Billy Wright: a preacher, killer, terrorist... and ‘agent for state’

Documentary reveals how former UVF man believes ‘King Rat’ was working as informer

NO loyalist since the Shankill Butchers in the 1970s struck fear into the hearts of Catholics more than Billy Wright.

‘King Rat’ had a long run. He waged a bloody, sectarian war in the Portadown and Lurgan areas from the mid-1980s until he was shot dead in the H-blocks in 1997 by the INLA.

His late father David alleged there was state collusion in the murder.

“My son was the last person to be executed at Her Majesty’s pleasure,” he told me.

A BBC Spotlight documentary last night alleged that the LVF leader himself may not have been all that he seemed.

It included an interview with loyalist Laurence Maguire who believes he was a state agent.

Maguire began to have suspicions when Wright stopped him from killing three suspected IRA members. He had followed them weekly and planned to shoot them in a rural park outside Dungannon. But, whenever he proposed the attack, Wright “was putting it back”.

Maguire said: “I thought there was something strange about it, and when I look back now, it seems there was a lot of strange things about it.”

Shortly afterwards, in July 1992, the three men — Gregory Burns, Aidan Starrs and John Dignam — were abducted and killed by the IRA who alleged they were informers.

Following “suspicions” about Wright, the UVF set up an internal inquiry into him, headed by the late David Ervine.

Former Police Ombudsman Baroness Nuala O’loan told Spotlight: “I think we know that Billy Wright was an informant.”

Former PUP leader Billy Hutchinson has previously said that Wright was a state agent.

Wright was born in 1960 in Wolverhampton, the only boy in a family of five. His parents separated and the children were put into care when he was seven.

Wright was separated from his sisters and grew up with a foster family in Mountnorris, south Armagh. He had Catholic friends and watched Gaelic football.

There was no history of paramilitarism in his family: two of his sisters married Catholics. Attending secondary school in Markethill, Wright’s opinions became increasingly loyalist.

In 1975, he painted ‘UVF’ on a local Catholic primary school wall. He refused to remove it, and was sent to live with an aunt in Portadown. He joined the paramilitary group later that year.

Months later, he was caught with weapons and spent the next five years in jail. After release from prison, he became a born-again Christian and travelled Ireland — including visits to Castlewellan and Cork — as a lay preacher.

He rejoined the UVF after the 1985 Anglo-irish Agreement, eventually becoming Mid-ulster commander. He is believed to have been responsible for at least two dozen murders and survived several republican assassination attempts.

Wright vigorously opposed the peace process and became a major thorn in the side of the UVF.

On July 8, 1996, with tension at Drumcree at its height, his men murdered Catholic taxi driver Michael Mcgoldrick near Lurgan.

The following month, the Combined Loyalist Military Command gave Wright 72 hours to leave Northern Ireland. He organised a march in Portadown to defy the threat.

The crowd marched to a football pitch where the district master of Portadown Orange Lodge Harold Gracey shared a platform with the DUP’S Rev William McCrea. The then Mid Ulster MP said he was there to defend democracy and the basic civil right of freedom of expression.

He condemned the death threat against Wright. If anyone had evidence he was involved in crime, they should place it before a court of law, he added.

Wright went on to set up the LVF. He told friends he would end up in prison or the grave. Eight months later, he was back in the H-blocks. Eight months after that, he was dead.

Aged 37, he was killed by the INLA as he was led out of a van for a visit with his girlfriend.

The overwhelming majority of Wright’s victims were Catholic civilians, not “active republicans” as he claimed.

In 2010, an inquiry found there was no state collusion, but a number of serious failings by the prison service as a result of negligence.

His father told me: “My son wasn’t a choir boy. He was a UVF man. I’ve never even had a parking ticket in my life. I’m completely against paramilitaries.

“Had he been shot dead by republicans on the street, I wouldn’t like it, but I’d accept it. Billy was killed in jail while in the care of the state. It was no accident. He was a roadblock to the political process and they were determined to remove him.”

If his father’s suspicions and Maguire’s allegations are true, then Wright had outlived his usefulness to the state — and he paid the price.

‘My son was no choir boy... Billy was killed in jail while in care of the state. It was no accident’