Ulster Protestant Volunteers

The Ulster Protestant Volunteers (UPV) were a loyalist and Reformed fundamentalist paramilitary group in Northern Ireland.^[1] They were active between 1966 and 1969 and closely linked to the Ulster Constitution Defence Committee (UCDC) and Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF). The UPV were led by Noel Doherty under the overall control of the Rev. Ian Paisley.

The organisation's inaugural meeting took place in Belfast's Ulster Hall. In the spring of 1966, members bombed an all-girls primary school in Ardoyne, where talks to better relations between Protestants and Catholics were to take place. In May of that year the group murdered a 70-year-old, Matilda Gould, a Protestant whom UPV men mistook for a Catholic living next door.^[2] Shortly after this, the UVF and UPV took part in the killings of two Catholic men not far from the scene of the first attack. Following the 1967 trial of the UVF's leader Gusty Spence, the two groups were classified as illegal organisations. Paisley split from the UPV at this time.