Christopher Owens in conversation with Gareth Mulvenna.

 
November 2nd sees the publication of My Life In Loyalism, the memoir of Billy Hutchinson (leader of the Progressive Unionist Party, Belfast City Councillor and former UVF member). Written with Dr. Gareth Mulvenna, it has been described in the press notes as being filled “…with great candour and honesty, this is a gripping memoir of an extraordinary life which reveals previously unpublished accounts of both the Northern Ireland Troubles and the peace process that culminated in the historic Belfast Agreement of 1998.” 

To coincide with the release, I decided to speak to Dr. Mulvenna about the book, his other research relating to the conflict and what we can expect next. My sincere thanks to him for taking the time to answer my questions.


CO: What are the origins of this project?

GM: In October 2016, 22 years on from the CLMC ceasefire, I was invited to speak at Shankill Road Library as part of the promotional duties for my first book Tartan Gangs And Paramilitaries. The invitation was from Action for Community Transformation (ACT) and the organisers asked me would I like to pick some people who I had interviewed for the book to sit on a panel as part of the evening which would be chaired by ACT co-ordinator William Mitchell. I didn’t have to think for long and immediately asked Eddie Kinner and Billy Hutchinson.

One of the incredible things about researching and writing a book like Tartan Gangs... was that I could ask people who lived through the history and who contributed to my research to illuminate and expand on some of the issues I had addressed in the text. Eddie and Billy came of age in that tumultuous early 1970s period; both of them were on the scene after the Balmoral Furniture Showrooms were blown up in December 1971 and both were honest about their desire to be part of the loyalist response to what they saw happening around them.

It was a candid event and instead of me talking from a purely historical slant, Eddie and Billy were able to talk about that history from their perspectives. Anyone who has read Tartan Gangs… will know how the lives of Eddie and Billy dovetailed at a certain point, and I had talked to both of them extensively since 2013 for the purposes of the book.

After this event in the library, as I was packing my stuff away, Billy told me he had something to ask me; basically, he said he wanted to write his life story and he wanted me to help him do it. I think that a trust had grown between myself and Billy as well as the other guys I had interviewed and come to know well over the three years since I embarked on the project.

Needless to say, I agreed to assist Billy. I knew there were many untold stories out there, and even at that stage I was advocating storytelling – whether public or private – as a means of preserving the past. That complimented what Beano Niblock was doing of course, and how Belts and Boots eventually came about.

So, leaving the library that evening in October 2016 I had another great project ahead of me.

CO: What challenges, immediate or gradual, did the two of you face when working on this?

GM: The following year, 2017, Billy seemed to go off the idea of doing the book. There were probably a variety of factors which fed into that reticence, but there’s no point in retreating into old ground about the Boston tapes or poor accounts of loyalism here. That was fine, and no offence was taken. I always felt, however, that when the time was right Billy would return to the book idea and if he still wanted me to work with him on it, I would.

Later in 2017 Billy decided that he wanted to pick up the project and we made plans to start doing interviews around November or December. Some would be recorded, some not. I say interviews, but they were more typical of the conversations we would have had anyway, but with a bit more structure.

Then, in early 2018, just as we were about to get going in earnest Billy fell and broke his hip. As he was recovering I fell ill with pneumonia and eventually ended up spending the best part of a month in hospital with an abscess on my lung. I was out of action until the summer of that year, but when I was feeling well again we got back into it.

Billy was honest that he would be able to tell me the stories, but he would be relying on me to prop up his memory on some things such as dates and ensure that the book was structured in a way that made sense to those reading it. We also brought in other people for chats and bounced ideas back and forth. What would make a good story, what wouldn’t, that sort of thing. Of course, we had to be careful that there was no talk out of school, but I was well-versed in that style of interviewing from doing the research for Tartan Gangs... We wanted to give an authentic perspective of Billy as a paramilitary and as a politician without breaking the confidences that go with both of those cultures. Unlike some books about paramilitaries who have turned to politics, Billy didn’t skim over the early years – indeed there is much material about the early to mid-1970s and the book gives a good insight into some of the machinations at leadership level in the UVF.

