Curious Beast excerpt - A return to violence? Perspectives from the killing fields

Have we learnt anything from the blood-soaked past?

This is an excerpt from my Curious Beast project on Loyalism’s pasts, presents and futures. I hope you find it insightful. Let me know what you think in the comments.

In the spring of 2021 a young loyalist named Joel Keys posted on Twitter. He stated ‘To say violence is never the answer is massively naive, sometimes violence is the only tool you have left.’ Keys is from the Taughmonagh estate, a loyalist area which nestles incongruously between the extremely prosperous upper Malone and Lisburn roads. A month later he appeared at a Westminster Northern Ireland Affairs Committee to give evidence on behalf of the Loyalist Communities Council. Asked by MP Simon Hoare about the comments he had made online, Keys responded, “I am not sure if and when and violence will be the answer. I’m just saying that I wouldn’t sort of rule it off the table.” Invoking the example of the people of North Korea living under the dictatorship of Kim Jong Un, Keys added that they weren’t “… going to get anywhere with peaceful protests anytime soon.”

In the context of heightened tensions within the loyalist community with regards to the NI protocol he said, “I’m no fan of violence, I think that it has to be an absolute last resort. But it worries me that we could potentially reach a point in this country, or in any country, where the people feel that they do have to defend themselves. You kind of have to have that willingness to back up what you say and back up what you believe in, and fight for what you believe in.”

I didn’t want to create a pile-on (in Twitter parlance) over this issue, but felt that I had to ask Keys what he felt about the statements he had made. Could he define specifically the nature of the violence, which would be a “last resort”? ‘Joel I'm not here to attack you - I've worked with loyalists for many years and have written empathetically about the struggles faced by loyalists. Can you just clarify - who will be the targets of any violence? Can you be clear that Catholics like my family have nothing to fear?’ He responded: ‘I can assure you that anyone who considers it acceptable to target innocent families, irrespective of their political or religions [sic] persuasions, is not fighting on the same side as me.’ I felt it was a positive thing that we could have these discussions online in a calm and measured way.

Keys is articulate and bright, but I was left with a hollow feeling. ‘Innocent’ families. What did that mean? I didn’t pursue the matter because I understood what he meant and I didn’t want to get into the finer details online. The history of the Troubles shows that ‘innocent’ people accounted for a huge number of the dead. It’s easy to talk of avoiding civilian casualties as the IRA did in 2002 on the 30th anniversary of Bloody Friday, but this doesn’t bring back the dead. 

It’s also easy to talk about violence being the only tool left in the box. The outworking of it; the way in which an act of violence can reverberate through time for both the person being attacked and their families, as well as the young man or woman pulling the trigger or planting the bomb. For young loyalists in the early 1970s it certainly appeared that the last resort of violence was the way forward. Many of them, only young teenagers, were willing to fight for Ulster and the adults in their communities weren’t trying to stop them. They were afraid as well. War is a young man’s game, and so it was that working-class republican and loyalist youths joined the paramilitaries in droves. The idea of defending one’s community was sold as a noble cause, with paraphernalia in social clubs and murals on gable walls across Northern Ireland commemorating the wholesale slaughter of young men at the Somme in 1916 and the blood sacrifice of Pearse and his band of desperadoes earlier that year in Dublin’s GPO. 

An older former UDA man was a boy when sectarian tensions in New Barnsley in 1970 forced his family to flee for the safety of a Protestant area. Almost overnight he went from having Catholic friends to viewing them as the enemy; those who were responsible for putting him and his family out of their home. Such binary thinking became normal and in turn normalised the brutality which would ensue throughout the 1970s. The man, who I’ll call ‘Andrew’, lived in Highfield, an estate near New Barnsley which along with Springmartin had become a dramatic frontier in the shadow of the Black Mountain with republicans in Ballymurphy and his former home just yards away across green fields.

Like so many other young loyalists in Belfast at the time he joined a Tartan gang. For a sense of identity, the feeling of being part of the peer group. It wasn’t all about territory and politics, it was also about music and football. ‘… we seen ourselves as defenders of the Protestant community’ he explained in a 2021 booklet published in an attempt to warn young loyalists of the dangers of the paramilitary lifestyle. ‘… it was a very direct progression from the Tartan gang into the paramilitaries. I will tell you how it happened for me. Word came about: “There is a meeting tonight in Highfield Community Centre and we want you to be there, and it’s in your interest to be there.” So we all gathered and went to the Highfield community hut, and I can remember when we walked in there three or four men sitting at a table with masks on. I can’t remember exactly, but there might also have been guns on the table. But the words which were spoke were: “It’s no longer sticks and stones, from this point on its bombs and bullets. And if you are not willing to be involved in that you can leave now.” For me, you didn’t want to say ‘no’ in front of your mates, so you stayed. And that was our induction into the Ulster Defence Association.’

UDA mural in the Woodvale area. © Gareth Mulvenna

I spoke to Andrew regularly throughout 2021 and 2022 about his experiences which he hopes to turn into a book. He talked about the work he was involved in trying to get young men to realise that talking was a better way forward than violence. He explained the fear that he felt that night in the community hut; how every sinew of his being wanted to get up off his chair and leave the room and never come back. He was afraid. Of what the men at the table might do to him, of what his friends might think. The idea of ‘chickening out’ in front of your peer group is visceral and real to a teenage boy. The fear of humiliation is stronger than the fear of retribution. It’s something that’s not often talked about by the former loyalist paramilitaries I have met and got to know over the years, but it’s something I feel needs to be probed more.

