Download or read book My Life in Loyalism written by Billy Hutchinson and published by Merrion Press. This book was released on 2020-11-19 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Growing up in the Shankill area of Belfast and living through the sectarian turmoil of the late 1960s, Billy Hutchinson joined the UVF in the early 1970s. In 1974, at the age of just 19, he was sentenced to life in prison, and it was in the cages of Long Kesh that he first came under the influence of loyalist icon Gusty Spence. Hutchinson spent much of the 1980s as overall Commanding Officer of UVF/Red Hand Commando prisoners, and upon his release, became involved with the recently established Progressive Unionist Party. As an authentic link between the UVF and the PUP, he was at the forefront of negotiations that led to the Belfast Agreement and was the UVF’s point of contact during the weapons decommissioning programme. Written with candour and honesty, this is a lively first-hand account of an extraordinary life and reveals previously hidden episodes of both the Northern Ireland Troubles and the high-profile negotiations that led to the Belfast Agreement of 1998. rom Tartan gang member to leading loyalist paramilitary, and from progressive unionist politician to respected Belfast City Councillor, My Life in Loyalism is Billy Hutchinson’s remarkable story.
Download or read book Tartan Gangs and Paramilitaries written by Gareth Mulvenna and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the the early 1970s in Belfast, many young members of loyalist youth gangs known as 'Tartans' converged with fledgling paramilitary groups such as the Red Hand Commando, Ulster Volunteer Force, and Young Citizen Volunteers.
Download or read book A Belfast Child written by John Chambers and published by John Blake. This book was released on 2020-09-03 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: John Chambers was brought up on Belfast's notorious Loyalist Glencairn estate, during the height of the Troubles. From an early age he witnessed violence, hatred and horror as Northern Ireland tore itself apart in civil strife. Kneecapping, brutal murders, and even public tarring-and-feathering were simply a fact of life for the children on the estate. He thought he knew which side he was on, but although raised as a Loyalist, he was hiding a troubling secret: that his disappeared mother - whom he'd always been told was dead - was a Roman Catholic, 'the enemy'. In a memoir of rare power, John explores the dark heart of Northern Irish sectarianism in the seventies and eighties. With searing honesty and native Belfast wit, he describes the light and darkness of his unique childhood, and his teenage journey through mod culture and ultra-Loyalism, before an escape from Belfast to London - where, still haunted by the shadow of his fractured family history - he began a turbulent and hedonistic adulthood. A Belfast Child is a tale of divided loyalties, dark secrets and the scars left by hatred and violence on a proud city - but also a story of hope, healing and ultimate redemption for a family caught in the rising tide of the Troubles.
Download or read book Northern Ireland s Lost Opportunity written by Tony Novosel and published by Pluto Press. This book was released on 2013-01-22 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Northern Ireland's Lost Opportunity is a unique in-depth investigation into working-class Loyalism in Northern Ireland as represented by the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), the Red Hand Commando (RHC) and their political allies.In an unorthodox account, Tony Novosel argues that these groups, seen as implacable enemies by Republicans and the left, did develop a political analysis of the Northern Ireland conflict in the 1970s which involved a compromise peace with all political parties and warring factions – something that historians and writers have largely ignored. Distinctive, deeply informed and provocative, Northern Ireland's Lost Opportunity is the first study to focus not on the violent actions of the UVF/RHC but on their political vision and program which, Novosel argues, included the potential for a viable peace based on compromise with all groups, including the Irish Republican Army.
