Although neither the UVF nor the UDA operated with impunity, it can be difficult to know who exactly joined their ranks, although most certainly they primarily recruited from working class Protestant communities. In his autobiography, Gerry Adams dies note that there were known members of the Catholic community who worked for loyalist groups against the IRA.

Perhaps the most notorious of these was Jimmy McKenna from the Catholic Ballymurphy estate in west Belfast. McKenna’s brother had been killed in a purge of petty criminals in the early ‘70s, which gave him motivation to “work for the other side”. McKenna returned to Northern Ireland after his brother’s death from Australia, and soon established credentials as a street fighter and was soon prosecuted for carrying a firearm.

After serving time in prison, by 1976 McKenna was wanted for inquiries into the murders of catholics John Crawford and Vincent Clark, although he had by that time escaped to Australia. One loyalist source, speaking in 2007, states that McKenna had been recruited and trained by British army intelligence at this time. On his return to Northern Ireland, according to other later reports by UVF members, he reached out to the Shankill branch of the UVF, to recruit their help in tracking down his brothers murderers, and he was put under UVF protection. Thereafter, he provided intelligence about IRA members and participated in their planned assassinations. The IRA, somewhat unusually, failed to claim some of these deaths as being from their ranks. Concerns started to arise that McKenna was not identifying IRA members, but rather had targeted random Catholics, and he started to become unpopular among the leadership. He was then taken to the airport and told to leave Northern Ireland, and he again returned to Australia. Allegedly, before he left, he admitted that he had been providing intelligence to the Special Branch of the RUC, although I’m not aware that this has been proven.