The Mid-Ulster Brigade was also responsible for the 1975 Miami Showband killings, in which three members of the popular Irish cabaret band were shot dead at a bogus security checkpoint by gunmen wearing military uniforms.

In March and April that year, UVF and UPV members bombed water and electricity installations in Northern Ireland, blaming them on the dormant IRA and elements of the civil rights movement.

In February, it began to target critics of militant loyalism – the homes of MPs Austin Currie, Sheelagh Murnaghan, Richard Ferguson and Anne Dickson were attacked with improvised bombs.

[40] It also continued its attacks in the Republic of Ireland, bombing the Dublin-Belfast railway line, an electricity substation, a radio mast, and Irish nationalist monuments.

[44] The UVF launched further attacks in the Republic of Ireland during December 1972 and January 1973, when it detonated three car bombs in Dublin and one in Belturbet, County Cavan, killing a total of five civilians.

This was a general strike in protest against the Sunningdale Agreement, which meant sharing political power with Irish nationalists and the Republic having more involvement in Northern Ireland.

The Irish parliament's Joint Committee on Justice called the bombings an act of "international terrorism" involving members of the British security forces.

Hanna and Jackson have both been implicated by journalist Joe Tiernan and RUC Special Patrol Group (SPG) officer John Weir as having led one of the units that bombed Dublin.

The group had been proscribed in July 1966, but this ban was lifted on 4 April 1974 by Merlyn Rees, Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, in an effort to bring the UVF into the democratic process.

In 1984, the UVF attempted to kill the northern editor of the Sunday World, Jim Campbell after he had exposed the paramilitary activities of Mid-Ulster brigadier Robin Jackson.

On 18 June 1994, UVF members machine-gunned a pub in the Loughinisland massacre in County Down, on the basis that its customers were watching the Republic of Ireland national football team playing in the World Cup on television and were therefore assumed to be Catholics.

[78] On 3 May 2007, following recent negotiations between the Progressive Unionist Party (PUP) and Irish Taoiseach Bertie Ahern and with Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) Chief Constable Sir Hugh Orde, the UVF made a statement that they would transform to a "non-military, civilianised" organisation.

[87] The UVF was blamed for the shotgun killing of expelled RHC member Bobby Moffett on the Shankill Road on the afternoon of 28 May 2010, in front of passers-by including children.

[88] Eleven months later, a man was arrested and charged with the attempted murder of the UVF's alleged second-in-command Harry Stockman, described by the Belfast Telegraph as a "senior Loyalist figure".

[96] During the Belfast City Hall flag protests of 2012–13, senior UVF members were confirmed to have actively been involved in orchestrating violence and rioting against the PSNI and the Alliance Party throughout Northern Ireland during the weeks of disorder.

[102] On 23 March 2019, eleven alleged UVF members were arrested during a total of 14 searches conducted in Belfast, Newtownards and Comber and the suspects, aged between 22 and 48, were taken into police custody for questioning.

[107] The UVF was suspected of organising a hoax bomb attack targeting a "peace-building" event in Belfast where Irish Foreign Minister Simon Coveney was speaking on 27 March 2022.

With a few exceptions, such as Mid-Ulster brigadier Billy Hanna (a native of Lurgan), the Brigade Staff members have been from the Shankill Road or the neighbouring Woodvale area to the west.

[113] The Brigade Staff's former headquarters were situated in rooms above "The Eagle" chip shop located on the Shankill Road at its junction with Spier's Place.

[131] However, from 1977 bombs largely disappeared from the UVF's arsenal owing to a lack of explosives and bomb-makers, plus a conscious decision to abandon their use in favour of more contained methods.

The first Independent Monitoring Commission report in April 2004 described the UVF/RHC as "relatively small" with "a few hundred" active members "based mainly in the Belfast and immediately adjacent areas".

Recently it has emerged from the Police Ombudsman that senior North Belfast UVF member and Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) Special Branch informant Mark Haddock has been involved in drug dealing.

Explosives for the north were mostly shipped in small boats which set out at night from the Scottish coast and made contact at sea with vessels from Ulster ports."

[168][169] Etobicoke based gunsmith William Charles Taylor and former Canadian Army Reserve officer Howard Wright sourced many second hand firearms at gun shows in the US and then smuggled them to the UVF wrapped in lead foil (to defeat X Ray scanners) in packages marked as "car components" from Old Mill Pontiac Buick in Toronto.

The cash was then laundered through Swiss banks accounts and other financial institutions in mainland Europe, where "respectable" members of the Unionist business community made in person lodgements.

58 assault rifles, 94 Browning Hi-Power pistols, 4 RPG-7 rocket launchers and dozens of warheads, over 400 RGD-5 grenades and 30,000 rounds of ammunition arrived at Belfast docks in December 1987, and was thereafter distributed to the three loyalist paramilitary groups.

[174] After the cash had been couriered over to Bernhardt's office in Geneva, he was alleged to have then arranged a bank draft to be forwarded to an arms dealer in Beirut, who then sourced the weapons and loaded then into a shipping container labelled as ceramic floor tiles.

[175] A supposed motive for Apartheid South Africa to get involved in supplying arms to loyalist paramilitary groups was their attempts to obtain classified Starstreak surface-to-air missile technology from the Short Brothers factory in Belfast, evidence of which was uncovered after representatives from Ulster Resistance were arrested in Paris in April 1989, along with Bernhardt and a diplomat from South Africa, while in the possession of stolen missile parts.

[176] On 24 November 1993, following a tip off from MI6, UK customs officers raided the MV Inowroclaw cargo ship while it was docked at Teesport and discovered a UVF weapons and explosives shipment hidden amongst a load of ceramic tiles.

The ship had originated in the Baltic Sea port of Gdynia, and Polish authorities had warned British intelligence agencies in advance of its arrival in England.