The first feud, between the LVF and UVF, began in earnest on December 27th, 1999. The LVF were toasting to the memory of their murdered leader, Billy Wright, inside Portadown Football Club's bar just yards away from where King Rat used to live. Around a dozen members of the UVF, some armed with pickaxe handles and clubs, burst into the social club and attacked the LVF, some of whom were prisoners out on Christmas parole. Several were severely beaten, including two brothers from Ballysillan, one of who was responsible for murdering Brian Service the year before.
They were targeted because of an earlier dispute in the club during which Richard Jameson, the UVF's Mid-Ulster commander, had been threatened. The bitterness between the two groups had been welling up in Portadown for several months, as the UVF sought to reassert its presence in the town. Jameson had remained loyal to the UVF leadership in Belfast, even though he stayed on friendly terms with Billy Wright. He had been insulted and threatened over a row he had had with a Wright supporter in the town during Christmas. The UVF, determined to flex its muscles in Portadown, saw red and carried out the brutal assaults on the LVF prisoners and their supporters. To the LVF, this was the last straw. Some of those badly beaten in the attack vowed revenge.
The following Monday evening, Jameson was sitting outside his home in his Isuzu Trooper jeep on the Derryletiff Road, five miles from Portadown. A young man from Dungannon lay waiting for him. The assassin fired two shots from a .9 millimetre semi-automatic pistol.
The killer then opened the jeep door and fired a further three shots into Jameson's body. Retaliation, when it came the following month, immediately diluted the outrage felt in Portadown over the murder of a popular loyalist businessman like Jameson. And although the UVF did not sanction the slaughter, it was widely believed that its members were behind it.
Teenagers Andrew Robb and David McIlwaine were out drinking with friends in a nightclub in Tandragree. After they left the club, they were lured into a car with the offer of a lift back to Portadown.
Robb and McIlwaine never came home. Their badly mutilated bodies were found in a field a few miles outside the north Armagh town. They had been beaten severely and stabbed by a gang with UVF connections in nearby Lurgan.
By the summer of 2000, The UDA's Shankill Road "C" Company leader, Johnny Adair had gained control of what had been, until then, separate UDA commands in north and west Belfast. His men had been behind organised attacks on Catholic areas in the north of the city during the marching season. Adair appeared determined to stoke up sectarian passions in the city. At one stage he even issued a statement that, if Catholics did not stop attacking Protestant houses and forcing Protestants out of their homes, the UDA would call off its ceasefire and take action.
The RUC and the authorities seemed genuinely perplexed by this declaration. The Northern Ireland Housing Executive, the body which controls public authority housing in the North, announced that 21 people had been forced from their homes in north Belfast in July, and all of them were Catholics.
There were a number of highly publicised attacks on Protestant homes in the Sandy Row area of south Belfast and in the Lower Shankill.
The south Belfast UDA now accepts that it was loyalists from their own organisation in the Lower Shankill who threw bricks and smashed windows at the Protestant areas targeted.
They have admitted that the Lower Shankill UDA were acting as agents-provocateurs trying to wind up the loyalist community and create the conditions to break the ceasefire.
They did not have long to wait, only the guns were to be turned not on Catholics or republicans but rival loyalists. The atmosphere on the Shankill during the summer of 2000 was already poisonous, with the UDA and UVF exchanging insults on leaflets and on gable walls.
The UDA painted murals dedicated to the memories of Billy Wright and Frankie Curry, whom they claimed were killed by "enemies of Ulster".
Curry and Wright's image was immortalised on the Shankill alongside the late Princess Diana, the loyalists' Queen of Hearts. The UVF, on the other hand, nursed dark suspicions of UDA involvement in LVF attacks in Belfast, where the latter group had little or no base.
The UDA had planned a day of "loyalist culture" for Saturday, August 20th, in which thousands of its members would march through the Greater Shankill area. Tensions were so high that the leaderships of the UVF and UDA met a few days before the parade to discuss potential problems. The UVF had one demand: that no LVF members or colours were allowed on the UDA march. The UDA's representatives at the meeting assured the UVF envoys that the LVF would not be invited.
Both organisations agreed the discussions had been useful and could provide a forum for defusing the recent antagonisms building between the two groups.
Up to 10,000 UDA members flooded into the Shankill around lunchtime. Among those attending the march was the UDP's John White and several leading loyalists, including Adair and Michael Stone.
The deputy Lord Mayor of Belfast, Frank McCoubrey, also caused controversy by turning up on the platform of the rally during which armed and masked UDA members, including a woman, fired shots from an AK47 and a sub-machine gun.
At first the parade itself appeared to be peaceful if menacing. The march was a naked demonstration of UDA strength, with hundreds of standard-bearers in paramilitary uniform swaggering along the Shankill. There was even good banter between a section of the marchers and young UVF activists watching the procession outside the Rex Bar, a Shankill pub favoured by UVF members and their supporters. One UDA-aligned flute band stopped outside the Rex and played a UVF song, which drew applause and cheers from their UVF rivals drinking at the front of the pub.
Then disaster struck. One UDA band passed by the Rex, and a standard-bearer unfurled an LVF flag shortly after 3 p.m. Beer glasses and bottles were hurled at the man waving the LVF flag. Fighting then broke out between marchers and those drinking outside the Rex. Ten minutes later, with the fights spilling on to the Shankill Road, around 200 UDA members charged up towards the Rex. They were led by a UDA killer who had met Mo Mowlam during her visit to the Maze in 1998 to appeal for an end to sectarian attacks. Three of the mob were armed and started shooting at the Rex, wounding two men and a woman.
As the UDA mob retreated down to the Lower Shankill and ambulances sped to the scene, the RUC tried to take control of the situation. Ten police Land Rovers were dispatched to the area to keep the rival loyalist factions apart. A day that had been described as a "celebration of loyalist culture" had degenerated into an orgy of inter-Protestant blood letting.
Although the RUC had secured the middle Shankill, violence erupted at the lower end of the road. UDA members, some of them activists in their youth wing, the Ulster Young Militants, turned their anger on the families of UVF men living in the Lower Shankill. Within an hour of the Rex attack, the homes of prominent UVF figures in the North were either on fire, burnt out or smashed up.
Among the homes attacked was that belonging to Gusty Spence, the founder of the modern UVF and the man who read out the loyalist ceasefire during those optimistic days of October, 1994, when Northern Ireland appeared to be on the brink of a new peaceful era. As Spence usually spends the weekends at his caravan on the Co Down coast, he and his family escaped being viciously assaulted or even killed during the attacks on UVF homes.
A revised and updated edition of UVF by Jim Cusack and Henry McDonald is published by this week by Poolbeg. £9.99.