I know that Billy didn’t want to rewrite history and he wanted to be explicit in taking responsibility for his actions as a member of the UVF but he also analysed the structural issues that gave rise to the Troubles – the ‘polluted politics’ that David Ervine so candidly spoke of. One of the big challenges I suppose was writing about the double murder he was arrested for in 1974 at the age of 18. It was something that had to be addressed directly by him in the text. There was no way around it. Just pasting in a newspaper article or something would have been shirking responsibility for me as a writer and researcher. I can honestly say that Billy was of the mind that while he wanted to be open as far as possible, he didn’t want anything in the book to rub the noses of victims in it. There’s a perception that Billy is hard-nosed but every time we have talked about legacy he is very much of the ‘abject and true remorse’ school of thought. People might look at that and compare it to some recent accounts of the prison escapes of the early 1980s. Are there two different approaches to legacy and interpreting the past? That’s for people reading these accounts to decide.

Billy was also adamant that I included a paragraph in my introduction stating that I did not agree with much of what had been said in the book. He’s protective that way as he is aware of the fact that people may mistake me for a ‘fellow-traveller’ rather than an historian. He’s aware of the abuse I have received over the years and he was very clear in asking me was I sure – was my partner sure – that this was something we were happy for me to work on.

I see My Life In Loyalism as a natural extension of the work I did with Tartan Gangs..., but it is unlikely I will write about loyalism for a while. I don’t want people to accuse me of being a ‘loyalist historian’. I am a ‘Troubles historian’ if labels are your thing. I actually talked about this with a close friend recently. His father had been jailed for UVF activities in the late 1970s. I was bemoaning the fact that over the years my research into loyalism has perhaps led some people to question my motivations, and I often wondered whether job opportunities had slipped through my grasp due to the powers of Google. It doesn’t help of course when one of the main newspapers erroneously referred to me as a ‘loyalist blogger’. My friend made an excellent point:

Maybe employers or others should be asking how this Catholic guy from north Belfast was able to build such positive and enduring relationships with former members of loyalist paramilitaries? He must have strong interpersonal skills, he mustn’t allow people’s pasts to interfere with his ability to create strong working relationships with them, he must have a strong level of empathy and an ability to understand other people’s perspectives.

It was a Damascene moment, and I remember feeling ten-foot-tall after we chatted that day.

CO: It's often cited that capturing the voice of the subject is important for writers when working on such projects. Was this something that came naturally, or was there some work needed?

GM: We had actually done something of a dry run back in 2013/14. Paul Burgess and I were drawing up a list of potential contributors for The Contested Identities of Ulster Protestants and Billy was near the top of that list. Billy was a neighbour of Paul’s growing up in the Shankill and Paul has had Billy down to Cork for some events at UCC. I agreed to ghost Billy’s chapter for the book, so I had experience of capturing his voice.

Also, there are plenty of newspaper and television interviews with Billy in the archives. I modelled it round those and added a very little bit of my own style. I also imagined what Billy would have sounded like as a 16-year-old talking to UVF members around the country.

He has a good sense of humour, which most people don’t see – so it’s a case of portraying that authoritative military figure authentically but ensuring that it doesn’t become a cold experience for the reader. Billy is down to earth and intelligent, and the book had to reflect that. He is also a deep thinker, so I had to give gravitas to some of the background thoughts that led to his decisions.

To be honest, it’s a bit like the research for Tartan Gangs… – I put myself in the person’s shoes. Sit back and think about what it must have been like for them. Listen to the music of the time, look at photographs of the old buildings, the street maps, the archive footage. Just try and immerse myself in it. It’s the same with the recent writing I have done on Sammy McCleave. There were moments during the research for those pieces where I closed my eyes and tried to imagine Sammy’s movements that evening. The walk from The Tavern. Shelleys. Standing at the taxi rank afterwards. The music of the time.

That’s how I approach my research.

There was never a stage where Billy said, ‘this doesn’t sound like me’.

CO: How did Merrion Press get involved in the publication?

