Face to face with the Ulster warlord

Irish Post

a day ago

I FIRST met Andy Tyrie, the leader of an armed loyalist group, who died last week, in 1986.
A BBC religious affairs programme, Sunday Sequence on Radio Ulster, had started hiring me as a freelance reporter and interviewing Tyrie was one of my first jobs.
He was of interest to a religious affairs programme because the producers thought he might have thoughts on how much loyalist violence against Catholics was religiously motivated.
I had to travel to a part of Belfast I did not normally feel safe in, where the population was almost entirely Protestant and unionist.
Esther who managed reception, pressed the buzzer to let me through the security gate and directed me up the stairs to Short Kesh. This was the joke name for Tyrie's office, a pun on Long Kesh, the site of the Maze prison which housed loyalist and republican convicts.
I found Tyrie affable and witty. He was a stout and tawny man with dark hair and a thick moustache. I assumed that the loyalist sectarian marauders he governed had at least the good sense not to shoot a journalist, one who might air their case, if they had one.
We spent a couple of hours talking and then I recorded the interview.
We covered a lot of ground. His basic theory was that sectarian tension in Northern Ireland was about territory.
Most working class Protestants lived in housing developments that were almost exclusively Protestant but the Catholic population was increasing and needed housing too.
The Ulster Defence Association which he led was ostensibly about defending Northern Ireland, or Ulster as they called it, against the IRA.
In reality it was more concerned to scare away Catholics who had moved into houses in what loyalists regarded as Protestant areas.
We talked also about new ideas being developed at that time about loyalist culture.
Tyrie said that loyalists had been surprised to see that republicans in the prisons were able to communicate using the Irish language. They realised that a coherent Irish culture reinforced the argument for Irish unity and the preservation of a singular Irish identity.
To match that, loyalists had to explore their own identity. They were now taking an interest in Ulster Scots, a rural dialect that their forebears had brought from Scotland.
Before I left Tyrie, one of his close colleagues came into the room. He remarked that I bore a strong resemblance to Jim Campbell, a former news editor of mine who had been shot and wounded by men of the UDA that Tyrie led, perhaps with Tyrie's approval.
The new arrival said, 'Sometimes we drive past Campbell's house and wave to him just to scare the shite out of him.'
This was closer to the raw humour of vicious people than the amicable chat I had been having with Tyrie.
This man took from his pocket a large brass folding knife, opened it and held the blade up to my face. 'If we just cut off a bit of the beard here and another bit here, you'd look just like Jim Campbell,' he said.
I edited the interview and it was broadcast at length. On the day after broadcast the production assistant called me and asked for Tyrie's address. The BBC, which paid interviewees back then, sent him a cheque for £83.
A few weeks later, Terry Sharkie, my producer and I went to Moneymore to report on an Orange Ceili, one of those presentations of loyalist culture that Tyrie had spoken of.
This was held in the ballroom of a hotel. Tyrie was there.
I went over to talk to him and realised that the men around him were not happy with my presumption of familiarity. I said something light-hearted to Tyrie to evoke a similarly friendly response that would reassure these goons that I was no threat.
Tyrie said nothing so I walked away.
There was further embarrassment that night when I was called out to draw the raffle ticket for a clock made by a loyalist prisoner. This clock was built onto a brass map of Northern Ireland on a wooden plaque.
I drew the ticket and to enormous embarrassment my producer Terry Sharkie had the winning ticket.
There was stamping of feet and shouts of 'Fenian Fix! The Taigs have got the clock'.
But Tyrie's people assured us we had won the clock fair and square and even invited us to stay on. I danced with one of the loyalist women in a cumbersome country waltz.
'We're not sectarian here,' she said.
That clock sat on a filing cabinet in the BBC's religious affairs office for about three years and was then blown onto the floor by an IRA bomb in the street below us.
In the year before my interview with Tyrie his organisation had shot and killed one Catholic. He was later usurped by more murderous younger members who raised that tally considerably after trying also, and failing, to kill Tyrie himself.
Perhaps I had seen a hint of that emerging tension myself, between the cheery bloke that he was when we were alone together and the sterner figure he became when hard men were around.
See More: Andy Tyrie, IRA, Ulster