Ulster Protestant Action

Ulster Protestant Action (UPA) was a loyalist organisation in Northern Ireland.

The group was founded at a special meeting at the Ulster Unionist Party's offices in Glengall Street, Belfast, in 1956. Among the attendees were many Loyalists who were to become major figures in the 1960s and 1970 also attended, such as Ian Paisley. The meeting's declared purpose was to organise the defence of Protestant areas against anticipated Irish Republican Army (IRA) activity, as the old Ulster Protestant Association had done after partition in 1920, often by organising assassination missions into Catholic areas of Belfast. [This move followed the election win by Sinn Féin of over 150,000 votes in the 1955 UK general election - the strongest expression of anti-partitionist feeling in some years.] The new body decided to call itself "Ulster Protestant Action", and the first year of its existence was taken up with the discussion of vigilante patrols, street barricades, and drawing up lists of IRA suspects in both Belfast and in rural areas. [See CEB Brett, Long Shadows Cast Before, Edinburgh, 1978, pp.130-131.]

Even though no IRA threat materialised in Belfast, and despite it becoming clear that the IRA's activities during the Border Campaign were to be limited to the border areas, Ulster Protestant Action remained in being. Factory and workplace branches were formed under the UPA, including one by Paisley in Belfast's Ravenhill area under his direct control. The concern of the UPA increasingly came to focus on the defence of "Bible Protestantism" and Protestant interests where jobs and housing were concerned. As Paisley came to dominate Ulster Protestant Action, he received his first convictions for public order offences. In June 1959, a major riot occurred on the Shankill Road in Belfast following a rally he had spoken at. [See Ian S. Wood, 'The IRA's Border Campaign' p.123 in Anderson, Malcolm and Eberhard Bort, ed. 'Irish Border: History, Politics, Culture'. Liverpool University Press. 1999]

In the 1960s, Paisley and the UPA campaigned against Prime Minister of Northern Ireland Terence O'Neill's "rapprochement" with the Republic of Ireland and his meetings with Taoiseach of the Republic, Seán Lemass, a veteran of Easter 1916 and the anti-Treaty IRA. He opposed efforts by O'Neill to deliver civil rights to the minority nationalist community in Northern Ireland, notably the abolition of gerrymandering of local electoral areas for the election of urban and county councils. In 1964 his demand that the Royal Ulster Constabulary remove an Irish Tricolour from Sinn Féin's Belfast offices led to two days of rioting, after this was followed through.

In the aftermath of these protests, two councillors were elected for the UPA. In 1966, the group reformed as the Protestant Unionist Party.

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