It was only years later that Andrew developed the critical faculties to assess the situation he had been in. It was then that he realised that his friends were also more than likely in the same predicament as he had been. Frozen with a mixture of fear and giddiness at this strange new situation they were in. ‘Every night, and pretty much every day, we were being trained in that hut in weapons. There was a lot of gun battles going on in the Highfield/Springmartin estates, and I can remember when I was fourteen years of age, being taken to the bottom of the Highfield estate and shown how to shoot a rifle. And I know – from my [later] Army experience – that that rifle was a Martini-Henry. So as a fourteen-year-old we were being trained to shoot guns!’ 

The whole culture had shifted within the loyalist working-class. Whereas in 1966 people had been broadly shocked and disgusted by the actions of Gusty Spence and his comrades in the nascent UVF, attitudes had calcified by 1972. A militant outlook had evolved and white paint daubed on gable walls now read ‘Gusty was right.’ ‘… the community at large didn’t bat an eyelid’ Andrew recalled. ‘Everybody in the community was involved, even my mother and father, my aunts and uncles were involved, we were all a part of one community. You could have walked down that estate with rifles and nobody took us under their notice! They seen us as being defenders of the community.’

By the late 1970s Andrew was in jail, serving a life sentence for the murder of an innocent Catholic who had the misfortune to answer a knock on his door. The young man was in the house with his 14-year-old niece and three young children, the eldest of whom was aged seven at the time when Andrew and an accomplice came to his door and shot him dead before he could open it. Andrew later told police ‘I didn’t know the man. I just shot him because this was the house that was pointed out to me.’

During the period I was working with Andrew I was chatting to my mother about something totally unrelated to the Troubles. She had been a teacher at St Catherine’s Primary School on the Falls Road throughout the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. I think I might have been talking about my own infant daughter and her love of drama and singing. My mother recalled a young girl she had taught in her P2 class in the 1970s. She had a bit of a stammer and lacked confidence, but the one thing that brought her out of herself was drama. The little girl had loved playing the role of the Scarecrow in the school’s production of The Wizard of Oz. My mother explained that the girl was a ‘wee mite’ and a pleasure to interact with before recalling that her father had been shot dead at his doorstep for no reason. When she said the little girl’s surname my blood froze.

I’d heard about some brutal things over the years. While working in the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland I’d processed scenes of crime and post-mortem photographs of Troubles dead. I’d read the witness statements, the almost incidental details of a person’s life that out of nowhere punch you in the gut like a ten-ton hammer when you think of your own loved ones. The pitiless and pathetic nature of death. When my mother said that little girl’s name I felt sick. I didn’t know why. After all, I’d listened to men tell me about horrendous things they had done in the 1970s that led to their convictions. One man told me that his child’s death was a punishment from God for all of the anguish he had caused to other people’s families as a teenage gunman. I probably thought of my own daughter, of the possibility of her being left without a father in similar circumstances. A morbidity that is probably a hangover from my childish fears about my own father in the 1980s. When I believed that terrorists would come to our house and shoot him. I had visions of him lying on the floor and bleeding to death as hooded gunmen fled the scene. I still don’t know where these ideations of murder came from. I was cosseted from the violence but I must have imbibed some of the trauma that pervaded Northern Ireland at the time.

While writing this I remembered what triggered the thoughts and visions. It was images of a Northern Ireland I fortunately only glanced on walls while being driven through north Belfast. Somewhere between Thundercats and Masters of the Universe – while sneaking downstairs in the evening and looking at the television around the door perhaps, I found my gaze fixed on an advertisement which I now understand was made by the Northern Ireland Office. It was for the confidential telephone phoneline and featured a pre-EastEnders Perry Fenwick (aka Billy Mitchell) wrestling with his conscience while witnessing a daily barrage of unrelenting violence and grimness including a man being kneecapped, presumably by the IRA. In the end he calls the confidential telephone line and finds contentment and happiness with his wife and baby. ‘I want a decent future,’ he says in voiceover, ‘… and that’s not gonna happen while these heroes are screwing it up for everybody.’

I felt that for full disclosure I had to raise the connection of my mother having taught the little girl with Andrew. When I did so I could see the emotion etched on his face. He was back in that moment, that period of time when he described his life as being a circle of drinking in loyalist shebeens, planning UDA operations and returning to the shebeens afterwards. No jubilation or celebration, just grim determination. Men barely out of their teenage years who had become automatons to a cause some could no longer define beyond simple revenge for what the IRA had done to their city, their community. There were tears in his eyes. Andrew had been a child himself when he jumped on what David Ervine once described as the ‘hamster wheel to hell’ of what became a ‘dirty, stinking, little war.’ Andrew had cried when he heard the shooting as it began in 1969.

As a man now in his sixties Andrew works with young men across the world, many of whom are gang members, to try and reroute the inevitability of violence in lives dominated by poverty, hopelessness and the resultant sense of emasculation that flourishes in such dire circumstances. His story is a local one, familiar to the Troubles and those who lived through it, but his experience is a global phenomenon; one that becomes flesh in societies where political and civic leadership have died.