GM: I had been in touch with Conor during this period as I was actually planning another book about the loyalist paramilitaries – a sort of ‘secret history’ of the organisations during the 1970s. I wasn’t going to looking at the UVF too much because of the good work Iain Turner is doing. I had planned to look at the early years of the UDA – and in particular the WDA. I got a lot of good help on that front from a very good and sincere friend. I also had co-operation from former members of the Young Newton. I was hoping to revisit some of the Red Hand Commando history as well and develop on that as part of the book. I contacted Conor with my idea and he liked it, but then it became apparent that the Red Hand were planning on doing something in house to mark their fiftieth anniversary, so it would have become a book purely about the UDA. Although Ian S. Wood has written a fantastic history of the UDA, I do believe that there are a multitude of stories to be told about how the WDA and Young Newton (by way of examples) came about. One of the stories I was told was about the UDA stand-off with the army in Ainsworth Avenue in the summer of 1972. It’s a well-known episode, but not many people know how messy it could have got. Maybe it’s a book for someone else to write. As I said, I just don’t think I could commit to another project like that at the moment, where you have to work hard tom gain the trust of people across elements of an organisation which has always been unwieldy in terms of its structure.

So, basically, I mentioned to Conor that maybe the priority was this project I was working on with Billy. I had one chapter at that stage, a rough draft of chapter one. Conor knew Billy and was very excited at the prospect of signing us up with Merrion. I had approached Merrion because, in my opinion, it is the best publisher in Ireland at the moment. The level of visibility for the books they publish is incredible. Belfast and Dublin airports always have Merrion books on display. They seemed to work incredibly hard for their writers, and that has proven to be the case. Everyone – Conor, Maeve, Patrick – that I have dealt with have been brilliant. It makes a huge different when a publisher is excited about your work and is trying to proactively sell it.

Billy, Conor and myself had a meeting in the PUP room in the City Hall in October 2019, we signed the contract the following week and I delivered the manuscript during the summer. Lock-down actually galvanised me and Billy to get a jog on. When we set up Zoom meetings we knew we couldn’t sit and talk about football for an hour before starting.

CO: At the 'Boots and Belts...' event in the Spectrum Centre (nearly two years ago!), Billy talked about the importance of loyalists coming forward to tell their stories because (in his words) "the IRA are trying to rewrite history", and you've talked about how frustrating it is to see projects like Darragh MacIntyre's Spotlight on the Troubles' programme focus on loyalism when it comes to collusion. With those in mind, what do you hope will come out of this book?

GM: It’s hard to believe it’s been nearly two years since that event Christopher!

As I’ve said before, myself and Beano have worked hard at trying to get loyalists to tell their stories. We have reminded people that if they don’t tell their stories, someone else will.

It’s that old adage of leading a horse to water. But I totally understand why people don’t want to tell their stories. There is no slick machine behind former loyalist prisoners, no safety net to pull ranks around them if they decide to tell their stories and they get wholesale criticism. One former member of the RHC, when I asked him why he didn’t challenge the myths around certain issues, just said “What’s the point?” That’s the attitude, and it’s one I understand.

I wouldn’t single out Darragh MacIntyre for criticism but there was no sense in those Spotlight shows of loyalist paramilitarism as an organic response to what was going on in Northern Ireland in the early 1970s. I don’t think people appreciate just how amateurish and unaided the loyalists were at that time. There’s footage of the UDA on Pop Goes Northern Ireland that shows what it was in 1971 – old men carrying sticks who were patrolling their own neighbourhoods. The narrative of the Spotlight programmes was that the Troubles was essentially a war between the British and the Provos. That doesn’t allow for agency within the loyalist experience; it relegates lived experience to a proxy for someone else’s propaganda.

I don’t hold out any hope of the floodgates opening after Billy’s book comes out. Those who want to tell their stories will and I think Iain Turner’s book will contain many of those crucial voices.

What I really want to see is more women from a loyalist background tell their stories. Those are important narratives which are disappearing at an exponential rate.

CO: Is there any chance of a similar work coming from Eddie Kinner, since you've been publishing some of his writings on your site?

GM: I would love to see that. In fact, one of the first lines in Tartan Gangs is about an interview Eddie gave to a US newspaper in 1994 where he talked about writing his autobiography. Sadly, that never happened, but I have been very encouraged to see his recent articles and perhaps that is a sign that he is toying with the idea of doing something. Eddie is an articulate advocate for progressive loyalism, and it has been great over the past few years – at the Shankill Road library event and then the PUP’s 40th anniversary conference – to facilitate discussion panels with him and Billy. There is a lot of mutual respect between the two of them. It is very clear.

I honestly thought that Plum Smith’s Inside Man would open the floodgates for loyalist accounts of the conflict, but it just never happened.

