Clifford Peeples (born c. 1969) is a self-styled pastor in Northern Ireland who has been associated with Ulster loyalism, for which he was convicted of terrorist activity and imprisoned.
[4] Peeples became close to another pastor, Portadown-based Kenny McClinton, who had formerly been a member of the Ulster Defence Association (UDA) before falling out with that organisation and joining forces with the UVF Mid-Ulster brigadier Billy Wright.
He was, along with McClinton, one of two unsuccessful candidates for the party in Belfast West in the 1996 elections to the Northern Ireland Forum, jointly securing only 43 votes (out of 42,000).
[6] In keeping with UIM policy, Peeples campaigned against the Good Friday Agreement and, on 24 April 1998, shared a platform at an Antrim rally with Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) councillors Jack McKee and Sammy Wilson.
For a time he ran a flower shop on the Crumlin Road which was ransacked in 1997 in an attack that Peeples blamed on loyalist racketeers.
[2] Peeples was assistant pastor at the Bethel Pentecostal Church on Belfast's Shankill Road when, in 1999, he was arrested for paramilitary offences and given a ten-year jail sentence after a pipe bomb and grenades were found in his car.
In December 2000 he, along with Stuart Wilson from Glenavy and Alan Lynn from Antrim, was handed a death sentence by the new leadership supposedly for leading a "black propaganda campaign" against the group from prison.
[15] Peeples is married to Suzanne, who ran as an Independent Unionist in the Upper Bann constituency in the 2007 Assembly election, coming last with less than 0.2%.
[16] Peeples was the official applicant in a court case launched from 2020–22 by Ulster loyalists against the British Government in respect of the Northern Ireland Protocol.
[19] In February 2025, Peeples lost a judicial review case in the High Court after a judge rejected it, that a Freedom of Information Act request as a better preliminary and alternative remedy.