Ulster Defense Association

The Ulster Defense Association (UDA) was the largest of Northern Ireland's Loyalist paramilitary organizations. It engaged in sectarian assassinations and bombings in Northern Ireland beginning in 1972, and it was an important factor in politics and peace negotiations during the conflict in Northern Ireland until the group officially disbanded in 2007.

For more than 30 years, Northern Ireland was torn by a conflict between the province's Roman Catholics (also known as Republicans or Nationalists), who wanted Northern Ireland to become a part of the Republic of Ireland, and its Protestants (also called Loyalists or Unionists), who wished it to remain part of Great Britain. Catholic and Protestant paramilitary organizations were formed, and both employed 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 (PIRA or, more commonly, the IRA) had patrolled Catholic neighborhoods since the organization's re-formation 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, and the result was the formation of the Ulster Defense Association, a group committed to combating the IRA and protecting Protestants.

The group was organized along British military lines: each of Northern Ireland's six counties had a brigade, and the brigades were subdivided into battalions and companies. The governing body was called the Inner Council; initially, this 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 had about 30,000 members in the mid-1970s, when the violence in Northern Ireland was at its peak. The primary method of attack by the UDA was sectarian assassination, or 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 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.