Download or read book Mad Dog written by David Lister and published by Random House. This book was released on 2013-04-19 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A mindless sectarian psychopath or a loyalist folk hero who took the war to the IRA's front door? The name Johnny 'Mad Dog' Adair is synonymous with a killing spree by loyalist terrorists that took Northern Ireland to the brink of civil war. From humble beginnings as a rioter and glue-sniffer on Belfast's Shankill Road, Adair rose through the ranks of the outlawed Ulster Freedom Fighters to head its merciless killing machine, 'C Company'. Surrounded by a group of trusted friends, his reign of terror in the early 1990s claimed the lives of up to 40 Catholics, picked out at random as Adair's hitmen roamed Belfast. Determined to lead from the front, his men even fired a rocket at Sinn Fein's headquarters, writing themselves into loyalist mythology and embarrassing the IRA in its republican heartland. Its desperate attempts to kill Adair culminated in October 1993, when a bomb on the Shankill Road, intended for the loyalist godfather, claimed the lives of nine Protestant civilians. Mad Dog: The Rise and Fall of Johnny Adair and 'C Company' describes in graphic detail Adair's criminal empire and an egomaniac's bloody war against Catholics and anybody else who got in his way. Adair's friends and enemies talk for the first time about the murders he ordered, his sordid personal life, and his attempts - ultimately disastrous - to become Northern Ireland's supreme loyalist figurehead.
Download or read book Choosing Sides written by Ruma Chopra and published by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. This book was released on 2013-06-07 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Though scores of texts, films and stories have been told about the American Revolution from the perspectives of our Founding Fathers and their followers, comparatively little is known about those colonists who resisted the revolutionary movement, and tried desperately to preserve their nation’s ties to the British Empire. Choosing Sides: Loyalists in Revolutionary America shows us that America’s original colonies were not nearly as united behind the concept of forming free, independent states as our society’s collective memory would have us believe. There were, in fact, numerous colonists, slaves, and Native Americans who counted themselves among the Loyalists: those who never wanted to sever ties with the English crown and who viewed revolution as an unnatural and unlawful mistake. Too often overlooked, these men and women made valid and valuable arguments against the formation of the United States—both weighing the costs of revolution and the perilousness of existing without the Empire’s command— arguments that even hundreds of years into America’s existence were echoed and championed both within and beyond our borders. Colonists from commoners to clergymen had nuanced and complex reasons for wanting to remain under British control, and an awareness of these reasons and their origins paints a more historically accurate portrait of the American populous around the time of our country’s founding. This volume not only showcases Dr. Chopra’s comprehensive analysis of Loyalism and its arguments, but includes letters, legislation and even poems written by Loyalists during and after the Revolutionary War. Choosing Sides lays a detailed foundation of facts for its readers and provides them entry points to the debate surrounding the genesis of the United States. It is both a primary source and a touchstone for original interpretations and discussions.
Download or read book Liberty s Exiles written by Maya Jasanoff and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2012-03-06 with total page 490 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER This groundbreaking book offers the first global history of the loyalist exodus to Canada, the Caribbean, Sierra Leone, India, and beyond. At the end of the American Revolution, sixty thousand Americans loyal to the British cause fled the United States and became refugees throughout the British Empire. Liberty’s Exiles tells their story. This surprising new account of the founding of the United States and the shaping of the post-revolutionary world traces extraordinary journeys like the one of Elizabeth Johnston, a young mother from Georgia, who led her growing family to Britain, Jamaica, and Canada, questing for a home; black loyalists such as David George, who escaped from slavery in Virginia and went on to found Baptist congregations in Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone; and Mohawk Indian leader Joseph Brant, who tried to find autonomy for his people in Ontario. Ambitious, original, and personality-filled, this book is at once an intimate narrative history and a provocative analysis that changes how we see the revolution’s “losers” and their legacies.
Download or read book UVF written by Aaron Edwards and published by Merrion Press. This book was released on 2017-12-01 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: UVF: Behind the Mask is the gripping new history of the Ulster Volunteer Force from its post-1965 incarnation to the present day. Aaron Edwards blends rigorous research with unprecedented access to leading members of the UVF to unearth the startling inner-workings of one of the world’s oldest and most ruthless paramilitary groups. Through interviews with high-profile UVF leaders, such as Billy Mitchell, David Ervine, Billy Wright, Billy Hutchinson and Gary Haggarty, as well as their loyalist rivals including Johnny Adair, Edwards reveals the grisly details behind their sadistic torture and murder techniques and their litany of high-profile atrocities: McGurk’s Bar, the Dublin and Monaghan bombings, the Miami Showband massacre and the Shankill Butchers’ serial-killing spree, amongst others. Edwards’ life and career has led him to the centre of the UVF’s long, dark underbelly; in this defining work he offers a comprehensive and authoritative study of an armed group that continues to play a pivotal role in Northern Irish society.
