It is true, as Dr. Conor Cruise O'Brien points out in the foreword to Martin Dillon's seminal 1989 book The Shankill Butchers, that "the Provisional IRA by far the most important of the various murderous organizations of Northern Ireland  never unleashed on society anyone quite like Lenny Murphy, the chief of the Shankill Butchers."

The Shankill Butchers

 

But as O'Brien points out, the absence of a Catholic parallel to the Butchers is more a source of puzzlement than it should be a source of pride to the Nationalist community. To be sure, the hatred runs as deep on the Catholic side of the Belfast barricades as it does on the Protestant side. The poverty is as crushing, the despair as constant. Perhaps, as Dillon notes in his book, and as other commentators have opined, it helps that the Provos, as the Catholic terrorists were known, had a better sense of organization and public relations than their Protestant counterparts in groups like the Ulster Volunteer Force or the Ulster Defense Association. Because of that they were better able to direct their constituent terror cells and to market the mayhem they caused with pious pronouncements about war and duty and fair targets. To be sure, there is ample evidence in the history of that bloody conflict to demonstrate that the Provisional Wing of the IRA knew how to sell their stories. But there are also case studies that show that the UDA and the UVF and others learned a few tricks from their adversaries as well.

UVF logo on wall

 

More likely, it was simply the grim luck of the draw that Hugh Leonard Thompson Murphy happened to be born to nominally Protestant parents on the Loyalist side of Belfast on March 2, 1952.

Perhaps, Dillon speculates, it was particularly unfortunate that the young Protestant was saddled with such a Catholic sounding name. In a place like the Shankill section of Belfast, a working-class enclave where the work has long been hard to come by and where people often define themselves less by who they are than by whom they hate, Murphy, sometimes called "Murphy the Mick" by his classmates, worked hard to dispel any misconceptions. Even as a child, he worked to be seen as the biggest bigot of all. Of course, there is ample evidence that Lenny Murphy he had dropped the slightly Papist sounding "Hugh" would have been a thug whatever denomination he had been born into. That is evident in the fact that by the age of 10 he was already robbing his Protestant classmates of their lunch money, according to reports published after he grew up and became infamous.

It was also as a child that Murphy first recognized a talent that would later serve him well as the leader of the Shankill Butchers. Handsome and flamboyant, he was charismatic in a hard-edged way and people were drawn to him. The fact that he was always enthralled by violence made him feared. The result was that as he grew into his teens, no one dared challenge him, not his teachers, not his parents, not the other kids in the neighborhood.

By the time he was 15, Murphy had already been arrested twice, both times for petty theft. But had grown weary of the company of children.

It was 1968, the date generally given as the beginning of the wave of sectarian bloodshed known as "The Troubles" that would continue, more or less unabated for three decades. Though the discipline of politics was of little interest to Murphy, the bigotry by which the latitude and longitude of Northern Irish politics were charted was. So was the potential for violence that the Troubles afforded.

He left school and began spending his free time and all of it was free time in the company of older men, Loyalists, some of them members of the recently established UVF. He joined the organization's junior wing, and as Dillon would later write "Murphy was developing as a thug the world around him was starting to get out of control."

In short, he was a dangerous young man living in a world so fraught with its own danger and chaos that it was difficult for anyone to see how deeply distorted Murphy's vision of the world was.

By 1970 the Troubles had long since exploded into a full-blown bloodbath and Murphy was, by all accounts, thriving in it. Though officially he was little more than a minor cog in the UVF, his dangerous charisma had already attracted a handful of followers, sycophants really. Among them were Bobby "Basher" Bates, a small-time thug, who, like Murphy, covered his penchant for violence with a veneer of politics, and Sam McAllister, another young hoodlum from the streets of Shankill. Together they formed the core of what would later become the Shankill Butchers.

Bobby "Basher" Bates & "Big Sam" McAllister mug shots

 

There is little doubt that the trio, along with others who joined them, threw themselves into the mayhem with elan. But at first, the violence was confined to beatings "giving a Taig a good digging" in the slang of the Belfast streets.

By 1972 the men who would go on to murder indiscriminately had crossed the last barricade between them and the savagery to come.

The year had begun violently. There were the tit-for-tat murders by the IRA and the various Protestant factions, but there were also earth-shattering events that threatened to change the political landscape in Northern Ireland. In January, a squad of British paratroopers opened fire on a group of protesters in Londonderry, killing 13 of them in what would later become known as the "Bloody Sunday" massacre. The British government, shocked by the incident, had already begun to hint that perhaps the time had come to extract itself from the bloody morass of Northern Ireland. To the leaders of the Loyalist movement, that meant one thing; there was a very real danger that the Crown would abandon them, and the only recourse they could conceive was more violence.

This suited Murphy, McAllister and Bates just fine.