Post by Wasp on Nov 30, 2007 21:02:15 GMT
Ed Curran Belfast Telegraph Monday 19,November,2007
The ceasefire announcement by the Ulster Defence Association jogged my memory back to the organisation's formation in the 1970s. In those perilous days, vigilante groups patrolled urban streets by night and from these sprung the paramilitaries.
My first encounter with the UDA was in a fairly humble terrace house off the Crumlin Road. There lived James Anderson, the first 'major-general' of the UDA to go public and, in 1972, to give me an exclusive interview.
Anderson told me he had been a Protestant vigilante in charge of the area around his home. He did his share of manning barricades and patrolling streets. He told me that when the novelty of this began to fade, he and others met in a school in North Howard Street and decided to amalgamate what was left of the vigilantes, and so the UDA was founded.
By 1972, when I talked to him, he was leading tens of thousands of working-class Protestant men, often marching through the streets in khaki uniform and dark glasses. When a riot broke out on the Shankill, their influence was obvious. Parachute Regiment officers came to Anderson's home and asked him to stop the trouble. Within an hour, it was over.
My own impression of him and many other UDA men whom I met in those early days, was of little more than community- spirited individuals protecting their neighbourhoods. "If the UDA hadn't come into being, we would have been three-quarters way into the Irish republic by now," he told me. And he expressed the hope that "it will all be over in six months".
Basically, he and his mates were in the UDA because they had lost faith in the political system to deliver for them. He said he had no confidence in unionist politicians and that "in the final analysis, it will eventually come to force being used."
How tragically right he was. When I reflect on his interview, it brings home the distance the UDA has travelled down a long and appallingly brutal, drug-trafficking, murderous, nest-feathering path, from the simplistic ideals of men like James Anderson who founded it, possibly out of nothing more than a sense of duty to protect their streets.
The ceasefire announcement by the Ulster Defence Association jogged my memory back to the organisation's formation in the 1970s. In those perilous days, vigilante groups patrolled urban streets by night and from these sprung the paramilitaries.
My first encounter with the UDA was in a fairly humble terrace house off the Crumlin Road. There lived James Anderson, the first 'major-general' of the UDA to go public and, in 1972, to give me an exclusive interview.
Anderson told me he had been a Protestant vigilante in charge of the area around his home. He did his share of manning barricades and patrolling streets. He told me that when the novelty of this began to fade, he and others met in a school in North Howard Street and decided to amalgamate what was left of the vigilantes, and so the UDA was founded.
By 1972, when I talked to him, he was leading tens of thousands of working-class Protestant men, often marching through the streets in khaki uniform and dark glasses. When a riot broke out on the Shankill, their influence was obvious. Parachute Regiment officers came to Anderson's home and asked him to stop the trouble. Within an hour, it was over.
My own impression of him and many other UDA men whom I met in those early days, was of little more than community- spirited individuals protecting their neighbourhoods. "If the UDA hadn't come into being, we would have been three-quarters way into the Irish republic by now," he told me. And he expressed the hope that "it will all be over in six months".
Basically, he and his mates were in the UDA because they had lost faith in the political system to deliver for them. He said he had no confidence in unionist politicians and that "in the final analysis, it will eventually come to force being used."
How tragically right he was. When I reflect on his interview, it brings home the distance the UDA has travelled down a long and appallingly brutal, drug-trafficking, murderous, nest-feathering path, from the simplistic ideals of men like James Anderson who founded it, possibly out of nothing more than a sense of duty to protect their streets.