5A Question of Allegiances
Uncertainty about the ultimate loyalties of many members of the RUC and UDR has produced a rich vein of speculation about their involvement in terrorist groups and the exploitation of these groups by intelligence agencies in Ulster. These allegations are based on an extension of the simple fact that the forces of law and order are drawn largely from a Protestant community which considers itself under siege, to the suspicion on the part of nationalists and some of the Labour left in Britain that the link between the lawkeepers and loyalist terrorists has been exploited by security chiefs to terrorize the republican movement through a policy of assassination.
Some soldiers from Northern Ireland regarded their Regiment as a legitimized form of loyalist ‘doomsday force’, able to defend the Protestant enclaves if Westminster ever abandoned them. These UDR members were also sometimes members of the largest loyalist paramilitary group, the Ulster Defence Association (UDA). The UDA grew out of the inner-city violence at the outset of the Troubles as an umbrella for loyalist vigilante groups. Even in the late 1970s its membership was estimated to be as high as 10,000. Most, however, were people who were available to defend their estates in the event of trouble but did not belong to the Ulster Freedom Fighters (UFF), the UDA’s military wing, outlawed in 1974, which carried out a campaign of sectarian killing.
The idea of Protestants banding together to fight the prospect of rule from Dublin, as they had in 1912 when thousands of armed men had paraded, was a potent one among loyalists. Another branch of the UDA revived the name given to those early loyalist formations, the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF). Sir Edward Carson, architect of the original UVF, had become a key figure in loyalist legend by organizing the appearance of thousands of armed men on a hillside, demonstrating to Whitehall the dangers of abandoning the Protestants to rule by the Catholic majority of Ireland. Carson’s powerplay still influenced people sixty years later: the British government feared the possibility of a large-scale loyalist insurrection if it pushed them into a closer bond with the Republic of Ireland; and the Protestants themselves longed for the unity and decisiveness of which Carson had been capable but their contemporary leaders were not.
The modern UVF was not, however, the armed wing of a united loyalist movement but a sectarian terrorist group, which by 1972 was believed to have around 1500 members. Its attacks on Catholics in the mid 1960s were an important stimulus first in the development of the Catholic civil rights movement and later for contemporary armed republicanism. The UVF and UDA were riven by deep factional rivalries which undermined their operations against the republican groups. Much of the daily energy of these groups was devoted to fund-raising through racketeering. They did not attack the Army, although there were often street confrontations with it, but relations with the RUC were often tense – particularly in the days following the signing of the Anglo-Irish Agreement in November 1985.
The notion that the UDR and RUC contain men and women whose loyalty is to the principle of Protestant hegemony in Ulster rather than to the rule of law finds currency at many levels within the Army. During the early 1970s soldiers often found that loyalist paramilitaries had been tipped off prior to raids. Lord Carver, the former Chief of General Staff, casts doubts in his memoirs about the loyalties even of some Special Branch men. However, most of the disquiet both within the Army and among Catholics surrounds the locally recruited soldiers of the UDR. The Army’s classified training manual for intelligence specialists bound for Ulster in the late 1970s noted with a candour absent from its public pronouncements: ‘Units must be aware of the fact that, in some instances, the UDR has been penetrated by extremist loyalist organizations, and this will affect the permissible limit of intelligence dissemination, particularly in relation to Protestant extremist activities’.
At its foundation almost one-fifth of the UDR were Catholics. But the IRA’s policy of assassinating Catholic UDR men and the difficulty facing the soldiers in upholding policies like internment which were deeply unpopular in the nationalist community led to the steady erosion of this figure. By the 1980s only about three per cent of UDR members were Catholic, the RUC doing rather better with about one in ten. There is a general consensus in Ulster that the RUC has maintained higher standards of professionalism and has had more success keeping Protestant extremists out of its ranks.
The UDR pays its members considerably less than the RUC (who also give generous overtime rates). Relative poverty is at the root of many of the UDR’s problems. While the RUC is considerably oversubscribed – there being more than ten applicants for each vacancy – the UDR is less able to be choosy. UDR members are often unable to afford housing away from the working-class estates where extreme loyalism is entrenched. One senior figure who had served at Stormont referred in private conversation to a particular UDR battalion as being recruited from ‘the cesspits of east Belfast’. RUC applicants are also vetted by the SB, and community ties are sufficiently close for one person from Ulster usually to be able to establish whether another has connections with loyalist extremism. In contrast, UDR vetting remained largely in the hands of Intelligence Corps members from other parts of Britain.
Outsiders who have become involved with the police in Northern Ireland are usually deeply impressed by the commitment of its officers. Kenneth Newman has described the RUC as containing the finest police members he has encountered in a long and varied police career. Michael Asher, however, the former paratrooper who served as a constable in the Special Patrol Group in the late 1970s, did detect prejudices against Catholics
