The Ulster armies that can kill more people than the IRA

Any security source in Northern Ireland will say privately that loyalist paramilitaries are, in terrorist terms, very much in second place behind the IRA.

In security circles last week there was grudging professional admiration for the IRA's proficiency in smuggling two large car-bombs into Army headquarters at Lisburn, Co Antrim.

The same respect is not shown for the loyalist paramilitary groups which are now in the process of deciding whether or not to continue their ceasefire, or follow the IRA back to war. Yet no one doubts the loyalist capacity to inflict casualties on a large scale, if they so choose.

Before the 1994 ceasefires a senior Army officer said of the IRA: "They are absolutely a formidable enemy. The essential attributes of their leaders are better than ever before. Some of their operations are brilliant, in terrorist terms. The fact is that the IRA are very, very good."

The same source described the violent loyalists as "a bloody menace," adding: "They make life more difficult for us. It allows the Provos to say to the Catholic community, 'You need us to protect you'."

This unflattering comparison reflects several factors. An IRA "spectacular" may take the form of engineering a security breach as stunning as that at Lisburn; a loyalist "spectacular" has tended to take the form of machine- gunning a Catholic pub or betting shop. Loyalists lack the IRA's financial resources, have fewer hard-core seasoned activists and, importantly, the large stocks of explosives and "heavy gear" - mortars, large-calibre machine-guns and so on - of the IRA.

But the early Nineties brought unmistakable evidence that what they lacked in equipment and resourcefulness they could more than make up for in determination and ferocity. For several years they outdid the IRA in their killing rate, in a bloody period that helps explain why there is so much fear of their return to the fray.

The first half of the Seventies saw the majority of the 900-plus killings by extreme Protestants, but their activities then markedly dropped away. The death toll began to climb again, however, after the signing of the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement, to which many loyalists fiercely objected.

Their second violent peak came in the early Nineties when, after a gradual build-up, the gunmen of the Ulster Volunteer Force and Ulster Defence Association pushed their killing rate up to around 40 victims a year, overtaking the death toll of the IRA toll for the first time.

The murders followed several different patterns. One was a more selective targeting of republicans and their families, resulting in the deaths of about 20 people with Sinn Fein connections in the five years leading up to the 1994 ceasefires.

A great deal of fear was generated in Catholic areas by the fact that the loyalists were prepared to kill not only Sinn Fein activists but also members of their families. The wife of one party member was shot dead while a republican councillor lost, in separate shootings, his brother and his son.

But, in addition to such specific targeting, the loyalists also stepped up random attacks on Catholics, particularly in the Belfast and mid-Ulster areas. They also carried out a series of indiscriminate attacks aimed at inflicting maximum casualties on the general Catholic population.

These were often designed as rapid retaliations for IRA violence. After a bus carrying Protestant workers was blown up in 1992, for example, UDA gunmen attacked a betting shop, killing five Catholic men and injuring seven others. In October 1993, after the deaths of 10 people in the IRA bombing of a Shankill Road fish shop, the UDA machine-gunned a Catholic- owned bar, killing seven people.

One of the most surprising and welcome features of the 1994 loyalist ceasefire was that it put an almost complete stop to a Protestant killing campaign which had raged at such a high level. The fringe parties sprouted by the paramilitary groups to act as their political wings are evidently arguing hard against a resumption of the violence.

There are hopes that the loyalists will hold their hand for the moment, but there is also a widespread belief that another IRA attack in Northern Ireland could make retaliation inevitable. Loyalist paramilitary leaders appear reluctant to go back to the gun, but there are rogue elements around who could act on their own initiative.

The UVF's mid-Ulster unit, for example, was formally expelled from the organisation recently, with one of the leading figures associated with it, Billy Wright, ordered to leave Northern Ireland. He has continued to defy this edict, and could conceivably act as a rallying-point for those who favour a more militant line.

In the meantime, another source of concern lies in reports that the UVF may have gained access to new supplies of explosives. The lack of such material saved many lives during the Nineties, since the loyalists would undoubtedly have bombed targets in Belfast and Dublin had they had the material to do so.

But even if these reports are unfounded, the loyalists still have guns enough to resume the kind of close-quarter shootings seen before the ceasefires, and to turn Belfast's recently peaceful streets back into killing grounds.