Category: UVF
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Bring Back The Phoenix, Part III. Check out 50 plus stories from 2025.
Continuing our campaign to bring back The Phoenix magazine, here is a selection of stories from 2025 which underline what we are missing. They cover MI5 and MI6 dirty tricks, neutrality, and much more besides. A selection from 2026 will appear next week. The PDF at the end of this article includes a selection of…
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Bring back The Phoenix Part II: 50+ espionage and dirty trick stories from 2024.
Click on the link below to read a selection of stories from The Phoenix 2024, including: Brig. Frank Kitson’s dirty war; what really happened on Bloody Sunday (not the nonsense in the Savile Inquiry report); Patrick Crinnion, MI6’s spy inside the Gardaí; the Dublin and Monaghan bombings; Barrie Gane of MI6; Freddie Scappaticci; the Kincora…
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Bring back The Phoenix. In the meantime here are approximately 30 dirty trick intelligence stories from 2020 to 2023.
The Phoenix ceased publication in June 2026. The magazine was the only real source of articles about collusion, the Dublin-Monaghan bombings, Kincora, MI5 dirty tricks and attacks on Irish neutrality, etc, on Irish newsstands. It has to be brought back – somehow. Otherwise, we will be relying on The Irish Times and other similar publications…
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From the Vaults: Capt. Robert Nairac.
Many articles, books and documentaries have been written about Capt. Robert Nairac, who was killed by Republicans on 15 May 1977. This article appeared in November 1977. His body has never been recovered. Covert History’s account of his role in the Dublin and Monaghan bombing and the UVF’s Glenanne Gang can be found in the…
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The Resistance Men (Webbook).
© Deirdre Younge. Introduction. ‘What were they trying to do around here .. create civil war?‘ (Willie Frazer, referring to the intelligence services operating in the 1970s in Armagh. (2016)) During the ‘Troubles’ Armagh, Tyrone and Down were the cockpit of a vicious war which descended into sectarianism fuelled by collusion. Intelligence material submitted to…
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Roy Garland.
In the 1960s Roy Garland played a part in setting up TARA alongside William McGrath. McGrath was a leading figure in the Orange Order. McGrath became the commander of Tara. Garland later discovered that McGrath was abusing children and risked his life trying to halt the abuse perpetrated at Kincora Boys’ Home by McGrath. This…
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The complexities of Loyalism. By Roy Garland.
A ginger group in the Orange Order known as “Cell” was led by Canon Ernest Long who said “Cell” was taken from the idea of a small seed that could influence a larger group. I assume the larger group was the Orange Order. William McGrath joined Cell in the 1960s and Canon Long, was uncomfortable…
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The strange death of Harry Breen. By Deirdre Younge.
In April 2017, Village magazine published this article by Deirdre Younge which revealed another side to Chief Superintendent Harry Breen of the RUC. Breen was shot dead by the IRA in 1989. He served as Commander H Division (Armagh and parts of Down) from March 1988 to ’89. His death was the subject of the…
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The Gathering Storm.
In this article, Roy Garland explains how Loyalist leaders such as William McGrath were making dire predictions about the intentions of the IRA as the 50th anniversary of the 1916 Rising approached. Roy Garland witnessed these developments at first hand. Soon, he was dedicating himself to the peace process believing in the “interconnectednes between everyone…
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Martin O’Hagan and the Official Republican movement. By Eddie Walsh
Eddie Walsh was born and grew up in Tralee. He joined the Republican movement in 1969, and became a lifeling supporter of the Workers Party. In this article, he describes how he met Martin O’Hagan through their mutual membership of the Official Republican movement. O’Hagan went on to become a high profile investigative reporter with…
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Tara’s roots.
In this article, Roy Garland describes the origins of Tara, an armed Loyalist paramilitary organisation. Garland was once a member of Tara. It was led by William McGrath. Tara was once part of the Orange Order. It had supporters in the Republic of Ireland and later linked up with the UVF. There were also international…
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Returning the Serve, the Dublin-Monaghan bombings of 1974. [WebBook]
1. London will not share MI5 and MI6’s files with Dublin. 2. The Corbet Lough conspiracy. 3. 2024: A Legal action is being pursued by families and survivors of the Dublin and Monaghan bombings. 4. The President who spelt it out. 5. The Government has Garda surveillance records of the people who campaigned for the…
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LBC
Roy Garland joined TARA as a young man. TARA was a paramilitary organisation commanded by William McGrath. Garland was also asked to join the mysterious ‘London Belfast Committee’ by McGrath. Very little is known about it. Garland turned down the offer and, hence, did not discover its inner workings. Nonetheless, he suspected it was an…
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False flag.