Beano has been proactive about publishing – whether through short memoir or poetry – autobiographical writing on his experiences; Ronnie ‘Flint’ McCullough is sitting on what I feel is the definitive story of loyalists in Long Kesh in the period 1972 – 1977.

Let’s hope some of these stories emerge before long.

CO: How many "Boots and Belts..." events took place, and how would you describe the crowds that came to them? Didn't one take place in Scotland?

GM: That’s a good question! I think there were only four of five in the end. We had one planned for Lurgan, and another planned for England, both of which had to be cancelled due to the pandemic.

The crowds that came to the events were overwhelmingly male and loyalist. That’s who we wanted to reach in the first instance, anything else was a bonus. At the first event in the Ballymac there were members of the Green Party and others there, and there was more of a mixture. The second Shankill event had a women’s group, and we drove home the point that their stories needed to emerge.

In Lurgan the locals were enthusiastic about storytelling but admitted a reticence among those outside Belfast to talk. Alan Gracey was in the audience. There’s a guy who has an incredible story to tell.

CO: Your recent work on the death of Sammy McCleave was one that I believe you had floated with Lyra McKee before her murder. What was it about his death (and the events that followed) that made you want to investigate?

GM: Yes, that’s correct. The day before Lyra was murdered we had exchanged emails where I had encouraged her to write about Sammy and his brother Anthony. She was very enthusiastic, and it was tragic to wake up to the news of her cruel death.

I suppose it comes back to that empathy quality. I know I have been accused by some people of being a ‘UVF fanboy’ – in fact, I should have and will take legal action when people try to defame me like that from now on – but my first experience of reading about the Troubles was reading about the Shankill Butchers. I was horrified to read about what had been done to people who could just as easily have been my dad (who lived on the Cliftonville Road during that 1975 to 1977 period). What was the reason for this brutality? I couldn’t get my head around it, and still can’t. Was that the full story on loyalism? Of course not, and I learned more about the human experiences that motivated young men to join the UVF/RHC/UDA.

I can still think of many of the names of people who were killed at random in the early to mid-1970s in Belfast – it’s like a grim grid reference in my head. I see streets, some of which have changed irrevocably, and often think of the blood that was shed on them. Both Catholics and Protestants died horrible and unnecessarily cruel deaths on the streets of my city during this period of history. I wouldn’t want to get into a hierarchy of victims, but one can’t help but be depressed by the appalling circumstances surrounding the deaths of people like Stephen McCann who were killed as part of the ‘conflict’. Then there’s this realisation that there were potentially maniacs running around who didn’t even bother to hide under the cloak of political or religious fervour – the sort of people I now believe were involved in the killing of Sammy McCleave. From 1973, when Sammy was murdered, right up to the murder of his brother (I do believe Anthony was murdered) almost to the day in June 1979 there’s this appalling vista of violence which interfaced with so many helpless and innocent people.

The research into the deaths of Sammy and Anthony, and also Freddie Davis – another gay man who was murdered in 1973 – is a different type of project for me. It has allowed me to indulge in a bit of Gordon Burn-esque prose. I would never seek to copy him, for who could even touch the master of that sort of writing, but his work – Somebody’s Husband, Somebody’s Son and Happy Like Murderers are a massive influence on me and I aim to write this next book (for I hope it will be a book) in that vein.

CO: You've been writing about some of the pop cultural events (such as the Exorcist screening) in Belfast from that period. Such aspects of Belfast life are pretty much ignored when it comes to the traditional narrative (which suggests that alternative lifestyles/cultures did not exist in the city until punk). In your research of this period, what has been your most surprising find?

GM: This is probably partly where I got the impetus to write about Sammy, Freddie and Anthony. A lot of the backdrop to their lives and deaths will be Belfast of the time, and the pop cultural events that characterised the decade as well as the violence. There were certainly alternative lifestyles and cultures that long predated punk.

In the 1960s working class kids would rent rooms on Clifton Park Avenue and do acid. There were always Teds, mods, rockers, bikers etcetera before punk. We both know that there’s an unforgivable myth peddled that bands didn’t play in Northern Ireland. It isn’t true and it isn’t helpful for cultural historians. Neither are depictions that paramilitaries are a people apart – they were all men and women who had lifestyles and interests outside their organisations. I’m interested in looking at all people in their different dimensions. I find it fascinating.

