Loyalist Volunteer Force

From Metapedia

The Loyalist Volunteer Force (LVF) is a loyalist paramilitary group in Northern Ireland which broke away from the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) and was led by Billy Wright. It is outlawed as a "terrorist" organization in the UK and Ireland.

Billy Wright, believed to be responsible for the murder of thirty Catholics (mostly civilians with no paramilitary connections), had been the leader of the mid-Ulster brigade of the UVF. Internal differences between Wright and the UVF's brigade staff in Belfast came to a head in July 1996 during the Drumcree dispute. The body of a Roman Catholic taxi driver, Michael McGoldrick, a recent university graduate, was found dumped a few miles from Lurgan. Although no grouping claimed the murder, it was strongly suspected that it was Wright's men. Consequently the mid-Ulster unit was stood down by the UVF leadership, as it had breached the ceasefire the organization had been observing while its representatives were in negotiations on the Belfast Agreement.

Wright then took most of the unit's members with him and set up the LVF. Wright (who had previously been a lay preacher) is believed to have exerted a strong moral force among LVF members, for example, banning pornography in the LVF wing of the HMP Maze prison.

Although believed to be behind many atrocities in the mid-Ulster area—centred on the Lurgan/Portadown area, including many attacks on civilians, Wright was finally charged with menacing behaviour and sentenced to eight years at the Maze prison. There he demanded a separate wing for the LVF prisoners. The authorities agreed and the wing became a gathering point for various dissident shades of loyalist paramilitaries, including many from Belfast and north Down.

Wright was murdered on 27 December 1997 in a well-planned attack by members of the Irish National Liberation Army (INLA) housed in an adjacent wing of the prison.

As Wright sat in a van waiting to be taken for a visit, a three-man unit scaled a number of roofs in the prison before running across a courtyard in full view of Wright's men locked in their wing and shooting dead their target.

The INLA claimed that this "execution" was in reprisal for Wright's sectarianism: neither of the two other LVF men in the prison van, one of whom was on remand for beating to death a Catholic teenager, was harmed.

That night, LVF gunmen killed a bouncer in Tyrone who prevented a massacre by physically blocking their entrance to a pub. Unbeknownst to the killers, the man had once been in the IRA.

In March 1998, during the negotiations for the Good Friday Agreement, the LVF issued a statement expressing support for the stance of the anti-agreement Democratic Unionist Party, saying the party's leader, Ian Paisley, had got it "absolutely right". Members of the DUP - including prominent member of parliament Rev. William McCrea - have appeared on public platforms with LVF leaders, including Billy Wright.

In May 1998 it called a cease-fire and urged people to vote No in the referendum. The NIO accepted its cease-fire in November making its prisoners eligible for the early release scheme under the Belfast Agreement. Later, it handed over a small amount of weapons to the Independent International Commission on Decommissioning. The weapons; four sub-machine guns, two rifles, two pistols, a sawn-off shotgun, 348 rounds of ball ammunition, 31 shotgun shells, five electrical detonators, two pipe bombs, two weapons stocks and five assorted magazines, were destroyed and recorded via video.

Wright's successor as LVF leader, Mark Fulton, was found hanged in Maghaberry prison in 2002. He is believed to have committed suicide.