Back Ulster Protestant Volunteers French Óglaigh Phrotastúnacha Uladh Irish Ulster Protestant Volunteers NB
The Ulster Protestant Volunteers was a loyalist and Reformed fundamentalist paramilitary group in Northern Ireland.[1] They were active between 1966 and 1969 and closely linked to the Ulster Constitution Defence Committee (UCDC) and Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), established by Ian Paisley and Noel Doherty in 1966.
The organisation's inaugural meeting took place in Belfast's Ulster Hall, which would later become the UCDC. Their first incidents quickly followed.
In the spring of 1966, members bombed an all-girls primary school in Ardoyne, where talks to better relations between Protestants and Catholics were to take place. In May of that year they had their first kill in Shankill, although it was unintentional. The victim was 70-year-old Matilda Gould, a Protestant who the volunteers mistook for the Catholic living next door.[2] Shortly after this, the UVF and UPV took part in the killings of two Catholic men not far from the scene of the first attack. Following the 1967 trial of the UVF's leader Gusty Spence, the two groups were classified as illegal organizations.
- ^ "CAIN: Abstracts of Organisations - 'U'". cain.ulster.ac.uk. Retrieved 10 May 2019.
- ^ "Getting their retaliation in first: 1969 and the re-emergence of paramilitary loyalism". History Ireland. 6 March 2013. Retrieved 10 May 2019.