Ulster Volunteers - After World War I

After World War I

The Irish War of Independence began in January 1919. It was fought between the Irish Republican Army (the army of the self-declared Irish Republic) and the forces of the United Kingdom (which included the British Army, Royal Irish Constabulary and the "Black and Tans"). The Government of Ireland Act 1920 provided Home Rule for Northern Ireland and Southern Ireland, giving Northern Ireland the option of Irish unity or Irish partition; the Unionist dominated Parliament of Northern Ireland chose to remain a part of the UK.

As a response to IRA attacks within Ulster, the Ulster Unionist Council officially revived the UVF on 25 June 1920. In early July, the UUC appointed lieutenant colonel Wilfrid Spender as the UVF's Officer Commanding. At the same time, announcements were printed in unionist newspapers calling on all former UVF members to report for duty. However, this call met with limited success; for example, each Belfast battalion inheld little more than 100 men each and they were left mostly unarmed. The UVF's revival also met with little backing from unionists in Great Britain.

During the conflict, loyalists set-up small independent "vigilance groups" in many parts of Ulster. Most of these groups would patrol with the intention of reporting anything untoward to the RIC. Some of them, however, were armed with UVF rifles from 1914. There were also a number of small loyalist paramilitaries. The most notable of these was the Ulster Imperial Guards, who may have overreached the UVF in terms of membership. Historian Peter Hart wrote the following of these groups:

Also occasionally targeted were Ulster Protestants who saw the republican guerrilla campaign as an invasion of their territory, where they formed the majority. Loyalist activists responded by forming vigilante groups, which soon acquired official status as part of the Ulster Special Constabulary. These men spearheaded the wave of anti-Catholic violence that began in July 1920 and continued for two years. This onslaught was part of an Ulster Unionist counter-revolution, whose gunmen operated almost exclusively as ethnic cleansers and avengers.

Owing to the sluggish recruitment to the UVF and its failure to forestall IRA activities in Ulster, James Craig beckoned the formation of a new special constabulary. In October 1920, the Ulster Special Constabulary (USC) was set-up. This was an armed reserve police force whose main role, during 1920–1922, was to bolster the RIC and fight the IRA. Spender encouraged UVF members to join, and although many did so, the USC did not engulf the UVF (and other loyalist paramilitaries) until early 1922. Craig hoped to "neutralise" the sundry loyalist paramilitaries by enrolling them in the C Division of the USC; a move that was backed by the British government. Historian Michael Hopkinson wrote that the USC, "amounted to an officially approved UVF". The USC was almost wholly Protestant and was greatly mistrusted by Irish Catholics and Irish nationalists. Following IRA attacks, its members sometimes carried-out revenge killings and reprisals against Catholic civilians during the 1920–22 conflict.

In his book Carson's Army: the Ulster Volunteer Force 1910–22, Timothy Bowman gave the following as his last thought on the UVF during this period:

It is questionable the extent to which the UVF did actually reform in 1920. Possibly the UVF proper amounted to little more than 3,000 men in this period and it is noticeable that the UVF never had a formal disbandment ... possibly so that attention would not be drawn to the extent to which the formation of 1920–22 was such a pale shadow of that of 1913–14.