John Gregg (UDA) - Anti-Catholic Campaigns

Anti-Catholic Campaigns

Along with Jackie McDonald and Billy McFarland, fellow brigadiers on the UDA's Inner Council, Gregg was lacking in enthusiasm for the Belfast Agreement when it appeared in 1998. Throughout 1999 his brigade continued to be active, undertaking a pipe bomb campaign against Catholic homes whilst on 12 May members of his brigade shot and wounded a Catholic builder in Carrickfergus under the cover name "Protestant Liberation Force". Much of this activity was inspired by Gregg's personal hatred of Catholics. Indeed a senior police source once described him as a man driven by "pure and absolute bigotry". Gregg was also characterised as "a bully, a racketeer, and a sectarian bigot who took particular delight in carrying out vicious punishment attacks and randomly targeting Roman Catholics." In 2000 he helped to ensure that a proposal before the Inner Council to initiate the decommissioning of weapons was rejected.

Having witnessed demographic shifts in Glengormley and Crumlin, traditionally unionist towns that had become majority nationalist on account of people moving out of Belfast, he determined that the same thing would not happen in Carrickfergus and Larne and so launched a campaign of pipe bomb and arson attacks on Catholic homes. Perhaps the main target proved to be Danny O'Connor, a Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) representative on initially Larne Borough Council and then the Northern Ireland Assembly, whose home and office were attacked at least twelve times by Gregg's men between 2000 and 2002. Trevor Lowry (aged 49) was beaten to death in Glengormley by UDA members under Gregg's command on 11 April 2001 after he was mistaken for a Catholic. Catholic workman Gary Moore was killed in Monkstown in 2000 in another killing attributed to Gregg's unit.

In late 2001, Gregg's reign of terror in Rathcoole, where drug dealing, knee-capping and savage beatings were the norm, was challenged by local labour councillor Mark Langhammer, who also objected to Gregg's close links to neo-Nazi groups in the United Kingdom. He called on the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) to establish an auxiliary police "clinic" on the estate, which had no permanent police building, so as locals concerned about crime could have somewhere to go. This followed in summer 2002 when a community centre was taken over for this purpose although Gregg's UDA objected and daubed the building with the word "tout". On 4 September Langhammer's car was blown up outside his Whiteabbey home by Gregg's men, although Langhammer himself was asleep at the time and no one was injured.