HUNDREDS gathered in the brick-paved little close in the Shankill area of Belfast yesterday to pay their last respects to a noted local representative and convicted UVF member.
Former UVF prisoner Joe Coggle's funeral cortege makes it way through the Shankill NO BYLINE.
16th September, 2022.
Joe Coggle Jr was remembered fondly by friends and family but, by many among the wider community, most recently as the wheelchair bound anti-protocol protester burning a banner while flanked by balaclava-clad men.
At the same rally, attended by 3,000 people, including about 50 in balaclavas, Mr Coggle was quoted stating: “If violence needed to overturn protocol, so be it."
He was remembered by one person yesterday as a “last true loyalist”. Old colleagues, including John ‘Bunter’ Graham were among the hundreds who gathered just after lunchtime in and around the home of the 62-year-old’s partner Lena.
After a 45 minute service and some more time to marshal the crowd, the mourners began a walk through the narrow streets in the Upper Shankill area near Woodvale Road.
Led by a lone piper, the hearse was flanked by eight strangely uniformed men, all in black, wearing beanies, the red hand crest on their chests and foreheads.
Wreaths that could be seen included one from the Volunteer Joe Coggle Fourstep Scotland pipe and drum band and another red one, plain but for the Scottish flag in one corner.
The procession made its way to Disraeli Street where the hearse and crowd stopped at the mural to Brian Robinson, one of the few loyalists shot dead by an undercover British Army unit.
Robinson, revered among a section of loyalists, had just riddled a random Catholic - the disabled Paddy McKenna - with 11 bullets, killing him.
It then continued to the corner at Enfield Street where men stood in the road stopping traffic and forcing drivers to turn. Yards later the procession stopped and the crowd dispersed, many heading towards Roselawn for the burial.
In his funeral notice, the deceased, the son of the late and widely respected late councillor Joe Coggle, was the “beloved partner of Lena, much loved father of James, Jayne and Tracey". He had four step-children, grandchildren and is also survived by his sister Sally.
But his position as a noted member of the UVF lies almost solely on one night in December 1991 when, according to Lord Justice Kelly, four “determined and ruthless terrorists who were bent on murder – and wholesale murder at that” were caught red handed at the corner of the Falls and Springfield roads.
An account from the sentencing two years later revealed that as armed police approached the vehicle, a man in the back seat was heard to shout: “We are Prods, we are Prods” (Collusion Is Not An Illusion). Two AK rifles and a semi-automatic pistol, cocked and ready, were discovered in the car.
While Justice Kelly stated at the time it was vigilance of RUC officers spotting the suspicious car led to their capture, later information suggested a mole within the UVF was more responsible.
Mr Coggle, sentenced to 18 years for conspiracy to murder, spent approximately 10 years behind bars before his release under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement.
With many thanks to the: Irish News and John Breslin for the original publication.
Follow these links to find out more on this story: A FORMER UVF prisoner who warned violence could be used to overturn the Northern Ireland Protocol has died.
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