Orange Volunteers

Relatively little is known about the Orange Volunteers, a Northern Irish terrorist organization that has claimed responsibility for a number of attacks on Roman Catholics beginning in 1998.

Since the late 1960s, Northern Ireland, a province of Great Britain, has experienced steady and violent conflict between Catholics, who wish Northern Ireland to become part of the Republic of Ireland, and Protestants, who wish it to remain a part of the United Kingdom. Both communities fostered armed paramilitary groups that were prepared to use violence to achieve their ends. In the early 1970s, a Protestant paramilitary group known as the Orange Volunteers, led by former British soldier Bob Marno, was formed. Members claimed responsibility for some murders of Catholics between 1974 and 1977, but the Orange Volunteers were principally known for its association with the 1974 Ulster Worker's Council (UWC) strike. This strike had caused the failure of the Sunningdale Agreement, the first serious peace attempt between Northern Ireland and Great Britain.

Before the strike, the UWC was a largely unknown organization with little political power. The UWC engaged paramilitaries from the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), the Ulster Defense Association (UDA), and the Orange Volunteers to compel workers to stay home during the strike's early days. (Once the strike seemed to be having an effect, most workers stayed home voluntarily.) After the strike, the Orange [Page 275]Volunteers faded from public view, and many believed the organization to be defunct by the 1980s.

In late 1997, peace negotiations had again begun in Northern Ireland, with all parties—the governments of Britain and Ireland, the major political parties, and paramilitaries—involved. The negotiations covered a provision that persons imprisoned for terrorist activities on behalf of the paramilitary groups would be released gradually. On April 10, 1998, preliminary negotiations were concluded and the Good Friday Accords were signed. The accords laid out a plan to achieve political stability in Northern Ireland; this plan included the provision for the release of prisoners.

Hard-line factions in both Loyalist organizations (representing Protestants; also called Unionists) and the Republican organizations (representing Catholics; also called Nationalists) split over the Good Friday peace plan and formed their own groups. Members of the re-formed Orange Volunteers (at first believed to be a separate splinter group of one of the larger Loyalist organizations) gave a televised interview to journalist Ivan Little in November 1998, stating that they were taking up arms for the express purpose of killing newly released Republican prisoners. Comments by the group during the interview and references made to the biblical Book of Revelations may indicate that the group has some connection to fundamentalist Protestants. The Orange Volunteers have been linked to about a dozen sectarian attacks on Catholic homes, mostly with mortar and pipe bombs, and to violent Loyalist protests at Drumcree centered around a route for a Protestant march in 1999 and 2000. In February 2001, the group issued a “Back to War” statement—once again declaring its intention to murder released Republican prisoners. They have also threatened to bomb Dublin, the capital of the Republic of Ireland. They have also been linked to the murder of Northern Irish journalist Owen Martin O'Hagan.

The group was declared illegal in Great Britain and Ireland in 1999 and was placed on the U.S. State Department's list of banned terrorist organizations in January 2002.

Many observers now believe that the Orange Volunteers are not a separate organization but merely a cover name employed by members of one of the larger Loyalist groups—possibly the UDA or the Loyalist Volunteer Force (LVF), both of which have observed a cease-fire since 1994 and 1998, respectively. If the UDA or LVF could have been shown to be responsible for the attacks, their political goals would have been jeopardized and the release of the prisoners provided for in the Good Friday Accords would have ceased. (These releases began in 1998 and have been largely completed.)

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