Again, written in 2021 and intended to form part of a more ethnographical look at what is going on in loyalism - in this section by framing it's ongoing crises in a historical pattern.
We’ve been here before. The mid-eighties. The Anglo-Irish Agreement of November 1985 and all of the anxieties that loyalists experienced around the accord between the governments of Margaret Thatcher and Garrett Fitzgerald. In the autumn months before the signing of that agreement the UFF commander John McMichael, then an emerging loyalist political intellectual, wrote an article for the cultural magazine Fortnight in which he stated that ‘All loyalists vehemently oppose Irish nationalism and reject any suggestion of a united Ireland. We also distrust Westminster in the belief that Britain does not positively wish Northern Ireland to remain within the United Kingdom. As a result the Anglo-Irish talks are seen as negotiations geared towards undermining the UK relationship and easing Ulster into an Irish dimension.’
So in September 1985, only weeks before the Anglo-Irish Agreement came to fruition, loyalists were experiencing an existential crisis, a rejection that was difficult to articulate with precision. ‘However’, McMichael continued, ‘… this tactic presents no easily definable evidence of a ‘sell-out’. You cannot put your finger on one particular thing and say that it constitutes the crunch. It’s like a jigsaw puzzle with all the pieces face down on the table. As each piece is turned over it adds to the picture. One piece says federal courts; another says repeal of the Flags and Emblems Act; another, an Anglo-Irish parliamentary tier; yet another, a council of Ministers; and so on until a picture emerges in which Ulster finds itself irrevocably linked, politically and economically, more to Dublin than to London. So at what point can loyalists feel justified in taking action?’
Irish history seems to turn in cycles, but for loyalism the intervals of time between these relentlessly repeating cycles grow ever shorter and lessons are rarely learned.
The successful rise of Sinn Féin into an electoral power-house has its origins in the years immediately prior to the Anglo-Irish Agreement. On 31 October 1981, at the party’s first Ard Fheis since the hunger strikes, Danny Morrison asked the audience, ‘Who here really believes we can win the war through the ballot box? But will anyone here object if, with a ballot paper in this hand and an Armalite in the other, we take power in Ireland?’ This was a strategy which ultimately proved successful.
For those loyalists such as McMichael who advocated a similar path for his constituency there was frustration at unionist political obstinacy. The class distinction, the divorce by those too polite to break the law from the loyalists they relied on for votes was a perpetual issue which stymied the ambitions of McMichael and the UDA as well as the UVF’s political thinkers.
McMichael understood the anger in his community in 1985 and wrote of his barely concealed contempt for those middle-class unionist leaders who he felt were leading loyalism down blind alleys. ‘I know of two prominent Unionists who believe that no country is worth fighting for and that there is no acceptable cause for violence. Yet those who believe this philosophy recognise the need to placate the restless masses with militant cliches and the promise of action which will never come. Their aim is to ride out each crisis and maintain order.’
While Sinn Féin barracked and hassled their way through the difficult 1980s with the PIRA firmly at their side, militant loyalism was kept in its cage by its political masters who provided next to no adequate political articulation of the fears and anger of the community while going through the pantomime of pulling hard at the leash of the UVF and UDA when they felt that they required leverage in political negotiations.
McMichael understood that this was a ‘beaten docket’ and that loyalists would have to find a way of developing their own political route, just as Sinn Féin had done for those republicans in their communities. ‘The Orange Order hierarchy told those who opposed the reroutings in Portadown that they must not break the law, yet two weeks later warned the government that if it continued with the Anglo-Irish process something would be done to make the 1974 strike look like a picnic (the mind boggles). Some loyalist leaders continue to threaten the government with a Protestant backlash. They warn that ‘Ulster will Fight,’ yet make no preparations for it. But the bluff has been used too many times.’
The dirty work of loyalism’s ‘armed struggle’ was kept at arm’s length by the ‘respectable’ politicians who used the bluff to try and intimidate the Irish and British governments. Oftentimes the bluff was real, but usually when it was impulsively acted upon by the militants it was innocent people who ‘picked up the tab’ for the actions of the governments or the republican movement.
David Ervine was all too aware of this and the hypocrisy that ensued within the body politic of unionism. Back in 2006 he told me ‘You know I’ve seen all this ambivalence; I’ve lived with this ambivalence, I’ve been in a pub when a loud bang went off and I can’t identify it because there’s no statute of limitations in Northern Ireland, but … I’ve been involved, and right away, everybody had a radio tuned into the police messages. So BANG!, you turn it on and then a short time later it tells you where the target was and it wasn’t a unionist target so the bar cheered and you can bet that they were going out to vote for the DUP and UUP and all the rest of it, so I’ve seen all that ambivalence first hand. I’ve also seen politicians nudge me and say, ‘Quare job last night.’
