NI: Reforming the UDR?
01 September 1991
From the 1st July 1992, the 76th anniversary of the Battle of the Somme, the Ulster Defence Regiment will be merged with the Royal Irish Rangers to become the Royal Irish Regiment. The UDR, a force of full- and part-time soldiers which includes 700 women (known as "greenfinches"), is currently around 6,200 strong, all recruited from within Northern Ireland aside from a few senior officers drawn from other regiments of the British Army. Only about 3% of the regiment come from the minority Catholic community. Approximately 50% of the UDR are full-time members. In all, some 45,000 people have passed through the ranks of the UDR in its 21 year history.
The Royal Irish Rangers, current strength around 1,300, will lose a battalion and the new combined regiment will number 6,750. The Rangers are said to be 30% Catholic with half this figure recruited from south of the border. On this basis the new regiment's seven "home service battalions" for duty in the North will not have a significantly higher proportion of Catholic members than the UDR at present.
The re-styling of the UDR came as part of Defence Secretary Tom King's restructuring of the British Army announced on 23rd July, the "Options for Change" Review. The overall plan involves a reduction of 40,000 troops and the cutting of the 55 infantry battalions to 38, which will contain around 116,000. Close on one third of the infantry is likely to be committed to the North of Ireland at any one time.
At the press conference announcing the new regiment, the commander of the British Army in Northern Ireland, Lt General Sir John Wilsey, admitted that the UDR had a serious image problem, although he claimed that the formation of the Royal Irish Regiment was a military, not political, decision. He said, "now the UDR has not sought to be sectarian, one-sided or filled its ranks with Protestants, but that's the way it turned out." He hoped that the new regiment would be a "pan-Irish regiment which attracts to its ranks from all parts of the community and beyond from the South."
Sir Wilsey was speaking just three weeks after the Queen inspected the UDR at Lisburn on her first visit to the North since 1977. Her short speech of endorsement of the regiment was described by one columnist as "a politicised demarche that can only be regarded as untimely and hamfisted."
The UDR was formed in 1970 on the recommendation of the Hunt Report (Report of the Advisory Committee on the Police in Northern Ireland). Hunt proposed the UDR as a replacement for the notorious 'B' Specials, the exclusively Protestant auxiliary police force which had been in existence since partition. The UDR's reputation never escaped its origins.
Three things have discredited the regiment. Firstly, there is a relatively high rate of recorded criminality among its members. Between 1985 and 1989, UDR members were twice as likely to commit a crime as the general public. The UDR crime rate was ten times that of the RUC and about four times the British Army rate. Around 120 members/ex-members of the regiment are serving prison sentences for serious crimes including 17 who have been convicted of murder. Four of these (the UDR Four) are serving life for the murder of Adrian Carroll for which they were convicted in 1986. The four - Neil Latimer, Noel Bell, James Hegan and Winston Allen - are protesting their innocence on the grounds that the only evidence against them was based on confessions, later retracted, made in Castlereagh Holding Centre, and contested eye witness accounts from two people. In July, the Secretary of State referred the case back to the Appeal Court.
The second problem with the UDR concerns the alleged links between its members and loyalist paramilitary groups. This collusion has amongst other things taken the form of sectarian assassinations, thefts of arms and the passing on of details of republicans, the latter being the subject of the Stevens' Inquiry which reported in May 1990. The tone was