Loyalist Volunteer Force

The Loyalist Volunteer Force (LVF) is a Protestant Unionist paramilitary group responsible for a number of sectarian killings in Northern Ireland.

A splinter group of the larger Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), the LVF broke with its parent organization in 1996 in a dispute related to the Drumcree Protests of that year. For more than 30 years, beginning in the late 1960s, Northern Ireland's Roman Catholic minority, who wished the province to become part of the Republic of Ireland, and its Protestant majority, who wished it to remain a part of Great Britain, were engaged in a bloody conflict. In late 1994 the major armed paramilitary groups representing both Protestants (also called Loyalists or Unionists) and Catholics (also called Nationalists or Republicans) declared cease-fires because they wished to participate in peace negotiations. By 1996, however, the negotiations had stalled.

Protestant frustration and suspicion at the lack of progress was aggravated in June by the banning of the Orange Order's July 12 March (a parade in Belfast that commemorates a 1690 Protestant victory over Catholics), the route of which passed through a Catholic neighborhood. Thousands of Loyalists assembled at a church in Drumcree for a protest lasting several days. Billy “King Rat” Wright, the UVF representative in Portadown, threatened violent reprisals if the march was not allowed. The leadership of the UVF had forbidden Wright to break its cease-fire, as this would have resulted in the organization's suspension from peace talks, but on July 8 a Catholic taxi driver named Michael McGoldrick was found murdered a few miles from Drumcree. Many observers believed the shooting to be the work of Wright's men.

Following McGoldrick's murder, Wright broke with the UVF, taking most of the organization's Portadown membership with him, and formed the [Page 367]rival LVF. The LVF has been linked to more than a dozen murders, and, as with other Loyalist paramilitary groups, most of its victims have been Catholics targeted at random. The LVF has also been implicated in a string of deaths thought to be the result of disputes over drugs.

In the spring of 1997, Wright was arrested on charges of intimidating a witness. On December 27, 1997, while in prison, he was shot to death by members of the Irish National Liberation Army, a Republican paramilitary group. His murder sparked a series of vengeance killings among the prisoners and led to two civilian deaths, as members of the LVF avenged, as best they could, their leader. With the death of the charismatic and popular Wright, a serious blow was dealt to LVF, and no new leader has yet emerged.

In 1998 the LVF declared a cease-fire because it wanted to participate in the early release program for paramilitary prisoners set up under the Good Friday Accords, which ended the overall conflict. Despite the cease-fire, however, the LVF is thought to be operating still, using the cover name “Red Hand Defenders” for sectarian attacks. A spokesperson for the Red Hand Defenders claimed responsibility for the murder of a Catholic postman, Daniel McColgan, on January 12, 2002, and issued a threat declaring all Catholic civil servants and teachers to be legitimate targets; the threat was retracted several days later. Many observers believe that the Red Hand Defenders consists primarily of members of the LVF and the Ulster Defense Association, another Unionist group. In August 2002, someone claiming to be an LVF operative made a death threat to Neil Lennon, a soccer player who was about to become the first Catholic to captain the Northern Ireland team. Although the LVF leadership disavowed responsibility for the threat, Lennon resigned from the team.

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