LOYALISTS in Scotland went from sending food parcels to shipping gelignite to paramilitaries in Northern Ireland, according to confidential Irish government papers.

During the first half of the 1970s, the government of the Irish Republic spied on Orange Lodges and loyalist groups in Scotland to assess their involvement in terrorist activities in Northern Ireland.

According to an Irish government memo, the Orange Order, which had kept the UDA and UVF at arm's length, began to revise its attitude to loyalist paramilitaries after an attack by IRA gunmen on an Orange Hall in South Armagh.

A delegation was sent to Belfast to make contact with the UDA and other paramilitary groups.

According to the memo, Scottish loyalists' main function was to send explosives to Northern Ireland.

It said: "The commonest contribution of Scots UDA and UVF is to send gelignite. 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."

Details of the surveillance activities of Irish agents are contained in cabinet files released this week by the National Archives in Dublin.

A memo detailing the links between Orange Lodges in Scotland and loyalist paramilitary groups in Northern Ireland was prepared for the Irish cabinet by an official from the department of foreign affairs in February 1976.

According to David Donoghue, the official who wrote the memo, membership of the Orange Order in Scotland at the time was 80,000, and was concentrated in Glasgow, Lanarkshire and Inverness.

He told Irish ministers that virtually all loyalists in Scotland belonged to the Orange Order, but said Scottish Orangemen "had traditionally been solid, respectable citizens whose magazine regularly condemned violence".

According to the Donoghue memo: "The Grand Orange Lodge of Scotland has rarely exerted any political inf luence and its solidarity with Ulster loyalism did not find expression outside the stereotype July 12 speeches and rallies until very recently."

But Irish agents witnessed a change in attitude among many Orangemen as violence escalated in Northern Ireland and some began forming links with paramilitary groups.

Donoghue wrote: "With the advent of loyalist paramilitary bodies, UDA and UVF units were established in Glasgow and elsewhere. Their object was either to send arms and explosives to their Ulster colleagues or to collect funds for purchasing these."

This was not always the case, and before the rise of paramilitary groups the only kind of aid given by Scottish loyalists to their compatriots in Northern Ireland took the form of food parcels.

In 1974, the Ulster Workers Council, a group of loyalist trade unionists, called a general strike in opposition to the Sunningdale agreement.

Sunningdale allowed for a power-sharing government in Northern Ireland and the creation of the Council of Ireland, made up of representatives from both the north and south and concerned with cross-border security co-operation.

During the UWC strike, which led to the collapse of power-sharing and the Council for Ireland, loyalists in Scotland had distinguished themselves only by sending food supplies over the Irish sea.

However, the following year an attack by the IRA on an Orange Hall in South Armagh triggered a sudden expansion of UDA/UVF activities in Scotland. From the doorway and a window, IRA gunmen opened fire into the hall, killing three Orangemen instantly, two others died later.