Ken Barrett (loyalist)

Barrett was a native of the loyalist Shankill Road area of Belfast and attended the same school as future leader Johnny Adair, Somerdale Secondary School on Somerdale Park (Barrett was, however, a few years above Adair).^[2] Barrett joined the UDA some time in the early to mid-1980s and was part of the West Belfast Brigade's B Company which covered the Woodvale area at the top of the Shankill. Barrett quickly gained a reputation within the West Belfast UDA as one of their most zealous gunmen.^[3] According to Henry McDonald and Jim Cusack, Barrett became one of RUC Special Branch's paid informers within the UDA in the late 1980s.^[4]

According to a fellow UDA member at the time, interviewed by David Lister and Hugh Jordan and identified by them only as "Davy", he and Barrett had collaborated on a number of killings at the time, including that of Paddy McAllister in August 1986, Terry McDaid in May 1988, Gerard Slane in September 1988, and Eamon Quinn in February 1990.^[5] The latter killing in particular was the handiwork of Barrett as he had shot the wounded Quinn several times in the head and stomach after he had initially been wounded by "Fat" Jackie Thompson of C Company.^[6]

One police detective described Barrett as a "compulsive gambler" and one of the "most cold-blooded killers he had ever met".^[7]

It was Barrett's involvement in the murder of Pat Finucane, an Irish solicitor alleged by loyalists to be in the Provisional IRA, which was to shape his future. According to the aforementioned "Davy", he had joined with Barrett and Johnny Adair on the night of the killing (12 February 1989), to hijack a car from a taxi driver in Glencairn. He claimed that Barrett then drove the car to the Finucane family home and, whilst Barrett sat outside in the driver's seat, Adair and "Davy" forced their way inside and fired fourteen shots to kill Finucane.^[8] The UDA claimed the killing soon afterwards, describing it as "the execution of Pat Finucane the PIRA officer, not the solicitor".^[9]

As part of the fallout from the Stevens Inquiries and the series of arrests that took place during them Barrett was briefly given the role of West Belfast Brigadier. Long-serving leader Tommy Lyttle had been arrested and as convention dictated he had to vacate the brigadiership whilst in custody, so command passed to Tommy Irvine. Before long however, Irvine was also arrested as part of the Stevens inquiries and so Barrett was promoted to the top job. However, Barrett proved to be an ineffectual leader and before long he was pushed aside in favour of Billy Kennedy, Tommy Lyttle's brother-in-law and the man chosen by the former brigadier as his successor.^[10] Eventually Jim Spence would emerge as brigadier with Adair as military commander as power passed into the hands of the Lower Shankill's C Company.^[11] Despite being sidelined, Barrett remained close to the new leadership and was frequently recorded as being in the company of Adair around 1990 and 1991 by police surveillance files.^[12] On 17 January 1991 Barrett shot and wounded Thomas McCreery, a former hitman for the UDA's North Belfast Brigade who had gone freelance as a drug dealer and whose activities were threatening the West Belfast Brigade's own expanding drugs empire.^[13]

Under interrogation, in 1991 Barrett had confessed to Johnston Brown, a Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) officer who spent much of his career investigating the activities of the UDA in West Belfast, that he had fired shots into Finucane as he lay on the ground.^[14] Other police officers serving at the time recalled Barrett as a braggart, who regularly boasted to them that he had killed ten people.^[15] The tape upon which the confession was made then disappeared.^[16] Lister and Jordan suggest that this, rather than the late 1980s, was the point at which Barrett was taken on as an RUC Special Branch informer.^[16]

The evidence provided by Barrett as an informer saw him resettled in England as part of a witness protection scheme.^[17] His involvement in providing information on the activities of his fellow UDA members had become common knowledge with graffiti appearing on the Shankill denouncing him as a "big nose, big mouth tout".^[18] He was taken from Belfast by the Stevens team after fellow informer William Stobie was killed by the UDA in 2001.^[19]