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  • The Guardian

    How old ghosts are haunting Ireland | Susan McKay

    As Britain prepares to leave the EU, the Irish border question looms ever larger, stirring fears that the Troubles have not yet been consigned to the past
    by Susan McKay Mar 25, 2018 12 minutes
    Members of the public walk past a mural depicting an Ulster Volunteer Force fighter on a street corner in BelfastMembers of the public walk past a mural depicting a fighter from loyalist paramilitary group, the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), on a street corner in Shankill Road in Belfast, northern Ireland, September 26, 2005. Irish nationalist guerrillas have given up the weapons that sustained their 30-year campaign, international monitors are expected to say on Monday. REUTERS/Dylan Martinez Photograph: Dylan Martinez/REUTERS

    The taxi was a big German four-wheel-drive affair, and as I got into the back seat I thanked the driver for his willingness to make the journey. The “beast from the east” was due to collide with Storm Emma and, south of the border, the government had warned people that a blizzard was imminent, that they should get home by 4pm and stay there. It was 4pm and I was in Belfast. I’d travelled up on the early train from Dublin, where I live, to report on a trial.

    I emerged from the court to a demented sky and the news that public transport north and south had been suspended. I needed to get home. It took a few calls to get a taxi company willing to agree a fixed fare. As I settled into the cream leather upholstery the happed-up driver looked back at me in his rearview mirror and said: “I know who you are. Do you know who I am?”

    I had not heard of him for many years. He’d been one of the leaders of the Loyalist Volunteer Force, the paramilitary faction responsible for a series of sectarian murders in County Armagh, about which I had written in the 1990s. Its origins were in the Ulster Volunteer Force, originally set up in 1912 to defend against home rule for Ireland. Back then it was trained on the lawns of the stately homes of the gentry, its guns stored in their attics when its members went off to fight in the first world war. They were led by men like Viscount Brookeborough who, as the Ango-Irish treaty of 1921 was negotiated, revived a militia, ready to ensure that not an inch of the new Protestant unionist state north of the border would be yielded to the Catholic Irish state south of it. This force became the Special Constabulary, including the “B” Specials. The modern UVF, formed in 1966, had throughout the Troubles’s hardline stance, and the taxi driver’s faction had continued to do so, rejecting the . The current leader of the DUP, , had also rejected the agreement, and defected from the Ulster Unionists to join Paisley’s party. But Paisley had turned. In 2007, he had taken power as first minister alongside former IRA leader .

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