Micheál Smith’s rich if somewhat uneven study of the Ulster Defence Regiment, based on extensive original research in British government archives, sheds new light on the origins of the UDR and the controversies surrounding the force. It reveals that British officials made a case for the abolition of the UDR as early as 1980, a decade after its establishment as a successor to the discredited B-Specials auxiliary police force. Like the B-Specials, the UDR was an almost exclusively Protestant force, several thousand strong.
The UK government portrayed itself as an honest broker between unionists and nationalists in Northern Ireland, but the Ulster Defence Regiment undermined this portrayal, offering clear evidence that the British government was closely aligned with one of the two big political traditions and highlighting the sometimes porous boundaries between the security forces and loyalist paramilitaries.
Although it was a regiment of the British army — the largest, in fact — the UDR was quite unlike any other regiment. Its members, most of them part-timers, were recruited locally and served only in Northern Ireland. There were UDR battalions for Belfast and each of the North’s six counties. In the evenings and at weekends, milkmen, postmen, small farmers and others put on British army uniforms, hefted their weapons and patrolled their own local districts. They were the subject of many complaints of harassment by nationalists in rural areas and they presented a particularly soft target for the IRA when they were off-duty — at home or in their place of work.
UDR Declassified is strongly critical of the UDR and especially of the UK government’s role in its development, but the author is careful to acknowledge the scale of suffering endured by those who served and the good intentions of many of its members. About 200 serving UDR members and perhaps 50-60 former members were murdered during the Troubles. Most of those killed were off-duty and out of uniform, fuelling unionist claims that IRA attacks on UDR members were, in effect, sectarian attacks.
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Smith sets out how and why the UDR was established in 1970. The UK government did not initially plan to replace the B-Specials but decided ultimately that an armed force was needed to combat any possible republican “guerrilla” campaign — imagined as a minor affair like the Border campaign of the 1950s — and thus allow for the withdrawal of regular British troops. But there were other reasons. At a time of growing loyalist extremism it was thought wise to provide a legal outlet for those who might otherwise become involved in loyalist paramilitary organisations, chief among them the thousands of former B-Specials who were recruited en masse into the new force.
Smith shows that vetting of UDR applicants was perfunctory and inadequate from the outset. A significant number of UDR members were active in loyalist paramilitary organisations or passed information to loyalists, and there is evidence that large numbers of loyalist paramilitaries joined the UDR for weapons training. UDA leader Andy Tyrie claimed as much in 1976. It is telling that membership of the UDA, the largest loyalist paramilitary organisation (legal until 1992), was not considered a bar to membership of the UDR.
Likely collusion
A British report in 1973 that examined the theft of UDR weaponry by loyalists concluded that collusion by members of the force was likely in many cases and noted that the UDR was a prime source of modern, high-quality arms for loyalist paramilitaries. UDR members were involved in high-profile sectarian murders including the UVF attack on the Miami Showband in July 1975, for which two serving members were convicted. There were concerted efforts to obscure the extent of UDR involvement in loyalist organisations. On many occasions UDR members charged with offences were discharged from the force or resigned before their case came to court, and their UDR membership was not mentioned at trial. Smith highlights cases where the UDR membership of convicted paramilitaries did not come to light until decades later.
Seamus Mallon of the SDLP caused consternation when he strongly condemned the force in 1985, highlighting the involvement of some members in loyalist paramilitary attacks and declaring that since its foundation “the UDR has acted as a paramilitary wing of unionism”. Searching for statistics that might be used to rebut Mallon’s criticisms, British officials found that about 20 UDR members had been charged with crimes over the previous 18 months, noting that this was “a figure that would cause alarm if it occurred in a British police force or regiment in [Britain]”.
UDR Declassified offers some suggestive insights into gender and social class in the UDR. A 1979 report by two UDR majors, for example, mentions “a distinct reluctance on the part of some of the rugby or golf club types to serve in the UDR”. Paramilitary groups were not the only armed groups in Northern Ireland that were disproportionately working-class, it seems. The UDR was one of the first British army regiments to fully incorporate women into its ranks, and there are indications that middle-class woman were significantly more likely than middle-class men to join the force.
That the regiment continued to exist until 1992, when it was merged with the Royal Irish Rangers and then gradually dissolved through internal reorganisation, is partly down to the advantages to the UK government of using local security force personnel rather than regular British soldiers in Northern Ireland. One aim was to reduce casualties among the regular army. Another was to free up British troops for duties with Nato. But the UDR also persisted for so long because of justified fears of a strong loyalist backlash against any attempt to phase out the force. Former DUP leader Peter Robinson’s 1990 pamphlet “Hands off the UDR” is indicative of the strong sense of unionist identification with the force and the resistance to change.
UDR Declassified reads well and is brimful of detail, much of it new. There are some weaknesses. Chapters tend to end somewhat abruptly with little attempt to draw out the central points, and the author occasionally makes awkward jumps from one period to another. It is nonetheless a valuable contribution to understanding the role of one crucial organisational actor in a decades-long armed conflict whose legacy continues to reverberate strongly in politics and public debate on both sides of the Irish Border.
Niall Ó Dochartaigh is a professor of political science and sociology at the University of Galway and the author of Deniable Contact: Back-channel Negotiation in Northern Ireland
