Ex-UDA godfather went from terrorising Catholics to becoming influential peace figure

Sunday World

21-05-2025

Tyrie pioneered the use of sectarian loyalist assassination teams but became loyalist peace process convert
Andy Tyrie stood at the head of a 25,000-strong UDA army of armed and trained volunteers.
For a number of years from the early 70s into the mid-80s he was the most powerful terrorist chief in the country and Europe.
Tyrie, who passed away this past weekend after a lengthy illness, was one of the most significant figures in loyalist paramilitarism. He is understood to have been in his eighties at the time of his death which was announced on Saturday morning.
He was in power when the UDA was in its pomp – feted by unionist politicians, it was seen as a mainstream loyalist movement and remained a legal organisation until it was finally proscribed in 1992.
By the time it became a crime to be a member, the UDA had murdered almost 300 civilians, the vast majority of them Catholics.
It was Tyrie who pioneered the use of sectarian loyalist assassination teams which become known in nationalist circles as 'loyalist murder squads'.
The murder in May 1972 of Catholic Benny Moane, who was snatched from a bar in the Shankill area and driven to the war memorial in Greenisland where his captors sat drinking before finally putting him out of his misery with a bullet to the head, is regarded as the first in what became the loyalist sectarian murder blueprint.
With successive British governments resisting calls to ban the organisation and not including suspected members in their internment policy, Tyrie was free to act with virtual impunity.
The UDA's legality allowed Tyrie to cultivate a media persona. With his trademark leather jacket, tinted glasses and spaghetti western moustache, he trademarked what became known as the 'loyalist look'.
Michael Stone pictured on the knee of former UDA commander Andy Tyrie
Journalists were regular visitors to the UDA HQ on Gawn Street off the Newtownards Road.
The late Ian Paisley was famously pictured parading past the building with a masked UDA man looking down on him.
Tyrie joined the UVF in 1970 before switching to the UDA in 1972, where he quickly rose through the ranks to take a seat on the ruling Security Council.
It was era of infamous figures such as Davey Payne and Tommy Herron, and the following year he was made Supreme Commander, the only person to hold such a rank in the history of the UDA.
He was a key figure in the organisation of the 1974 Ulster Workers' Council strike which paralysed the country in an attempt to bring down the Sunningdale Agreement.
In an interview with the Sunday World a quarter of a century later, he conceded it was wrong to bring down what was effectively the model for the current power-sharing Executive.
'We weren't ready for power sharing then,' he said, 'it was a time when the loyalist community was under attack from republicans and from a British government that seemed determined to sell us down the river to a united Ireland.
'Do I regret it? I regret the loss of so many lives in the years that followed, but the strike? No.'
At the time of the strike and for the following 14 years he was the undisputed godfather of the biggest terrorist gang in Europe.
Ulster Defence Association (UDA) march along Shankill Road. Photo:Intelligence documents uncovered in 2021 put the membership of the UDA at 25,000, and their assessment was they were well-armed and 'fully trained'.
There were hundreds of murders committed by the UDA in Tyrie's time in charge. And they weren't confined to killing Catholics – the UDA were murdering their own in savage internecine feuds and vendettas.
At one stage, Tyrie, coming to the end of his tenure as UDA overlord, escaped a boobytrap car bomb murder bid himself. That was on May 6, 1988. Five days later, Tyrie 'took retirement' from the top echelons of the terror organisation.
The attack came months after the murder of UFF leader John McMichael, who was killed by an under-car booby trap.
The attack was claimed by the IRA but it is widely suspected it was carried out in collusion with elements within the UDA. Tyrie was a pall-bearer at his Boxing Day funeral.
Together Tyrie and McMichael had set up the UFF, a sectarian murder machine, so that the UDA could continue to be legitimised.
With a two-track strategy, the UFF maintained their murder mission while the terror chiefs drew up the 'Beyond The Religious Divide' document attributed to the New Ulster Political Research Group and which would become the basis of the strategy of the Ulster Democratic Party headed by McMichael's son Gary and which they took into negotiations for the Good Friday Agreement.
But in 1988 there were many in the UDA not ready for peace. Tyrie saw the writing on the wall and after the attempt on his life he walked, retiring to a quiet life in east Belfast.
He left behind an organisation that was splintering into factions. In October 1988 one of his contemporaries, Jim Craig, was lured to the Bunch of Grapes bar on the Beersbridge Road where the UDA commander and racketeer was executed by his own organisation for treason.
He was suspected of setting up McMichael and Tyrie.
Despite the formation of a ruling inner council, the decline of the UDA was evident. Tyrie remained an influential figure in the drive for a ceasefire.
Like another loyalist peace process convert, the UVF's Gusty Spence, he shaped the Combined Loyalist Military Command ceasefire announced on October 13, 1994. Spence read out the statement with Tyrie sitting behind him.
His name had featured on a loyalist museum in east Belfast.
The Loyalist Conflict Museum opened in 2012, and was originally called The Andy Tyrie Interpretive Centre.
He became a leading figure in the Ullans Academy, a project with an ethos of 'bringing unionist and nationalist people together'.