In terms of the most surprising find – I’m not sure any one stands out at the moment, but certainly in The Exorcist research I had a chuckle when I read about Pastor Dale Gaver. In an ad from the North Down Christian Centre for their Bible Adventure Land they promised that Pastor Gaver could play the organ and accordion at the same time. Punters at Bible Adventure Land could also receive the ‘power of Exorcism’ before being evangelised at by a man called Steve Orange.

The 1970s in Northern Ireland was certainly bloody and horrific, but it was also as zany, seedy and hilarious as anywhere else in the UK. 

⏩ Christopher Owens was a reviewer for Metal Ireland and finds time to study the history and inherent contradictions of Ireland. He is currently the TPQ Friday columnist. 

⏭ Gareth Mulvenna is the author of My Life in Loyalism. His earlier work was  Tartan Gangs and Paramilitaries.

My Life In Loyalism

Christopher Owens in conversation with Gareth Mulvenna.

 
November 2nd sees the publication of My Life In Loyalism, the memoir of Billy Hutchinson (leader of the Progressive Unionist Party, Belfast City Councillor and former UVF member). Written with Dr. Gareth Mulvenna, it has been described in the press notes as being filled “…with great candour and honesty, this is a gripping memoir of an extraordinary life which reveals previously unpublished accounts of both the Northern Ireland Troubles and the peace process that culminated in the historic Belfast Agreement of 1998.” 

To coincide with the release, I decided to speak to Dr. Mulvenna about the book, his other research relating to the conflict and what we can expect next. My sincere thanks to him for taking the time to answer my questions.


CO: What are the origins of this project?

GM: In October 2016, 22 years on from the CLMC ceasefire, I was invited to speak at Shankill Road Library as part of the promotional duties for my first book Tartan Gangs And Paramilitaries. The invitation was from Action for Community Transformation (ACT) and the organisers asked me would I like to pick some people who I had interviewed for the book to sit on a panel as part of the evening which would be chaired by ACT co-ordinator William Mitchell. I didn’t have to think for long and immediately asked Eddie Kinner and Billy Hutchinson.

One of the incredible things about researching and writing a book like Tartan Gangs... was that I could ask people who lived through the history and who contributed to my research to illuminate and expand on some of the issues I had addressed in the text. Eddie and Billy came of age in that tumultuous early 1970s period; both of them were on the scene after the Balmoral Furniture Showrooms were blown up in December 1971 and both were honest about their desire to be part of the loyalist response to what they saw happening around them.

It was a candid event and instead of me talking from a purely historical slant, Eddie and Billy were able to talk about that history from their perspectives. Anyone who has read Tartan Gangs… will know how the lives of Eddie and Billy dovetailed at a certain point, and I had talked to both of them extensively since 2013 for the purposes of the book.

After this event in the library, as I was packing my stuff away, Billy told me he had something to ask me; basically, he said he wanted to write his life story and he wanted me to help him do it. I think that a trust had grown between myself and Billy as well as the other guys I had interviewed and come to know well over the three years since I embarked on the project.

Needless to say, I agreed to assist Billy. I knew there were many untold stories out there, and even at that stage I was advocating storytelling – whether public or private – as a means of preserving the past. That complimented what Beano Niblock was doing of course, and how Belts and Boots eventually came about.

So, leaving the library that evening in October 2016 I had another great project ahead of me.

CO: What challenges, immediate or gradual, did the two of you face when working on this?

GM: The following year, 2017, Billy seemed to go off the idea of doing the book. There were probably a variety of factors which fed into that reticence, but there’s no point in retreating into old ground about the Boston tapes or poor accounts of loyalism here. That was fine, and no offence was taken. I always felt, however, that when the time was right Billy would return to the book idea and if he still wanted me to work with him on it, I would.

Later in 2017 Billy decided that he wanted to pick up the project and we made plans to start doing interviews around November or December. Some would be recorded, some not. I say interviews, but they were more typical of the conversations we would have had anyway, but with a bit more structure.

Then, in early 2018, just as we were about to get going in earnest Billy fell and broke his hip. As he was recovering I fell ill with pneumonia and eventually ended up spending the best part of a month in hospital with an abscess on my lung. I was out of action until the summer of that year, but when I was feeling well again we got back into it.

