John Weir

John Oliver Weir (born 1950) is an Ulster loyalist born and raised in the Republic of Ireland. He served as an officer in Northern Ireland's Royal Ulster Constabulary's (RUC) Special Patrol Group (SPG) (a tactical reserve unit), and was a volunteer in the illegal Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF). As a member of the UVF's Mid-Ulster Brigade led by Robin "the Jackal" Jackson, Weir was a part of the Glenanne gang, a group of loyalist extremists that carried out sectarian attacks mainly in the County Armagh area in the mid-1970s. Weir and his RUC colleague Billy McCaughey were convicted of the 1977 sectarian killing of Catholic chemist William Strathearn and sentenced to life imprisonment. Weir's affidavit which implicated Jackson, other members of the Glenanne gang, soldiers of the Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR), and his colleagues in the RUC and SPG, in a series of sectarian attacks, including the Dublin and Monaghan bombings, was published in the 2003 Barron Report, the findings of an official investigation into the 1974 car bombings commissioned by Irish Supreme Court Justice Henry Barron. Early life and the RUC Weir was born in 1950 in County Monaghan in the Republic of Ireland to Church of Ireland parents on an estate near Castleblayney, where his father was employed as a gamekeeper. Raised in County Monaghan, he was later educated at The King's Hospital, a Protestant private school in Dublin. Over six feet tall, powerfully built, with blond hair and blue eyes, he had an imposing physical presence, which made him stand out in a crowd. Initially he had considered joining the Garda Síochána, the police force of the Republic of Ireland; however, in keeping with his family's political traditions, he opted to join Northern Ireland's police force, the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), in March 1970 when he was 20 years of age.