MAY TAINTED BY TERROR
DUP leaders set up paramilitary-style organisation which went on to run guns into NI later used in loyalist massacre
THERESA May has been accused of wedding the UK’s minority Tory government to the Democratic Unionist Party, a party tainted with terrorism, in a desperate attempt to cling on to power.
Last night senior opposition politicians warned that May’s pact would allow the DUP, with its past connections to loyalist paramilitary groups, to dominate key areas of UK government policy. The row came as the DUP agreed a “confidence and supply” deal to sustain a Tory Government.
Key figures in the DUP including former Northern Ireland First Minister Peter Robinson and Ian Paisley were prominent in the early days of the Ulster Resistance (UR), a quasi-paramilitary style group set up to ‘protect Ulster’. In later years, UR allegedly imported weapons from South Africa – in collaboration with other loyalist terror organisations – some of which were used in loyalist murders in the 1990s.
May, who mounted an aggressive campaign accusing Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn of links to the IRA, is now facing accusations of hypocrisy.
Corbyn’s leading ally in Scotland, Labour MSP Neil Findlay, claimed the DUP deal would give the “hard men of Ulster” influence over UK policy. Findlay predicted May’s government will find itself “held to ransom”. He said: “It is clear that she will have to fold on a number of policy areas.”
Former SNP Cabinet minister Alex Neil also accused the Tories of hypocrisy. “It’s absolutely unacceptable that we will be governed by the priorities of the DUP,” he said.
“If the Labour Party contemplated a deal with an organisation like the DUP, the Tories would be at the head of the queue to pillory them.”
Pete Shirlow, the director at the University of Liverpool’s Institute of Irish Studies, said that while it was important to recognise that the DUP had moved on and had not been directly involved in violence, UR would have been seen as “a menace, a threat”. He said: “Some would say they rabble-roused and encouraged.”
On CAIN – the acclaimed Ulster University’s Conflict Archive on the Internet – UR is described as “a loyalist paramilitary-style organisation which was formed on 10 November 1986 by Ian Paisley, then leader of the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), Peter Robinson of the DUP, and Ivan Foster”.
CAIN claims UR was organised into nine battalions and members wore paramilitary-style red berets. Robinson was pictured at the time wearing a red beret, and beside men in military fatigues.
CAIN continues: “In November 1988 there was an arms find in County Armagh and the subsequent arrest of a former DUP election candidate brought accusations of links between DUP politicians and armed paramilitary groups.
“The DUP claimed that party links with the organisation had ended in 1987. Two members of Ulster Resistance were arrested in April 1987 in Paris along with a South African diplomat. It was claimed that there had been an attempt to exchange information on Shorts’ [the Belfast arms manufacturer] missile technology for weapons.”
Last year the Police Ombudsman for Northern Ireland published a 157page report into the infamous Loughinisland massacre in 1994, which saw loyalist gunmen murder six civilians in a bar. Evidence found that guns used in that attack were imported into North- ern Ireland by the UR in the late 1980s, by which point the DUP had severed links.
Dr Peter McLoughlin, lecturer in politics at Queen’s University, Belfast, said: “I think it is fair to say that the DUP under Paisley certainly flirted