Billy was honest that he would be able to tell me the stories, but he would be relying on me to prop up his memory on some things such as dates and ensure that the book was structured in a way that made sense to those reading it. We also brought in other people for chats and bounced ideas back and forth. What would make a good story, what wouldn’t, that sort of thing. Of course, we had to be careful that there was no talk out of school, but I was well-versed in that style of interviewing from doing the research for Tartan Gangs... We wanted to give an authentic perspective of Billy as a paramilitary and as a politician without breaking the confidences that go with both of those cultures. Unlike some books about paramilitaries who have turned to politics, Billy didn’t skim over the early years – indeed there is much material about the early to mid-1970s and the book gives a good insight into some of the machinations at leadership level in the UVF.

I know that Billy didn’t want to rewrite history and he wanted to be explicit in taking responsibility for his actions as a member of the UVF but he also analysed the structural issues that gave rise to the Troubles – the ‘polluted politics’ that David Ervine so candidly spoke of. One of the big challenges I suppose was writing about the double murder he was arrested for in 1974 at the age of 18. It was something that had to be addressed directly by him in the text. There was no way around it. Just pasting in a newspaper article or something would have been shirking responsibility for me as a writer and researcher. I can honestly say that Billy was of the mind that while he wanted to be open as far as possible, he didn’t want anything in the book to rub the noses of victims in it. There’s a perception that Billy is hard-nosed but every time we have talked about legacy he is very much of the ‘abject and true remorse’ school of thought. People might look at that and compare it to some recent accounts of the prison escapes of the early 1980s. Are there two different approaches to legacy and interpreting the past? That’s for people reading these accounts to decide.

Billy was also adamant that I included a paragraph in my introduction stating that I did not agree with much of what had been said in the book. He’s protective that way as he is aware of the fact that people may mistake me for a ‘fellow-traveller’ rather than an historian. He’s aware of the abuse I have received over the years and he was very clear in asking me was I sure – was my partner sure – that this was something we were happy for me to work on.

I see My Life In Loyalism as a natural extension of the work I did with Tartan Gangs..., but it is unlikely I will write about loyalism for a while. I don’t want people to accuse me of being a ‘loyalist historian’. I am a ‘Troubles historian’ if labels are your thing. I actually talked about this with a close friend recently. His father had been jailed for UVF activities in the late 1970s. I was bemoaning the fact that over the years my research into loyalism has perhaps led some people to question my motivations, and I often wondered whether job opportunities had slipped through my grasp due to the powers of Google. It doesn’t help of course when one of the main newspapers erroneously referred to me as a ‘loyalist blogger’. My friend made an excellent point:

Maybe employers or others should be asking how this Catholic guy from north Belfast was able to build such positive and enduring relationships with former members of loyalist paramilitaries? He must have strong interpersonal skills, he mustn’t allow people’s pasts to interfere with his ability to create strong working relationships with them, he must have a strong level of empathy and an ability to understand other people’s perspectives.

It was a Damascene moment, and I remember feeling ten-foot-tall after we chatted that day.

CO: It's often cited that capturing the voice of the subject is important for writers when working on such projects. Was this something that came naturally, or was there some work needed?

GM: We had actually done something of a dry run back in 2013/14. Paul Burgess and I were drawing up a list of potential contributors for The Contested Identities of Ulster Protestants and Billy was near the top of that list. Billy was a neighbour of Paul’s growing up in the Shankill and Paul has had Billy down to Cork for some events at UCC. I agreed to ghost Billy’s chapter for the book, so I had experience of capturing his voice.

Also, there are plenty of newspaper and television interviews with Billy in the archives. I modelled it round those and added a very little bit of my own style. I also imagined what Billy would have sounded like as a 16-year-old talking to UVF members around the country.

He has a good sense of humour, which most people don’t see – so it’s a case of portraying that authoritative military figure authentically but ensuring that it doesn’t become a cold experience for the reader. Billy is down to earth and intelligent, and the book had to reflect that. He is also a deep thinker, so I had to give gravitas to some of the background thoughts that led to his decisions.