Download or read book Inside Man written by William Smith and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Plum Smith tells his story of Long Kesh prison during the Troubles. There is day to day drama, tragedy and humour as well as Internment, escape plots, riots and the burning of the camp. Drawing on interviews and previously unseen documents, he explains how the Loyalists were politicised and educated, learned to talk to 'the enemy' and secure peace.
Download or read book None Shall Divide Us written by Michael Stone and published by Kings Road Publishing. This book was released on 2014-05-31 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Michael Stone was born in East Belfast in 1955. In 1988 he was sentenced to 800 years in prison. He served twelve years in the Maze prison before being released under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement. He is now an artist, and proponent of the peace process.
Download or read book Unionists Loyalists and Conflict Transformation in Northern Ireland written by Lee A. Smithey and published by OUP USA. This book was released on 2011-08-31 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lee Smithey examines how symbolic cultural expressions in Northern Ireland, such as parades, bonfires, murals, and commemorations, provide opportunities for Protestant unionists and loyalists to reconstruct their collective identities and participate in conflict transformation.
Download or read book Ulster Loyalism after the Good Friday Agreement written by J. McAuley and published by Springer. This book was released on 2011-01-19 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A timely assessment of loyalist history, identity and community in Northern Ireland today which provides a comprehensive picture of how loyalism has reacted to changes since the Good Friday Agreement. Challenging simplistic stereotypes of loyalism this book provides a complex multi-faceted explanation of the loyalist imagination.
Download or read book Southern Irish Loyalism 1912 1949 written by Brian Hughes and published by . This book was released on 2020-10-22 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book brings together new research on loyalism in the 26 counties that would become the Irish Free State. It covers a range of topics and experiences, including the Third Home Rule crisis in 1912, the revolutionary period, partition, independence and Irish participation in the British armed and colonial service up to the declaration of the Republic in 1949. The essays gathered here examine who southern Irish loyalists were, what loyalism meant to them, how they expressed their loyalism, their responses to Irish independence and their experiences afterwards. The collection offers fresh insights and new perspectives on the Irish Revolution and the early years of southern independence, based on original archival research. It addresses issues of particular historiographical and political interest during the ongoing 'Decade of Centenaries', including revolutionary violence, sectarianism, political allegiance and identity and the Irish border, but, rather than ceasing its coverage in 1922 or 1923, this book - like the lives with which it is concerned - continues into the first decades of southern Irish independence. CONTRIBUTORS: Frank Barry, Elaine Callinan, Jonathan Cherry, Seamus Cullen, Ian d'Alton, Sean Gannon, Katherine Magee, Alan McCarthy, Pat McCarthy, Daniel Purcell, Joseph Quinn, Brian M. Walker, Fionnuala Walsh, Donald Wood
Download or read book The Routledge Handbook of the Northern Ireland Conflict and Peace written by Laura McAtackney and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-11-13 with total page 732 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Routledge Handbook of the Northern Ireland Conflict and Peace is the first multi-authored volume to specifically address the many facets of the 30-year Northern Ireland conflict, colloquially known as the Troubles, and its subsequent peace process. This volume is rooted in opening space to address controversial subjects, answer key questions, and move beyond reductive analysis that reproduces a simplistic two community theses. The temporal span of individual chapters can reach back to the formation of the state of Northern Ireland, with many starting in the late 1960s, to include a range of individuals, collectives, organisations, understandings, and events, at least up to the Good Friday/Belfast Agreement in 1998. This volume has forefronted creative approaches in understanding conflict and allows for analysis and reflection on conflict and peace to continue through to the present day. With an extensive introduction, preface, and 45 individual chapters, this volume represents an ambitious, expansive, interdisciplinary engagement with the North of Ireland through society, conflict, and peace from a wide range of disciplinary perspectives, theoretical frameworks, and methodological approaches. While allowing for rich historical explorations of high-level politics rooted in state documents and archives, this volume also allows for the intermingling of different sources that highlight the role of personal papers, memory, space, materials, and experience in understanding the complexities of both Northern Ireland as a people, place, and political entity.
