Joe Bratty - UDA Activity

UDA Activity

Eventually Bratty became head of the UDA in Ballynafeigh, leading his own unit from Annadale Flats. Bratty's unit struck on 7 September 1990 when they entered the house of a 34 year old Catholic, Emmanuel Shields, and shot him dead as he lay in bed with his pregnant girlfriend. According his family, Shields, who had a criminal record but not for republican activity, had regularly been targeted by Bratty and his associates for physical attack in the past and they had fired shots into his mother's house in nearby Burmah Street when he lived with her. Bratty christened his unit Ku Klux Klan and members of the group, including himself, had the initials KKK tattooed on their arms.

Bratty ordered the attack on the lower Ormeau branch of Sean Graham's bookmakers on 5 February 1992, an act resulting in the death of five men. Bratty was widely believed to have been present along with his right-hand man Raymond Elder during the attack, although the team that Bratty sent was made up of UFF members from east Belfast rather than local members. Another gunman had been provided by west Belfast UFF leader Johnny Adair, who had first conceived of the action. Alex Kerr, Bratty's commanding officer as South Belfast brigadier, commended the attack, claiming that lower Ormeau residents had been involved in shielding republicans before suggesting that the attack was revenge for the Teebane bombing.

In addition to the 5 February Ormeau Road bookmakers shootings, Bratty's unit was allegedly involved in the murder of Michael Gilbride, a Catholic taxi driver who had settled in the Lower Ormeau area. Gilbride was killed outside his parents home on Fernwood Street not far from Bratty's Annadale Flats base. Another victim was Donna Wilson, a Protestant and resident of Annadale Flats who had recently moved to the area from the Tullycarnet, East Belfast. A number of residents had complained to Bratty in his role as local UDA commander about the noise of her stereo and he assembled a team of ten men armed with baseball bats who broke in, beat her to death, seriously injuring three of her companions and wrecked the flat. In the end only a sixty-year-old who had led the complaints to Bratty was charged with relation to Wilson's death. Bratty was also identified as the getaway driver for the attack in which Teresa Clinton, the wife of a Sinn Féin election candidate, was murdered in her lower Ormeau home. Thomas "Tucker" Arnett, one of Bratty's closest lieutenants, was identified as the main gunman although not charged. Arnett died on 12 July 1996 as part of an internal UDA dispute when two fellow members of the organisation kicked him to death outside a bar on the Ormeau Road.