The decision of the British authorities to recognise the Loyalist Volunteer Force led by Billy Wright as a loyalist paramilitary group provoked the Irish government’s “horror”, State papers reveal.
Irish officials were strongly critical – and deeply suspicious – of the way Wright was treated in prison, echoing complaints that “malign mandarins” were “nurturing” his breakaway paramilitary group.
Known as “King Rat”, Wright had been a senior member of the Ulster Volunteer Force in mid-Ulster but broke away in 1994 and set up the LVF, which is blamed for 19 killings.
He was jailed in 1997, but the British authorities recognised the LVF as a separate loyalist paramilitary grouping and gave its members a separate wing in the Maze prison.
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Deeply unhappy, Irish officials complained that that the move would “enhance Wright’s self-confidence and self-importance ... [and] provide a magnet for a variety of dissidents amongst loyalist prisoners”.
In addition, it would weaken “the authority of the relatively moderate and peace-oriented Combined Loyalist Military Command leadership within the Maze”.
While the LVF were given extra prison privileges, the British authorities were at the same time refusing requests from Dublin for concessions to mainstream loyalist prisoners to strengthen their ceasefire.
Visiting Wright in jail in 1997, Brendan McAllister of the Mediation Network said he found him to be “articulate, intelligent and charismatic”, attracting loyalty through “personal magnetism ... rather than fear”.
Urging people to take the LVF threat seriously, McAllister said Wright “combined a potent mix – magnetism and leadership, a sense of purpose, idealism and probity, a cadre of disciplined and motivated followers with a proven capacity for sectarian violence and a philosophy which stridently mixes notions of territory, identity and religious fundamentalism. He and his followers see themselves as the custodians of a unionist integrity which has been lost sight of by the mainstream ...”
By the time, McAllister visited Wright the prison privileges that he and other LVF members had been given had been withdrawn after they had set their prison wing alight in July 1997.
From then on, the LVF prisoners faced a strict regime and were held in solitary confinement, guarded by a specialist unit of prison officers armed with long shields and batons.
Prison officers wore visors that only revealed their eyes and communicated only in hand signals to avoid identification by the loyalist prisoners, for fear of attacks upon them outside the Maze.
Describing the wing as “deathly quiet”, McAllister said he found Wright “very angry at this treatment”, which he described as an attempt to humiliate him.
But others thought the harsher treatment benefitted the LVF. Breidge Gadd, head of the Northern Ireland Probation Board, felt it was being “done deliberately” by some prison authority figures.
Such treatment would “establish and nurture the LVF”. She believed it would increase cohesion among the prisoners and give their supporters on the outside a cause to rally around.
Some NIO officials were “manipulative and malign ... and followed a right-wing and unionist agenda”, she told Irish official Eamon McKee and such “malign mandarins” should be opposed politically.
McKee told Dublin that Gadd was “but one of a number of contacts with whom I talked about the prison issue who voiced very real fears about the senior NIO and prison service officials involved and their intentions”.
The “nurture” suggestion would be seen as “fanciful”, he accepted, but “given her credentials and her experience”, it should not be lightly dismissed.
“It is, at any rate, a view shared by other paramilitary groups,” McKee, then working in the Department of Foreign Affairs’ Security Section in Dublin, told his Iveagh House superiors.