In the September 2019 edition of Village magazine, Deirdre Younge described how MI5 fabricated a Loyalist arms importation to frighten the Dublin government. The MI5 ‘false flag’ operation was launched in 1993, on the verge of an IRA ceasefire Deirdre Younge was a reporter with Hibernia magazine and a Current Affairs Programmes Editor in RTE…
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From the Vaults: Billy Wright, 1996
In October 1996 Fortnight magazine published an article which asked: “What does Billy Wright think? Since the Combined Loyalist Military Command gave him the choice of exile or death, Wright has maintained that it is his thinking that got him into trouble with organisations he previously supported. Although he consistently denies that he is a…
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Gusty Spence
I met friends of Gusty Spence in the mid 1960s when I ran a small business that dad had formed in the early 1940s after I was born. I joined the Orange Order in the early 1960s, and often sat beside Gusty’s brother, who thought highly of him and said of someone who had criticised…
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Orange and the Green.
ROY GARLAND is the author of ‘Gusty Spence’, the acclaimed biography of the former UVF leader. Spence changed his ways and became a key participant in the peace process. Here, Roy Garland, who knew many of the key Loyalist figures of the Troubles, describes some of the preliminary steps taken on the long road that…
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The Collusion Spectrum. By Deirdre Younge.
In 2019 the BBC’s investigative ‘Spotlight’ programme added significantly to a body of evidence exposing widespread collusion across the Loyalist spectrum from the DUP to the UVF to MI5. Deirdre Younge revealed more in an article in Village magazine. It can be downloaded here:
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New Beginnings.
Roy Garland is the author of the biography of Gusty Spence, a founding member of the modern era UVF. After decades of violence, Spence embraced the peace process. In this article Roy Garland writes about some of the unlikely relationships which he saw blossom between former Loyalist and Republican paramilitaries, including Gusty Spence and Billy…
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Dirty Linen.
A Review Essay by Christopher Stanley of “Dirty Linen: The Troubles in My Home Place” by Martin Doyle. Published by Merrion Press (€24.99/£22.99 Hardback) 368 pages.. Christopher Stanley is Litigation Consultant, KRW LAW LLP, Belfast and was a Legal Aid Practitioner Group/Legal Aid Lawyer of the Year Public Law Lawyer of the Year Nominee 2017…
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Blackmailing Thatcher.
Peter Wright CBE, formerly of MI5, defeated Margaret Thatcher in a volcanic legal battle in Australia in the late 1980s. Thatcher tried – and failed – to injunct the publication of Wright’s book, Spycatcher, in Australia. The publication cast MI5 and MI6 in a deplorable light: little more than organisations riddled with traitors and immersed in…
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A supplement to ‘A State in Denial’, taking the story of collusion to the 1990s. By Margaret Urwin. [WebBook.]
Margaret Urwin (née Kelly) has worked with Justice for the Forgotten, the organisation representing the families and survivors of the Dublin and Monaghan bombings, since 1993 and, for more than a decade, with the families of the victims of other cross-Border bombings. Justice for the Forgotten affiliated with the Pat Finucane Centre in December 2010.…
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Download a pdf copy of Operation Clockwork Orange by David Burke.
A pdf copy of Operation Clockwork Orange by David Burke can be downloaded by clicking on the link below. Some readers may find there is a space between this paragraph and the download link. David Burke is the author of three books published by Mercier Press: – ‘Deception & Lies, the Hidden History of the Arms…
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Operation Clockwork Orange Vol 4: The Never Ending Cover-Up. MI5 will never admit what it did in Ireland.
By David Burke. [Volumes 1-3 of this ebook can be found by clicking on the top section of this page (purple lettering) which will return you to the home page.] 167. The Cabinet Office knew the report into the sex abuse at Kincora Boys’ Home by Sir George Terry contained a lie. While David Calcutt…
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From the Vaults: NOW magazine May 1990. Linking MI5 agents to the Dublin and Monaghan bombings of 1974. By Frank Doherty and David Burke.
At the end of the 1980s, the late Frank Doherty set up NOW magazine. It published a number of stories about MI5 malfeasance. Two of them stick out in my mind. First, one which linked Mountbatten to the abuse of boys at Kincora which Frank and I wrote together. MI5 ran Kincora as a ‘honey…
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Parallels in ‘Perversion’: RUC and MI5 informers and the Arlene Arkinson and Richard Kerr cases. By Donal Lavery.
While they would seem worlds apart, their fates were all the more alike. This refers of course to the tragedies which befell young Arlene Arkinson and Richard Kerr starting when both of them were youths and culminating in two destroyed lives. Arlene was a pleasant teenage girl who seemed well-liked by her family and friends…
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