Download or read book The Consequences of Loyalism written by Rebecca Brannon and published by Univ of South Carolina Press. This book was released on 2019-02-28 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This anthology examines the role of Loyalism in the American Revolution, building on the pioneering work of historian Robert M. Calhoon. Calhoon’s work on American Loyalists redefined their role in the Revolution, showing them to be dynamic figures adapting to a society in upheaval. In The Consequences of Loyalism, editors Rebecca Brannon and Joseph S. Moore shed light on Calhoon’s foundational influence and explore the continuing scholarship in the wake of his prolific career. This volume unites sixteen previously unpublished essays that build on Calhoon’s work and consider Loyalism’s relationship to conflict resolution, imperial bureaucracy, and identity creation. In the first of two sections, scholars discuss the complexities of Loyalist identity, while considering Calhoon’s earlier work. In the second section, scholars work from Calhoon’s later publications to investigate the consequences of Loyalism both for the Loyalists, and for the legacy of the Revolutionary War. This book brings Loyalist dilemmas alive, digging into their personalities and postwar routes. Loyalists from all facets of society fought for what they considered their home country: women wrote letters, commanders took to the battlefield, and thinkers shaped the political conversation. This volume complements Calhoon’s influential work, expands the scope of Loyalist studies, and opens the field to a deeper, perhaps revolutionary understanding of the king’s men.
Download or read book The Loyalist Conscience written by Chaim M. Rosenberg and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2018-08-22 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Freedom of speech was restricted during the Revolutionary War. In the great struggle for independence, those who remained loyal to the British crown were persecuted with loss of employment, eviction from their homes, heavy taxation, confiscation of property and imprisonment. Loyalist Americans from all walks of life were branded as traitors and enemies of the people. By the end of the war, 80,000 had fled their homeland to face a dismal exile from which few would return, outcasts of a new republic based on democratic values of liberty, equality and justice.
Download or read book Resisting Independence written by Brad A. Jones and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2021-03-15 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Resisting Independence, Brad A. Jones maps the loyal British Atlantic's reaction to the American Revolution. Through close study of four important British Atlantic port cities—New York City; Kingston, Jamaica; Halifax, Nova Scotia; and Glasgow, Scotland—Jones argues that the revolution helped trigger a new understanding of loyalty to the Crown and empire. This compelling account reimagines Loyalism as a shared transatlantic ideology, no less committed to ideas of liberty and freedom than the American cause and not limited to the inhabitants of the thirteen American colonies. Jones reminds readers that the American Revolution was as much a story of loyalty as it was of rebellion. Loyal Britons faced a daunting task—to refute an American Patriot cause that sought to dismantle their nation's claim to a free and prosperous Protestant empire. For the inhabitants of these four cities, rejecting American independence thus required a rethinking of the beliefs and ideals that framed their loyalty to the Crown and previously drew together Britain's vast Atlantic empire. Resisting Independence describes the formation and spread of this new transatlantic ideology of Loyalism. Loyal subjects in North America and across the Atlantic viewed the American Revolution as a dangerous and violent social rebellion and emerged from twenty years of conflict more devoted to a balanced, representative British monarchy and, crucially, more determined to defend their rights as British subjects. In the closing years of the eighteenth century, as their former countrymen struggled to build a new nation, these loyal Britons remained convinced of the strength and resilience of their nation and empire and their place within it.
