A former detective chief inspector with the Metropolitan Police told a court in Belfast this week that 10 Downing Street knew, as long ago as 1973, that the Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR) – once the British Army’s largest regiment – was “totally subverted” by loyalist paramilitaries.

It is the first time Detective Chief Inspector Steve Morris has spoken publicly about what he discovered while working for the Historical Enquiries Team (HET), set up by the then Chief Constable of the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI), Sir Hugh Orde, to review the 3,000-plus murders of the Troubles.

Morris was speaking at a civil court hearing in which a County Armagh family is seeking acknowledgement, apology and compensation from the Ministry of Defence for the murder in August 1975 of Sean Farmer, 32, a father of five, shot dead as he returned from a Gaelic football match in Dublin.

In court on Monday, counsel for the Farmer family asked Morris for his view on who was responsible for the murder. Morris replied that a gang of loyalists, the “vast, vast majority” of whom were members, or former members, of the security forces, had killed him.

The UDR, said Morris, had been “totally subverted” by the two largest loyalist paramilitary gangs – the Ulster Defence Association and the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF). The evidence for this conclusion is contained in an intelligence report “Subversion in the UDR” compiled for the Joint Intelligence Committee in 1973.

Morris was also asked about how high up the political ladder he believed this knowledge went and immediately replied: “As high as Ten Downing Street where the Prime Minister was briefed about it”. Conservative Ted Heath was Prime Minister at the time.

Sean Farmer (Supplied)

Armouries

Morris told the court that Farmer had been killed by the Mid-Ulster UVF, specifically by two serving UDR men and one serving member of the police, using weapons and other equipment taken from British Army armouries.

A second victim, Colm McCartney, 22, first cousin to Nobel poetry prize-winner Seamus Heaney, was shot dead in the same incident as he and Farmer crossed the border returning from the Gaelic football match in Dublin and were stopped at a bogus UDR road-block.

No one has even been convicted of murdering Farmer or McCartney. However, in court on Monday, Morris named three of those allegedly involved in the murders as Robert McConnell and Bertie Frazer, both deceased UDR men, and Laurence McClure, then a serving policeman.

He also named Philip Silcock, a UVF man named in police Special Branch daily record sheets as involved in a triple gun-and-bomb attack at Donnelly’s Bar in County Armagh in December 1975.

UDR man Robert McConnell, later killed by the IRA, was also involved in the attack on Donnelly’s Bar and identified in the 1993 YTV documentary Hidden Hand as involved in the 1974 Dublin and Monaghan UVF bombings in which 34 people were killed.

The Farmer/McCartney murders took place less than a month after three musicians in the Miami Showband were stopped by a fake UDR patrol and killed on their way south from Banbridge, County Down. Two serving UDR members were later convicted of the murders and another two suspected of involvement.

In both incidents, the victims were stopped on the road by what they believed to be genuine UDR men patrolling in what appeared to be full uniform and carrying British Army-issued weapons. Two more people, James and Gertrude Devlin, were shot dead at yet another apparent UDR checkpoint in May 1974 with a UDR man convicted.

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Damages

Last week, the PSNI agreed to pay undisclosed damages to the Farmer family and make a public apology. The MoD, a joint defendant, however, is fighting the same case which was adjourned at a hearing on Tuesday until November.

Morris explained at Monday’s hearing that he had been invited, after 10 years serving with the Serious Crimes Squad, to join the HET where he had headed up the “White Team” reviewing credible claims of collusion between loyalist paramilitaries and either (or both) the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) – the precursor to the PSNI – and the UDR.

In June this year, during a successful case taken against the PSNI and the MoD by the Reavey family, victims of the same gang, it was revealed McConnell’s service record stated that he had stolen the Sterling sub-machine gun used to murder the three Reavey brothers, John Martin, Brian and Anthony in January 1976.

This revelation had been withheld from Morris’s HET inquiry and also a later inquiry, “Operation Denton” initially headed by the now Chief Constable of the PSNI, Jon Boutcher, into the activities of the so-called “Glenanne Gang” who killed over 120 Catholic civilians during the mid-1970s.

Operation Denton’s report was due to be published late last year but this was delayed after leaked minutes of a private meeting with families prompted challenges on whether it had the legal power to conduct a non-criminal investigation and disclose intelligence material.

The PSNI paid the Reavey family £175,000 while the MoD paid £225,000. An apology was read in court acknowledging that “the behaviour and failures of members of the RUC may have contributed to the murders”.

The “Subversion in the UDR” file was found in The National Archives by The Pat Finucane Centre. It states:

- An estimated 5-15 per cent of UDR soldiers were linked to loyalist paramilitaries

- The “best single source of weapons, and the only significant source of modern weapons” for loyalists was the UDR and were being used to murder Catholics

- Many soldiers were “loyal to Ulster” rather than the British government.

The UDR was dissolved in 1992.

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