A year and a half before the Anglo-Irish Agreement was signed the Glasgow-born DUP councillor George Seawright had talked of political resistance running out of steam. He painted a portrait of a loyalist nightmare, one in which the provisional republican movement would overtake the SDLP by 1985. Seawright was correct, but that tectonic shift in the shape of constitutional nationalism wouldn’t happen for another twenty years.
What fear did he have of democracy then, if he believed that Sinn Féin would take seats off the SDLP? ‘Throughout the seventies many Loyalists believe that the Provisionals are going to become the undisputed spokesmen for the Nationalist community. Faced with this Provisional onslaught, faced with a philosophy that believes there is no accommodation for Protestants, the Protestants must obviously see themselves as a people with their backs to the sea, and must see that their right to exist is going to be threatened by those who are legitimately supported by the majority of the Nationalist community.’
Like John McMichael a year later, Seawright was aware that his community’s political leaders, specifically the Ulster Unionists, had gained a reputation as being ‘bluffers.’ Unionist political leaders, he felt, would eventually face a choice of existential proportions: either recognise that ‘there’s nothing more to be gained through the democratic process to maintain the Protestant position in Northern Ireland, and bow out’ or ‘sit down with the leadership of the entire Loyalist community and say how exactly we are going to react, and if it’s a case of bluffing then that bluff is going to be called and that bluff’s going to be defeated.’
Seawright held extreme views which proved even too excessive for the DUP of the 1980s. During a meeting of the Belfast Education and Library Board in June 1984 he had told those present that money should be used to buy an incinerator which could be used to burn all Catholics and their priests. He was suspended by the party and threatened with expulsion. Seawright, a self-professed bigot, refused and went independent. Although it wasn’t widely known then, Seawright was a member of the 1st Belfast Battalion of the UVF.
In a 2006 publication the organisation publicly claimed him for the first time, describing him as ‘… a man of action, and a reliable and true Volunteer.’ The clues had been there for those who could recognise them. During the count for the 1982 Northern Ireland Assembly election at Belfast City Hall Seawright was spotted openly conversing with Lenny Murphy. Murphy, who had been released from prison some months earlier having served half of a sentence for firearms charges with remission, was widely known to the infamous ‘Mr X’ referred to during the so-called ‘Shankill butchers’ trial in 1979. A few weeks after the election Murphy was shot dead in disputed circumstances as he pulled into the driveway of his girlfriend’s house in the Forthriver area.
Although the PIRA claimed the killing some doubt remains as to who facilitated their passage into such a strongly loyalist estate with few entry and exit points. The same ambiguity lingered long after George Seawright was gunned down in December 1987 by the Irish Peoples Liberation Organisation, with the UVF stating that ‘… there remains some suspicion as to who actually ‘fingered’ [him] for assassination.’
Another clue to Seawright’s dual life as politician and paramilitary came on 11 July 1986, some eight months after the signing of the Anglo-Irish Agreement and the day before the contentious rerouting of an Orange parade in Portadown. Emily O’Reilly, a journalist for the Irish paper the Sunday Tribune had arranged to meet Seawright for an interview. Joining them was a ‘UVF commander’ who it later transpired was John Bingham. Seawright had spotted Bingham coming out of the UVF’s Eagle headquarters on the Shankill Road and whispered to O’Reilly that ‘This man is a legend in his own lifetime.’ Bingham didn’t ask who O’Reilly was, supposing that she was a reporter; ‘Then this is quite a coup for you,’ he told her.
At only 33 years of age Bingham described himself as ‘a hardened old hand.’ That was true – he had been an early member of the Red Hand Commando on its formation in 1970 as a 17-year-old and had narrowly missed death when a bomb accidentally exploded in a house he was entering in Bann Street off the Oldpark Road in September 1971. Two fellow loyalists, Jim Finlay and John Thompson were both eviscerated while Bingham was able to go on through the 1970s with only severe burns to his hands.
‘I got a letter from a friend just the other day, the guy who did the Miami showband’ Bingham told O’Reilly as they drove through the Ballysillan area of north Belfast where he lived, ‘… and he was telling me how frustrated they all feel (in jail) about what’s going on. I have never seen the tension run so high in this area. It’s incredible, all the young lads are feeling the frustration, the anger.’ Bingham too was frustrated at how the Anglo-Irish Agreement and what loyalists viewed as the treachery of the RUC had changed the landscape dramatically for militants. ‘There used to be a time when if you were stopped at a roadblock, all you’d have to do was flash your King Billy tattoo and they’d let you go by. Now they know it means you’re a loyalist and they get at you.’