As a shop steward and paramilitary leader, Andy Tyrie played a leading role in the 15-day long, 1974 Ulster Workers’ Council strike which rendered Northern Ireland ungovernable and doomed political attempts at cross-community power-sharing for decades.
Tyrie, who has died aged 85, headed the Ulster Defence Association (UDA), which organised roadblocks and pickets – closing factories, pubs, Belfast’s shipyards, Larne port, Ballylumford power station and other essential services. Those who tried to work were intimidated.
The protest was against the Heath government’s Sunningdale agreement, which established a Northern Ireland executive and assembly with unionist and nationalist ministers working together. The Irish government had a consultative role in the administration.
Loyalist and grassroots unionist opposition to the proposals, particularly Dublin’s participation, culminated in the Ulster Workers’ Council strike of May 1974. The two-week insurrection brought Northern Ireland to a standstill, collapsing the power-sharing assembly and executive.
The UDA leader was instrumental in coordinating preparations for the lockout, forging an alliance between paramilitary groups and the loyalist working class. Strikers were instructed not to confront the security forces if barricades were demolished, simply to rebuild them once soldiers had moved on.
The protest was originally due to start on Tuesday 14 May. “Who in their right mind starts a strike on a Tuesday?” Tyrie said at the time. “You start it on a Monday when nobody wants to go to work anyway.”
With his tinted glasses and downturned moustache, Tyrie was one of the easily recognised figures of the rebellion. Media-savvy, he remained the public face of Northern Ireland’s largest loyalist paramilitary organisation for 15 years, between 1973 and 1988.
Tyrie was born off the lower Shankill Road, west Belfast. His father had been a soldier; his mother took in sewing to supplement family income. Andy was one of seven children, who played in the streets between the Shankill and Falls Roads, before sectarian violence segregated Catholics and Protestants.
At one stage he lived in Ballymurphy, not far from Gerry Adams’ family. After Brown Street school he left full-time education at 14 to become an apprentice landscape gardener with the council.
Aged 18 he joined the Territorial Army, serving part-time for seven years. Needing to earn more money after he married Agnes Mooney, he went to work in a local mill, became a shop steward and later moved to the Rolls-Royce factory in east Belfast. His commitment to paramilitary loyalism pre-dated the Troubles: in 1967 Tyrie was sworn in as a member of the outlawed Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF).
The August 1969 riots in Belfast saw Catholic and Protestant families burnt or chased out of previously shared streets. Tyrie organised loyalist vigilante groups. The UVF, he believed, had not done enough to protect those forced out.
In 1971, the Shankill Defence Association, of which he was a prominent member, was absorbed into the loyalist Ulster Defence Association. It was an alliance of local “brigadiers” controlling different areas.
Tyrie’s rise to become self-styled “supreme commander” was accidental. Two of the most powerful leaders were Charles Harding Smith in the Shankill and Tommy Herron in east Belfast. The election of either, it was felt, would trigger a feud.
Tyrie was the compromise candidate in 1973. He was credited with restraining some of the worst violence and attempting to provide political leadership for loyalism. Targeting IRA members, he argued, was legitimate; he wanted to “terrorise the terrorists”. Sectarian killings of ordinary Catholics, he claimed, were counterproductive.
His initiatives included sending a delegation, including himself, to Tripoli. The Libyan leader Colonel Muammar Gaddafi had reportedly been impressed by the 1974 workers’ strike. They never met Gaddafi but spotted a rival IRA delegation seeking funding and weapons.
That year Tyrie and the UDA had secret contacts with the IRA at Laneside on the shore of Belfast Lough, a house used by MI6 and the Northern Ireland Office for back-channel negotiations. There was no political breakthrough.
A second loyalist workers’ strike led by Ian Paisley and supported by Tyrie’s UDA in 1977, aimed at restoring devolved, majority-rule government, proved ineffectual after tougher RUC policing dispersed picket lines.
In 1979, Tyrie published, with Glenn Barr, Beyond the Religious Divide – a plan envisaging political cooperation between Protestant and Catholic communities within an independent Northern Ireland. With other loyalist colleagues, he also wrote a play, This is It!, in 1984, which developed similar themes.
Tyrie, himself, was never convicted of terrorism offences. He was arrested for being in possession of police documents in 1982 but acquitted. Killings were claimed in the name of the UDA’s armed wing, the Ulster Freedom Fighters. The UFF was officially proscribed in 1973; the main organisation, the UDA, however, was not banned until 1992. Racketeering was commonplace.
Many UDA leaders were killed by the IRA or during internal loyalist feuds. Tyrie survived to retire. His close ally John McMichael was assassinated in a car bomb in 1987. Republicans had been provided with targeting information by opponents within the UDA, it was alleged.
The RUC’s interception of carloads of weapons imported from Lebanon the following year angered UDA hardliners arguing for a more assertive military strategy. In March 1988, Tyrie spotted an explosive device under the driver’s seat of his car. It was detonated by the army. Days later, he announced he was standing down and left the organisation.
In retirement, he became a supporter of the peace process – sharing public platforms with former IRA enemies. The Loyalist Conflict Museum in east Belfast, which opened in 2012, was originally entitled the Andy Tyrie Interpretive Centre.
• Andrew Tyrie, loyalist paramilitary leader, born 4 February 1940; died 16 May 2025
