 In 1815, the chief secretary for Ireland (and later prime minister) Sir Robert Peel wrote of the Yeomanry, ‘Admitting that the Yeomanry are generally speaking unfit for those very duties in the performance of which their main utility would consist, namely in relieving the army from the maintenance of internal order and the collection of revenue, I am not quite prepared to come to your conclusion that it would be the wisest measure to disband the whole force.’9 Peel was saying that while the Yeomanry was unfit for its duties in maintaining order, he couldn’t agree to getting rid of them. By the 1830s the force was described by Sir Frederick Stoven, inspector general of police, as ‘more than useless ... they are dangerous’.10

The Yeomanry was eventually stood down and replaced by a professional police force, the Irish Constabulary, in 1822. Yet all of the problems associated with it – ‘admitting unattested men’, difficulties in establishing a force ‘free from objection’, and ‘allowing arms to leak into the community’ – would be revived under its twentieth-century successors, the B Specials and then the UDR. Like these forces would, the Yeomanry had proven (as Blackstock describes them) a ‘dangerous species of ally … using them was risky, yet disbanding was politically difficult.’11

During the Irish War of Independence, the passage of the Government of Ireland Act in 1920 would provide for a separate unionist statelet secured through partition. But before partition, violent conflict flared across the island. Vigilante groups, comprised of soldiers demobbed after the First World War and remnants of the Ulster Volunteer Force,12 emerged in unionist areas. These unionist vigilante groups drove Catholics from factories and towns across the north, ‘condoned by the hard-pressed British army and RIC who turned a blind eye on the basis that they were on the same side’.13

In the autumn of 1920, a force of special constables was raised for use only in the north. Alongside a full-time force, to be known as A Specials, under the command of the RIC, a force of voluntary part-timers – called B Specials – was also proposed. These men, in the company of an RIC officer, would do duty one night in ten in their local area. A third category – C Specials – would comprise a 6,000-strong reserve force for use in emergencies.

After the state of Northern Ireland had been established, the A Specials and RIC were assimilated into a new police force there, the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC). The B Specials were retained as a reserve paramilitary force, part-time and unpaid, operating at night and weekends; their command structure was kept separate from that of the civil police force.

Recruitment to the B Specials was corrupted from the outset by the former vigilante gangs referred to above, which were behind much of the anti-Catholic violence that flared across the north before and after partition. In a report to London, a British army officer criticised the selection committees, accusing them of ‘a want of moral courage … in excluding undesirables’. The outcome, according to the officer, was that the B Specials were comprised of ‘a large leaven of a bad type’.14

Ryder provides a contemporaneous report by a Belfast RIC officer who warned, ‘There can never be any possibility of establishing confidence and security so long as the B force, the ordinary Protestant countryman and, in many cases, the corner boy, is supplied with arms and clothing by his government and authorised to “get on top”, as it were, of his neighbour.’15

In March 1921, The Manchester Guardian editorialised about the B Specials:

The Special Constabulary, drawn almost exclusively from the ranks of the Orange Lodges16 and the Unionist ‘Volunteers’, was nominally raised to protect life and property and to maintain order, not to become a force of terrorists exercising powers of death over their Catholic neighbours … It will be a bad beginning for the Ulster parliament if its establishment coincides with the dragooning of the Catholic minority in the six counties by an armed Protestant force administering a sort of lynch law.17

Despite the 1921 July truce between the British government and the fledgling Irish state, serious violence continued in the north-east of Ireland. In one notorious incident, six members of the McMahon family were murdered at their home in Belfast in March 1922.18 The murders were committed under cover of curfew, and eyewitnesses asserted that members of the B Specials had been among the assassins. The crime was described by none other than Winston Churchill as ‘worse than cannibalism’.19 In a foreshadowing of a pattern of violence to come from state forces in the 1970s,20 the McMahon family were prosperous Catholics – they owned several pubs in Belfast – with no connections to the IRA. Owen McMahon was a supporter and personal friend of Joe Devlin, the Irish Parliamentary Party member of parliament, an Irish nationalist who rejected republican violence.21

A contemporaneous account of the fear prevailing in Belfast in 1922 was recorded by a visiting Catholic priest, Fr P.J. Gannon:

Two days after my visit this sector of the front was to waken up to renewed activity in which five Catholics were killed and seven wounded. In a house some four doors from the one we were looking at two women were shot dead in cold blood. ‘The Irish Independent’ for April 13, 1922, stated that on the previous day a Lancia car manned by ‘Specials’ patrolled the city with the inscription in chalk on its sides – ‘Papish blood is sweet’. It would seem so, and very particularly the blood of women and children.22

Gannon’s account of his visit continued: ‘The powerlessness of the military during two years of this sort of situation, recurring almost weekly, is one of the mysteries of Belfast. It is pathetic indeed when fear-frantic women have to appeal to powerless soldiers against the Special Constabulary of Northern Ireland.’23

Over the following decades of unionist rule, the B Specials were feared and despised in equal measure by Catholics and the nationalist community. Supported by the unionist community in Northern Ireland (who saw it as a bulwark against republicanism), the B Specials became established as a unionist auxiliary force, with a deserved reputation for sectarian brutality.

Flash forward to 1969 when, following widespread civil unrest, thousands of refugees from the nationalist-republican community in Northern Ireland fled across the Irish border to camps set up by an ill-prepared Irish army.24 They were fleeing attacks from loyalists, aided and abetted by the RUC.25

By that time, the B Specials were the only remaining class of the original three Ulster Special Constabulary classes. In 1969 they numbered around 8,000 men and were deployed for military-type duties, such as road checks and mounting armed guards on certain installations. An official review described them as ‘a partisan and paramilitary force recruited exclusively from Protestants’.26 Critically, they were deployed in the areas in which they lived, ‘policing’ their own Catholic neighbours.

In 1968, the civil rights movement was growing in strength, inspired by the civil rights movement in the United States. The demands of the movement in Northern Ireland included the introduction of universal franchise, an end to the practice of gerrymandering to manipulate elections, fair and equal access to housing, the reform of draconian security powers and the outlawing of religious discrimination. The initial response of the Unionist government was to concede nothing and to unleash the RUC and ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Bio
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• List of Abbreviations
• Preface
• Introduction – ‘Narrowing the Permissible Lies’
• 1. ‘A Dangerous Species of Ally’
• 2. Formation of the New Force
• 3. Citizens of Good Character?
• 4. ‘Arming One Section of the Community’
• 5. Subversion in the UDR
• 6. A Question of Loyalty
• 7. The Roadblock Killings
• 8. Life and Death in the UDR
• 9. Criminality in the UDR
• 10. ‘An Aspiration Unlikely to be Fulfilled’
• 11. The Demise of the UDR
• 12. Sinning Quietly
• Endnotes
• References
• Index