The British government has never accepted responsibility for its collusion with Northern Irish loyalist paramilitary forces during the Troubles. This historical legacy issue will not go away and has lasting effects.

1972: UDA paramilitaries march through Grove Park in Belfast Jack Garofalo · Paris Match · Getty

The term ‘deep state’ originally referred to close relations between repressive state agencies, organised crime and the far right in countries once ruled by military dictatorships, like Greece or Turkey. Among supporters of Donald Trump and Brexit partisans, it has been denuded of meaning: what they now call the ‘deep state’ is just the ‘permanent government’ of civil servants and judges with which any elected government has to reckon.

In the UK, however, ‘deep state’ had real meaning during the ‘Troubles’ in Northern Ireland during which British security forces collaborated extensively with loyalist paramilitaries responsible for hundreds of sectarian killings. There is now much evidence to document this record, which far surpassed in scale the GAL episode in Spain, when the government of Felipe González (1982-96) sponsored the formation of death squads to target Basque militants. The history of collusion in Northern Ireland shows how far Britain’s ‘deep state’ has been willing to go against perceived adversaries on its own national territory.

The IRA (Irish Republican Army) and smaller republican groups killed 2,057 people during the Troubles, 58% of the 3,532 who died during the struggle. The loyalist paramilitary groups — notably the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF, formed in 1966) and the Ulster Defence Association (UDA, 1971) (1) — killed 1,027. But the loyalists were so relentless in targeting non-combatants that they were responsible for nearly half of all civilian deaths in the conflict: 85% of those killed by loyalist paramilitaries were civilians (35% for republicans) (2). The loyalists’ stated goal, to preserve the union between Northern Ireland and Britain against republican demands for British withdrawal, was combined with an ill-concealed desire to deny Catholics equal rights as citizens even if Northern Ireland remained part of the UK.

British government ministers always insisted that the security forces dealt with republican and loyalist paramilitaries even-handedly, and those forces were concerned only to defend the public and maintain the rule of law. But there were obvious reasons for the state to adopt a different attitude towards the loyalist groups. Unlike the IRA, they were not trying to kill British soldiers, police officers or politicians, and their roots were in the Protestant-unionist community, which also supplied the majority of recruits from the region to the British security forces. There could be no cooperation between the British state and the IRA, even in theory, but there was a potential basis for the security forces and the loyalist groups to work together against their common enemy, the IRA.

Widespread collusion

Spokespeople for the British government dismissed claims of collusion as republican propaganda, even when the accusations came from nationalist politicians who were staunch opponents of the IRA. Since the 1990s, however, a variety of different sources have produced hard evidence. There was no South African-style truth and reconciliation commission in Northern Ireland, and truth recovery has been a more fragmented process. But a series of official reports has made it impossible to deny the existence of widespread collusion between agents of the state and loyalist paramilitaries. The British government response has shifted from denial to minimisation.

The pattern of loyalist violence fluctuated during the conflict. The first peak was between 1972 and 1976, when loyalist groups killed 567 people, most of them Catholic civilians. This was followed by a period of relative inactivity before the sectarian killings escalated sharply again. Between 1983 and 1987, loyalists killed 50 people; between 1988 and 1994, they killed 224. By 1992, the UVF and the UDA were claiming more lives than the IRA, usually randomly selected Catholic civilians.

The clearest sign that a different standard applied to loyalist paramilitaries was the status of the UDA, which remained a legal organisation until 1992

The clearest sign that the British authorities applied a different standard to loyalist paramilitaries was the status of the UDA, which, extraordinarily, remained a legal organisation from its foundation until 1992. In 1972 a government memo told the commander of British forces in Northern Ireland, Harry Tuzo, that UDA members should not be prevented from joining the Ulster Defence Regiment: ‘The UDA is not an illegal organisation and membership of the UDA is not an offence under the military laws; it is also a large organisation, not all of whose members can be regarded as dangerous extremists ... it would be counter-productive to discharge a UDR member solely on the grounds that he is a member of the UDA’ (3). A classified document published in 1973 found that between 5 and 15% of UDR members ‘have paramilitary links with widespread joint membership of the UDA’. It also reported that UDR soldiers were routinely passing on guns and ammunition to the loyalist groups: this was ‘their only significant source of modern weapons’ (4).

In 1978 the Irish government challenged its British counterpart in the European Court of Human Rights over the policy of internment without trial. During the hearings, British government officials acknowledged the double standard applied to republican and loyalist paramilitaries, and sought to justify it, claiming that the loyalist groups were not disciplined, structured organisations like the IRA. Tuzo insisted that the UDA ‘was not a terrorist organisation, it was a frightening, if you like, very militant manifestation of a point of view.’ A senior British civil servant claimed that just ‘a handful of people’ from the UDA were directly involved in acts of violence (5).

2002: British soldiers on patrol in Belfast as a 22ft-high barrier goes up to separate two local communities Cathal McNaughton · Getty

Flag of convenience

The British authorities already had ample evidence to contradict that view. Yet they refused to ban the UDA for another 14 years, arguing that responsibility for violence lay with a separate group, the Ulster Freedom Fighters (UFF). In fact, the UFF was a flag of convenience for the UDA.

Much of the research into collusion in the 1970s has focused on the activity of the Glenanne Gang, a loyalist militia responsible for well over a hundred deaths: it was responsible for no-warning bombs that killed 33 people in Dublin and Monaghan in 1974. Serving members of the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) and the UDR were part of the gang.