To be honest, it’s a bit like the research for Tartan Gangs… – I put myself in the person’s shoes. Sit back and think about what it must have been like for them. Listen to the music of the time, look at photographs of the old buildings, the street maps, the archive footage. Just try and immerse myself in it. It’s the same with the recent writing I have done on Sammy McCleave. There were moments during the research for those pieces where I closed my eyes and tried to imagine Sammy’s movements that evening. The walk from The Tavern. Shelleys. Standing at the taxi rank afterwards. The music of the time.

That’s how I approach my research.

There was never a stage where Billy said, ‘this doesn’t sound like me’.

CO: How did Merrion Press get involved in the publication?

GM: I had been in touch with Conor during this period as I was actually planning another book about the loyalist paramilitaries – a sort of ‘secret history’ of the organisations during the 1970s. I wasn’t going to looking at the UVF too much because of the good work Iain Turner is doing. I had planned to look at the early years of the UDA – and in particular the WDA. I got a lot of good help on that front from a very good and sincere friend. I also had co-operation from former members of the Young Newton. I was hoping to revisit some of the Red Hand Commando history as well and develop on that as part of the book. I contacted Conor with my idea and he liked it, but then it became apparent that the Red Hand were planning on doing something in house to mark their fiftieth anniversary, so it would have become a book purely about the UDA. Although Ian S. Wood has written a fantastic history of the UDA, I do believe that there are a multitude of stories to be told about how the WDA and Young Newton (by way of examples) came about. One of the stories I was told was about the UDA stand-off with the army in Ainsworth Avenue in the summer of 1972. It’s a well-known episode, but not many people know how messy it could have got. Maybe it’s a book for someone else to write. As I said, I just don’t think I could commit to another project like that at the moment, where you have to work hard tom gain the trust of people across elements of an organisation which has always been unwieldy in terms of its structure.

So, basically, I mentioned to Conor that maybe the priority was this project I was working on with Billy. I had one chapter at that stage, a rough draft of chapter one. Conor knew Billy and was very excited at the prospect of signing us up with Merrion. I had approached Merrion because, in my opinion, it is the best publisher in Ireland at the moment. The level of visibility for the books they publish is incredible. Belfast and Dublin airports always have Merrion books on display. They seemed to work incredibly hard for their writers, and that has proven to be the case. Everyone – Conor, Maeve, Patrick – that I have dealt with have been brilliant. It makes a huge different when a publisher is excited about your work and is trying to proactively sell it.

Billy, Conor and myself had a meeting in the PUP room in the City Hall in October 2019, we signed the contract the following week and I delivered the manuscript during the summer. Lock-down actually galvanised me and Billy to get a jog on. When we set up Zoom meetings we knew we couldn’t sit and talk about football for an hour before starting.

CO: At the 'Boots and Belts...' event in the Spectrum Centre (nearly two years ago!), Billy talked about the importance of loyalists coming forward to tell their stories because (in his words) "the IRA are trying to rewrite history", and you've talked about how frustrating it is to see projects like Darragh MacIntyre's Spotlight on the Troubles' programme focus on loyalism when it comes to collusion. With those in mind, what do you hope will come out of this book?

GM: It’s hard to believe it’s been nearly two years since that event Christopher!

As I’ve said before, myself and Beano have worked hard at trying to get loyalists to tell their stories. We have reminded people that if they don’t tell their stories, someone else will.

It’s that old adage of leading a horse to water. But I totally understand why people don’t want to tell their stories. There is no slick machine behind former loyalist prisoners, no safety net to pull ranks around them if they decide to tell their stories and they get wholesale criticism. One former member of the RHC, when I asked him why he didn’t challenge the myths around certain issues, just said “What’s the point?” That’s the attitude, and it’s one I understand.

I wouldn’t single out Darragh MacIntyre for criticism but there was no sense in those Spotlight shows of loyalist paramilitarism as an organic response to what was going on in Northern Ireland in the early 1970s. I don’t think people appreciate just how amateurish and unaided the loyalists were at that time. There’s footage of the UDA on Pop Goes Northern Ireland that shows what it was in 1971 – old men carrying sticks who were patrolling their own neighbourhoods. The narrative of the Spotlight programmes was that the Troubles was essentially a war between the British and the Provos. That doesn’t allow for agency within the loyalist experience; it relegates lived experience to a proxy for someone else’s propaganda.

I don’t hold out any hope of the floodgates opening after Billy’s book comes out. Those who want to tell their stories will and I think Iain Turner’s book will contain many of those crucial voices.

