Willie Frazer - Background

Background

William Frazer grew up in the village of Whitecross in County Armagh as one of nine children with his parents Bertie and Margaret. He is an ex-member of the Territorial Army, and a member of the Free Presbyterian Church of Ulster. He attended a local Catholic school and played Gaelic football. In his own words Frazer described his early years as a “truly cross-community lifestyle”. His father who was a part time member of the British Army's Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR), and a council worker, was shot dead by the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) on 30 August 1975. The family home had previously been attacked before with petrol bombs and shooting incidents due to his father's UDR membership. Frazer has stated that his family was well respected in the area including by "old school IRA members" and received Mass cards from Catholic neighbours expressing their sorrow over his father's killing. Frazer believes an IRA member helped carry the coffin of his father at his funeral. Over the next ten years four members of Frazer's family who were members or ex-members of the RUC or British Army were killed by the IRA. An uncle of Frazer's who was a member of the UDR was also wounded in a gun attack.

Soon after his father's death the IRA began targeting Frazer's older brother who was also a UDR member. The family relocated to the predominately unionist village of Markethill. Upon leaving school Frazer worked as a plasterer for a period before serving in the army for nine years. Following this he worked for a local haulage company, then setting up his own haulage company which he later sold.

During the Drumcree conflict, Frazer was a supporter of members of the Orange Order who were demanding the right to march down the Garvaghy Road against the wishes of local residents. Frazer was president of his local Apprentice Boys club at the time.

For a brief period after selling his haulage firm Frazer ran "The Spot", a nightclub in Tandragee, County Armagh, which closed down after two Protestant civilians, Andrew Robb and David McIlwaine, who had been in the club were stabbed to death in February 2000 by the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), after one of them had allegedly made derogatory remarks about dead UVF Mid-Ulster Brigade leader Richard Jameson. Frazer was confronted in an interview on Radio Ulster about the murders by the father of one of the victims.

Frazer applied for a licence to hold a firearm for his personal protection and was turned down, a chief inspector said, based on intelligence that he was known to associate with members of loyalist paramilitaries. During the Smithwick Tribunal (set up to investigate the IRA ambush and killing of RUC officers Harry Breen and Bob Buchanan) it was alleged by a member of the Garda Síochána that Frazer was a part of a loyalist paramilitary group called the Red Hand Commando. Frazer denied the allegations, saying they put his life in danger.