After the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, the RUC was reconstituted as the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI). The PSNI’s Historical Enquiries Team (HET) investigated the record of the Glenanne Gang and acknowledged that many people had accused the RUC of failing to pursue the gang effectively when it was most active: ‘Members of the Nationalist community and relatives of the victims in cases such as these are convinced that investigations were not rigorously conducted, in a deliberate effort to conceal security forces’ involvement and perpetuate a campaign of terror by loyalist paramilitaries against Catholic civilians. The HET is unable to rebut or allay these suspicions. The HET review has uncovered disturbing omissions and the lack of any structured investigative strategy’ (6).

‘The murderous cycle continued’

According to the HET, there was ‘indisputable evidence’ of collaboration by the security forces with loyalist paramilitaries that should have ‘rung alarm bells all the way to the top of government’. However, ‘nothing was done; the murderous cycle continued’ (7). Several RUC members were later implicated in a sectarian attack on a Catholic pub. Ballistic evidence linked their weapons to several killings by the Glenanne Gang, but they were only given suspended sentences by the court, except for a police officer who had already been convicted of murder. The judge in his summing up described the defendants as ‘misguided but above all unfortunate men’ who had been motivated by ‘the feeling that more than ordinary police work was needed and was justified to rid the land of the pestilence which had been in existence’ (8).

It is easy to imagine why British government ministers would have been reluctant to dig too deeply into this affair in the late 1970s, when the British counter-insurgency in Northern Ireland was shifting to a policy of ‘Ulsterisation’. This meant greater reliance on locally recruited forces in the struggle against the IRA. ‘Ulsterisation’ limited the number of British soldiers being killed and reduced the pressure on British politicians to end the conflict. If indisputable evidence of collusion had become public, it would have been much harder for the British government to justify a security policy that relied so heavily upon the RUC and the UDR.

At the heart of the recharged loyalist campaign of the late 1980s and early 1990s was a UDA member called Brian Nelson, who worked as an agent for the secretive Force Research Unit (FRU), an intelligence vehicle for the British army. He rose to become the UDA’s chief intelligence officer. Nelson’s status as an agent was revealed because of his role in planning the assassination of Pat Finucane, a high-profile Belfast lawyer who had defended IRA suspects.

A series of official reports has made it impossible to deny widespread collusion between agents of the state and loyalist paramilitaries

Under pressure from John Major’s Conservative government, the prosecution agreed to strike a plea bargain with Nelson, ensuring that he would not face cross-examination at his trial in 1992 (9); he pleaded guilty to five conspiracy to murder charges, while more serious murder charges against him were dropped. Nelson was sentenced to 10 years in prison, but was released after four years. Nelson’s commanding officer, Gordon Kerr, testified on his behalf, taking ‘personal moral responsibility’ for the actions of his subordinate, and describing Nelson as a man who was ‘very loyal to the system’ (10). It later became obvious that Kerr had misled the court about Nelson’s record in the UDA. Instead of using his position to prevent attacks, Nelson had reorganised the group’s intelligence files, with the assistance of his FRU handlers, to improve its targeting.

South African contacts

With the FRU’s encouragement, Nelson had also travelled to South Africa in 1985 to ask for a shipment of arms from the apartheid regime. The contacts he made paid off when hundreds of rifles, handguns and grenades were smuggled into Northern Ireland and distributed to the loyalist groups in 1988. The UVF and UDA then used those weapons in attacks, including the murder of five men at a betting shop in a Catholic area of Belfast in 1993, and another murder of six men in a rural pub in 1994.

Nelson’s career illustrates a crucial point about the handling of informers by the security forces. RUC Special Branch, which took the lead in the intelligence war, ran hundreds of informers in the loyalist groups well into the 2000s. Defenders of the security forces argued that it was sometimes necessary to turn a blind eye to criminal activity by informers if the intelligence they supplied helped prevent attacks. But that argument collapses if the true role of informers like Nelson was to strengthen the groups they had infiltrated.

The intertwined lives of Brian Nelson and Pat Finucane symbolise a wider picture of collusion, not only because they are intrinsically important, but because they led to a series of inquiries that made public much damning evidence. This battle over historical memory has become a story in its own right.

A clear picture has emerged of the security forces’ complicity in loyalist violence: vehicle checkpoints mysteriously removed when attacks were imminent; informers tipped off by their handlers before they were due to be arrested; obvious clues not investigated; evidence hidden or destroyed (11). Some details would seem implausible in a novel. The RUC recovered the rifle used in the betting shop murders of 1993. When the HET later investigated the murders, which remained unsolved, police officers claimed to have already disposed of the weapon, but it was later found on display at London’s Imperial War Museum (12). Other vital pieces of evidence really have been destroyed, such as the records from the RUC’s interrogation centre at Gough Barracks, which were shredded weeks after the Good Friday Agreement was signed.

Faced with such revelations, the British state and its defenders have fallen back on the claim that collusion was a bottom-up phenomenon, driven by rogue members of the RUC and UDR who passed on intelligence files to the loyalist paramilitaries, or turned a blind eye at crucial moments. But this ignores the evidence of top-down collusion: senior police and army officers established the framework in which their forces could operate with the knowledge of their political masters in London.

If those at the top of the chain of command did not have a full picture of what was happening on the ground, it was because they did not want to know. The resistance of British governments to a full public inquiry into the murder of Pat Finucane suggests a fear that it would end up establishing the wider links between component parts. The battle over ‘legacy issues’ is certain to continue, adding to the turbulence of a political scene already destabilised by the Brexit crisis.