anyone who has taken the trouble to look. Had the same violence been unleashed on the population of Great Britain, the proportional numbers killed would have stood at 100,000, and, if it happened in the United States, the losses would have peaked somewhere in the region of the astronomically high figure of 1 million.
Today, most people think that Northern Ireland is at peace. After all, a ‘peace process’ was indeed begun in the early 1990s, culminating in the signing of the Belfast Agreement in 1998 and the establishment of power-sharing institutions a decade later. Crucially, it is important that we acknowledge the limitations of this process. For one thing, it has not completely ended the conflict and removed the causes which gave rise to it in the first place. Almost twenty years on from the peace accord brokered between Unionist and Nationalist politicians, loyalist and republican terrorist groups are still in existence. What is more, they have shown a willingness to become involved in civil disturbances, intimidation, threats, physical violence, particularly within their own communities, and even murder, whenever the situation demands it.
For this reason, you will find much of what you read here shocking. It is a story of young men (and occasionally young women) who turned to violence, some in the heat of the moment and others in more premeditated circumstances. At the time and since, many of these individuals would give their motives for doing so as indicative of wanting to ‘hit back’, to ‘defend their country’ or to ‘return the serve’ against Irish republicans. Others, less troubled by the trappings of patriotism, engaged in violence because of the promise of power, money, and the status it gave them in the deprived working-class communities where they try to carve out lives for themselves and their families. No matter what the motive, the collective sum of all parts of this violence was to contribute to the continuation of the Northern Ireland conflict from its outbreak in the 1960s – via the intense violence of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s – to the present day. There were other motives, of course, and this book is aimed at uncovering what they were.
***
As a professional historian, I draw inspiration from the advice passed on to future generations of writers by one of the twentieth century’s most influential historians, the French intellectual and resistance fighter Marc Bloch. Bloch was a man of action as well as a man of letters and – as a direct consequence – paid the ultimate price for his activism when he was captured, imprisoned and subsequently machine-gunned to death by the Nazis in occupied France as the Allies invaded to liberate his country in June 1944. Bloch believed history to be the study of both the dead and the living. In a line that would become synonymous with his approach to the past, he wrote, ‘As soon as we admit that a mental or emotional reaction is not self-explanatory, we are forced in turn, whenever such a reaction occurs, to make a real effort to discover the reasons for it. In a word, in history, as elsewhere, the causes cannot be assumed. They are to be looked for …’1
One of my motivations was to uncover the real causes of the ‘mental or emotional’ reactions that lead people to engage in violence. This has necessitated adopting the time-honoured historical approach of assembling evidence and scrutinising it as rigorously as possible, while placing it in its proper context. In pursuing a forensic examination of the causes and consequences of individual and collective actions, it has been necessary to recognise that the past is as hotly contested as the present and, without sounding too cynical, as the future may well be in this deeply divided society. In ethnic conflicts, like Northern Ireland, rival groups rarely agree on much, except on who they do not like. The past is an important adhesive in binding these prejudices together and giving them a meaning that, in marginalised and deprived communities, acts as an accelerant on an open fire.
Interestingly, most of those who write about Northern Ireland’s troubled past do so in a way that removes human agency from the violence. To deny that the people responsible for some of the most horrific killings of the twentieth century were ordinary men and women, with human frailties and with choices, is to sanitise the past according to the political logic of the present. I realise that my approach will not be welcomed by many who were caught up in the events narrated here. However, the findings are accurate and based on evidence, including interviews with people who were intimately involved in UVF activity, from the origins of the troubles to the present day.
The book also takes inspiration from the important work by Canadian liberal journalist and politician Michael Ignatieff, who informs us that when investigating these sorts of conflicts, ‘The very fact of being an outsider discredits rather than reinforces one’s legitimacy. For there is always a truth that can be known only by those on the inside.’2 It has, therefore, been necessary to adopt an approach acknowledging that I am ‘already native’ in this setting, by the objective fact that I was ‘born of this island’, to paraphrase the late, great Ulster poet John Hewitt, and having lived alongside people who feature prominently in this story. Unlike numerous academics who refuse to admit that their background colours their analysis, my identity has facilitated access where others are unlikely or unwilling to tread.
***
I have been watching the UVF at close quarters for over two decades – even longer if we include the fact that I am from the working-class community where it has traditionally recruited its foot soldiers. However, I must make it absolutely clear that I am not a supporter or an apologist of this organisation. I refuse to seriously entertain the conceited view that ordinary working-class people who live ‘cheek by jowl’ with terrorist organisations (for that is what they are – they use terror to spread fear in a political context) are either necessarily sympathetic or supportive of, or complicit in, the actions of these people.3 Often, people are forced to live with the presence of armed groups because the state has failed to retain the monopoly over the legitimate use of force. In many respects it appears, on the surface at least, that the state has ceded authority to these malign non-state actors in some of the country’s most marginalised neighbourhoods.4
This book challenges the misguided view that people who join terrorist groups are all ‘willing executioners’, driven wholly by structural forces or cultures that give them no other choice than to become involved in violence. All human beings are endowed with a degree of free will and must choose to become involved in the enterprise of murder, or not. In much of what you read here, the motives of paramilitaries are directly attributable to a range of micro factors: peer pressure, the internal structures by which the UVF enforced discipline, or by a deep-seated hunger for revenge, all of which propel people into action just as readily as macro factors like intolerance, ideology or, as has become a fashionable explanation in certain circles, a conspiracy of ‘collusion’ with representatives of the British state and its Security Forces. The truth is much more complicated than the propagandists would have us believe.5
Whether we choose to accept it, or not, the actions of a few violent men (and women) in committing some of the worst atrocities of the troubles continue to affect the society and politics of this part of the world. That cannot be a good thing. Yet regardless of my own personal beliefs, there seems to me to be an urgent need to strip back the parochial language used to describe this phenomenon – of militancy within predominantly marginalised and deprived working-class communities – to instead ask serious questions about why, how, and with what consequences, members of the UVF felt the need to take the lives of other human beings in the way that they did.
Therefore, I am interested in depicting the violent acts perpetrated by these individuals not only according to their primary motivations but also in terms of their secondary motivations and, ultimately, tertiary motivations, which make sense only within the wider political context in which they are committed. The truth is that this is a complex story. To say that religion was always the motivating factor is empirically wrong and cannot be supported by the evidence. The fact remains that not all UVF killings were motivated by a ‘pro-British, anti-republican’ ideology either. Many members were blissfully unaware of British or Irish history and politics. Very few had a sophisticated understanding of Ulster unionism or Protestantism, never mind Catholicism, Irish republicanism or nationalism. The fact is that some of the UVF’s murders were a direct result of umbrage being
