Ulster Defense Association

The Ulster Defense Association (UDA) is the largest of Northern Ireland's Loyalist paramilitary organizations. It has engaged in sectarian assassinations and bombings in Northern Ireland since 1972 and has been an important factor in politics and peace negotiations during the conflict in Northern Ireland.

For more than 30 years, Northern Ireland has seen battles between the province's Roman Catholics (also called Republicans or Nationalists), who wish Northern Ireland to become a part of the Republic of Ireland, and its Protestants (also called Loyalists or Unionists), who wish it to remain part of Great Britain. Catholic and Protestant paramilitary organizations have formed—both employing terror to achieve their ends.

As the violence escalated in the late 1960s, many people came to believe that Northern Ireland's security forces, the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), and the British Army could no longer protect them. The Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA or PIRA) had patrolled Catholic neighborhoods since their reformation in 1969. Protestants, however, had no equivalent organization, though local vigilante groups had sprung up, particularly in the working-class neighborhoods of Belfast and Derry. In May 1971, the leaders of several local vigilante groups organized a series of community meetings; the result was the formation of the Ulster Defense Association, a group committed to combating the IRA and protecting Protestants.

The group was organized on British military lines; each of Northern Ireland's six counties had a brigade, which was further subdivided into battalions and companies. The governing body was called the Inner Council; initially it was a large committee comprising several dozen local leaders, but by 1974 a supreme commander, Andy Tyrie, had been elected. He and his deputies would lead the organization for the next 15 years. Although estimates vary, some sources believe the UDA to have had about 30,000 members in the mid-1970s, when violence in Northern Ireland was at its peak. The primary method of attack by the UDA has been sectarian assassination, killing members of the Catholic community at random in reprisal for IRA attacks. Its first campaign, begun in the spring of 1972, killed more than 80 people by the end of the year.

Because they feared a Protestant backlash, the police and other security forces were loathe to acknowledge that the murders were a deliberate sectarian campaign. In turn, the UDA was reluctant to publicly accept responsibility because the organization would then have been declared illegal and many of its members arrested. Their solution was to use a cover name, the Ulster Freedom Fighters (UFF), to claim responsibility for any attacks. Many UFF [Page 376]attacks were deliberately brutal; stabbing was preferred to shooting, and the bodies of some victims were mutilated and burned in an effort to terrorize the Catholic community and thus diminish support for the IRA.