Irish Times
Kevin Myers
The activities of the British army's Force Research Unit in the North are frankly appalling. But in fact, far more serious, and at far greater cost in human suffering, was the historic failure of the British state, and its security forces, to recognise the early threat emanating from loyalist terrorists and to deal with it in a coherent, organised fashion.
This column recently contained details of the murders of Rose McCartney and Patrick O'Neill by the UDA terrorist Davy Payne in the 1970s. Involved in those murders was the UDA leader Tommy Lyttle, who - perhaps motivated by guilt - gave an account of the affair to a confidant, including the names of all those present: effectively the entire leadership of the UDA in Belfast.
The confidant passed on that information to Rose's brother Gerry. I now know that Gerry in turn passed on all that he had been told to the RUC. But no RUC man ever got back to Gerry about the sensational information he had given them. No further inquiry followed, and no one was questioned about these murders. Had the RUC acted, it could have decapitated the UDA leadership and disgraced the organisation which was just then embarking upon its campaign of the mass murder of Catholics.
The RUC was not alone in its delinquency. By chance, I recently met a retired British soldier who had been a battalion commander in north and west Belfast in the 1970s. I told him - with no little pleasure - that Davy Payne, one of the most ferocious savages in the history of Irish terrorism, was dead. He'd never heard of him. When I told him who Payne was, he replied that the army never paid too much attention to loyalists.
The security forces could in part be forgiven their myopia. They were being almost overwhelmed by republican violence; and naturally - being human beings - they were rather more focused on those who were trying to kill them than on those who were trying to kill members of the community in which the IRA was based. But no corrective action came from London: the culture that perceived terrorism as an essentially republican phenomenon was allowed to thrive unchallenged.
It's not that loyalists were not being arrested and charged for terrorist offences. They were. But the hunt for the Shankill Butchers, for example, was never conducted with the vigour with which the IRA was being pursued at the time. The Butchers even used one of their own cars, a black taxi, to abduct and murder Catholics across North Belfast. The RUC never bothered to cross-check ownership of black taxis with known loyalist paramilitaries. The consequences of this kind of negligence were catastrophic, not just for the unfortunate victims and their families, but for the security forces themselves.
The IRA leader Daithi O Conaill once told me that the IRA was not perturbed by sectarian assassinations of Catholics. On balance, he said with icy, murderous logic, they were good for the IRA, firstly because hardly any IRA men were ever killed; secondly because every killing was followed by an upsurge of recruitment to the IRA; and thirdly because the killings contributed to the sense of social anarchy that was vital to the IRA campaign. And long before the emergence of the Force Research Unit, there was unofficial collusion. The remarkable feature of that collusion was how unproductive it was. The UDA/UVF had the names and addresses of hundreds, if not thousands, of IRA men and women. But instead of targeting them, they preferred to go for blameless, easy Catholics.
In part this reflected the calibre of many Protestant paramilitaries. In my life, I have not met such stupid brutes. There were, of course, exceptions: intelligent but misguided individuals who were enraged by the IRA's murderous attacks on loyalist communities. But for the most part, loyalist terrorists were witless thugs, for whom the killing of papists was a recreation, and an end in itself. Nobody would take such people seriously as allies. Yet it is quite clear that the British army's Force Research Unit attempted to direct the activities of loyalist terrorists, as if the latter were reliable instruments of policy, rather than the violent cretins they in reality were. The secret of such an alliance would inevitably emerge.
But the FRU was not alone to blame. Larger questions have to be asked of the British army, the British government and British opposition parties that loyalist terrorism was not taken as seriously as republican terrorism, and that British soldiers were not briefed about loyalist killers. Indeed, the very concept of being "on the run" is uniquely nationalist: loyalists didn't use the term because it didn't apply to them. This negligence was quite different from the FRU's activities, some of which amounted to active terrorism. And aside from the sheer wickedness involved, the FRU has had a catastrophic effect on the reputations of thousands of good and honest soldiers and police officers who kept the peace in Northern Ireland without personal bias or resort to illegality, and at huge cost to themselves.
Moreover, the FRU ran numerous agents in the IRA, including the famous Steak-knife: like the FRU's loyalist agents, these too must have remained active terrorists and killers even while they were informing, if only to protect their cover. Is that why the Shinners are not so vociferous in their demands for a full inquiry into the activities of the FRU? So just how many Shinners were able to build all those lovely holiday homes courtesy of the FRU?
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