Loyalist terrorist groups intent on a bloody year

ON NEW YEAR'S EVE, a violent loyalist group, the Ulster Defence Association, issued a grim warning that it intended 'to intensify and widen our campaign in 1993 to a ferocity never imagined'.

On Sunday night the other main loyalist terrorist organisation, the Ulster Volunteer Force, showed by killing two members of a Catholic family that it, too, intends to make this year as violent as possible. UVF gunmen burst into a house near Dungannon shot dead Pat Shields, 51 and his son Diarmuid, 20. A second son, Davog, 24, was also shot and seriously injured.

No one doubts the determination of the loyalist gunmen to keep up the body count. In the past two years they have killed 80 people - more than the IRA in the same period.

For a number of reasons people outside Northern Ireland tend to be much more aware of IRA violence. The IRA is responsible for more than half the 3,000-plus killings of the past 25 years. Yet the UVF, UDA and other smaller loyalist groups have killed about 800 people in that time, most of whom were civilians often chosen at random simply because they were Catholics. Thus, loyalists probably rival the IRA in terms of civilian killings.

This is certainly understood by the Catholics in Northern Ireland, particularly in the traditional loyalist killing fields of Belfast, Tyrone and Armagh. There are families that have lost three or more members to Protestant gunmen. The security forces have traditionally had a higher success rate in jailing loyalist paramilitaries than in putting the IRA behind bars, so that the prisons hold more than 300 convicted UVF and UDA members. But the recent rise in loyalist violence has been accompanied by a greater sophistication in avoiding the leaving of clues and the indications are that the detection rate is falling.

Appalling as the IRA's record has been over the years, loyalists have been responsible for some of the most gruesome and horrific killings. In some cases Catholics have been tortured before being shot, while in one case loyalists raped a woman, then shot and injured her and killed her mentally retarded son. The notorious UVF 'Shankill Butchers' gang stabbed more than a dozen Catholics to death in the 1970s.

Most Northern Ireland Protestants are aghast when crimes like these are committed in their name and regard them as unjustifiable. Much of this violence comes at heart from anti-Catholic bigotry, yet it also has an underlying political purpose: to demonstrate that while Unionism has lost much of its political clout, its wilder fringes retain a capacity for violence.

The idea is to bring home the message that if Britain should ever contemplate withdrawal from Northern Ireland the potential exists for greater violence than anything yet experienced.

The illegal Ulster Volunteer Force has claimed responsibility for Sunday night's killings of a father and son in Co Tyrone, in an attack which may have been an attempt to wipe out an entire Catholic family. The gunmen who burst into a house near Dungannon shot dead Pat Shields, 51 and his son Diarmuid Shields, 20. A second son, Davog, 24, was also shot and seriously injured. Mr Shields' wife, a daughter and his third son saved themselves by barricading themselves into another room in the house. The killings, the first in Northern Ireland this year, brought widespread condemnation.