[6] The Special Constabulary was disbanded in May 1970, after the Hunt Report, which advised re-shaping Northern Ireland's security forces to attract more Catholic recruits[7] and demilitarizing the police.

With police and troops being drawn towards combating insurgency in the south and west, Unionists wanted a force that would be dedicated to taking on the IRA.

[12] Craig proposed to the British cabinet a new "volunteer constabulary" which "must be raised from the loyal population" and organised, "on military lines" and "armed for duty within the six county area only".

[15] The idea of a volunteer police force in the north appealed to British Prime Minister David Lloyd George for several practical reasons; it freed up the RIC and military for use elsewhere in Ireland, it was cheap, and it did not need new legislation.

The Ulster Unionist Labour Association had established an "unofficial special constabulary," with members drawn chiefly from the shipyards, tasked with 'policing' Protestant areas.

[20] In April 1920, Captain Sir Basil Brooke (future Prime Minister of Northern Ireland), had set up "Fermanagh Vigilance", a vigilante group to provide defence against incursions by the IRA.

[21] In Ballymacarrett, a Protestant rector named John Redmond had helped form a unit of ex-servicemen to keep the peace after the July riots.

[24] Charles Wickham, Chief of Police for the north of Ireland, favoured incorporation of the Ulster Volunteers into "regular military units" instead of having to "face them down".

[26] In addition, a number of Special Constables, newly appointed by the Lisburn Urban Council, had been charged with rioting and looting committed over three days and nights following the assassination of RIC Inspector Oswald Swanzy.

In the British House of Commons, the leader of the Nationalist Party of Northern Ireland, Joseph Devlin, formerly a leading member of the now defunct Irish Parliamentary Party, made his feelings on the creation of the USC clear: "The Chief Secretary is going to arm pogromists to murder Catholics...we would not touch your special constabulary with a 40 foot pole.

"[37][39] John Anderson, the Under Secretary for Ireland (head of the British Administration in Dublin) shared his fears, "you cannot, in the middle of a faction fight, recognise one of the contending parties and expect it to deal with disorder in the spirit of impartiality and fairness essential in those who have to carry out the order of the Government.

Their skilful propaganda set about blackening the image of Special Constables, trying to identify them with the worst elements of the Protestant mobs in Belfast.

One of the reasons for this was to enable rapid call out of platoons, via a runner from the local RUC station, without the need to issue arms from a central armoury.

Deployment of the USC during the Anglo-Irish War provided the Northern Ireland government with its own territorial militia to fight the IRA.

The USC's most intense period of deployment was in the first half of 1922, when conditions of a low-intensity war existed along the new Irish border between the Free State and Northern Ireland.

This was despite the Craig-Collins Agreement which was signed by the leaders of Northern Ireland and the Free State on 30 March, and envisaged the end of IRA activity and a reduced role for the USC.

[52] The renewed IRA campaign involved attacking barracks, burning commercial buildings and making a large-scale incursion into Northern Ireland, occupying Belleek and Pettigo in May–June, which was repulsed after heavy fighting, including British use of artillery on 8 June.

[56][57][ii] Their biggest single loss of life came at Clones in February 1922, when a patrol which entered the Free State refused to surrender to the local IRA garrison and took four dead and eight wounded in a firefight.

[63] The conflict never formally ended but petered out in June 1922, with the outbreak of the Irish Civil War in the Free State and the wholesale arrest and internment of IRA activists in the North.

[67] The 'A' and 'C' categories of the USC were dispensed with, leaving only the B-Specials, who functioned as a permanent reserve force, and armed and uniformed in the same manner as the RUC.

[56] In 1936 the British advocacy group - the National Council for Civil Liberties characterized the USC as "nothing but the organised army of the Unionist party".

[68] During the Second World War, the USC was mobilised to serve in Britain's Home Guard, which unusually, was put under the command of the police rather than the British Army.

[70] Historian Tim Pat Coogan said of the USC, "The B Specials were the rock on which any mass movement by the IRA in the North has inevitably floundered.

"[74] In August 1969 the IRA Chief of Staff Cathal Goulding issued a statement saying that his men were deployed in Belfast in a defensive capacity protecting Catholics who had been "terrorized by mobs backed by armed B-Specials."

[76][77] In Belfast, the USC were successful in restoring order in the predominantly Protestant Shankill area, where they performed their patrol duties unarmed.

He reported that in Major Ronald Bunting's Ulster Protestant Volunteers (UPV), there was definite evidence of dual membership by Special Constables, of which he said "we consider highly undesirable and not in the public interest".

[84] The Hon Justice Scarman, in his report on the rioting, was critical of the RUC's senior officers and of the way the B Specials were deployed into areas of civil disturbance which they had no training to deal with, which in some occasions led to a worsening of the situation.

[30] Scarman concluded in his report on the civil disturbance in the region in 1969 that: "Undoubtedly mistakes were made and certain individual officers acted wrongly on occasions.

But the general case of a partisan force co-operating with Protestant mobs to attack Catholic people is devoid of substance, and we reject it utterly.

[87] On the disbandment of the USC, many of its members joined the newly established Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR), the part-time security force which replaced the B Specials.