What I really want to see is more women from a loyalist background tell their stories. Those are important narratives which are disappearing at an exponential rate.

CO: Is there any chance of a similar work coming from Eddie Kinner, since you've been publishing some of his writings on your site?

GM: I would love to see that. In fact, one of the first lines in Tartan Gangs is about an interview Eddie gave to a US newspaper in 1994 where he talked about writing his autobiography. Sadly, that never happened, but I have been very encouraged to see his recent articles and perhaps that is a sign that he is toying with the idea of doing something. Eddie is an articulate advocate for progressive loyalism, and it has been great over the past few years – at the Shankill Road library event and then the PUP’s 40th anniversary conference – to facilitate discussion panels with him and Billy. There is a lot of mutual respect between the two of them. It is very clear.

I honestly thought that Plum Smith’s Inside Man would open the floodgates for loyalist accounts of the conflict, but it just never happened.

Beano has been proactive about publishing – whether through short memoir or poetry – autobiographical writing on his experiences; Ronnie ‘Flint’ McCullough is sitting on what I feel is the definitive story of loyalists in Long Kesh in the period 1972 – 1977.

Let’s hope some of these stories emerge before long.

CO: How many "Boots and Belts..." events took place, and how would you describe the crowds that came to them? Didn't one take place in Scotland?

GM: That’s a good question! I think there were only four of five in the end. We had one planned for Lurgan, and another planned for England, both of which had to be cancelled due to the pandemic.

The crowds that came to the events were overwhelmingly male and loyalist. That’s who we wanted to reach in the first instance, anything else was a bonus. At the first event in the Ballymac there were members of the Green Party and others there, and there was more of a mixture. The second Shankill event had a women’s group, and we drove home the point that their stories needed to emerge.

In Lurgan the locals were enthusiastic about storytelling but admitted a reticence among those outside Belfast to talk. Alan Gracey was in the audience. There’s a guy who has an incredible story to tell.

CO: Your recent work on the death of Sammy McCleave was one that I believe you had floated with Lyra McKee before her murder. What was it about his death (and the events that followed) that made you want to investigate?

GM: Yes, that’s correct. The day before Lyra was murdered we had exchanged emails where I had encouraged her to write about Sammy and his brother Anthony. She was very enthusiastic, and it was tragic to wake up to the news of her cruel death.

I suppose it comes back to that empathy quality. I know I have been accused by some people of being a ‘UVF fanboy’ – in fact, I should have and will take legal action when people try to defame me like that from now on – but my first experience of reading about the Troubles was reading about the Shankill Butchers. I was horrified to read about what had been done to people who could just as easily have been my dad (who lived on the Cliftonville Road during that 1975 to 1977 period). What was the reason for this brutality? I couldn’t get my head around it, and still can’t. Was that the full story on loyalism? Of course not, and I learned more about the human experiences that motivated young men to join the UVF/RHC/UDA.

I can still think of many of the names of people who were killed at random in the early to mid-1970s in Belfast – it’s like a grim grid reference in my head. I see streets, some of which have changed irrevocably, and often think of the blood that was shed on them. Both Catholics and Protestants died horrible and unnecessarily cruel deaths on the streets of my city during this period of history. I wouldn’t want to get into a hierarchy of victims, but one can’t help but be depressed by the appalling circumstances surrounding the deaths of people like Stephen McCann who were killed as part of the ‘conflict’. Then there’s this realisation that there were potentially maniacs running around who didn’t even bother to hide under the cloak of political or religious fervour – the sort of people I now believe were involved in the killing of Sammy McCleave. From 1973, when Sammy was murdered, right up to the murder of his brother (I do believe Anthony was murdered) almost to the day in June 1979 there’s this appalling vista of violence which interfaced with so many helpless and innocent people.

The research into the deaths of Sammy and Anthony, and also Freddie Davis – another gay man who was murdered in 1973 – is a different type of project for me. It has allowed me to indulge in a bit of Gordon Burn-esque prose. I would never seek to copy him, for who could even touch the master of that sort of writing, but his work – Somebody’s Husband, Somebody’s Son and Happy Like Murderers are a massive influence on me and I aim to write this next book (for I hope it will be a book) in that vein.

CO: You've been writing about some of the pop cultural events (such as the Exorcist screening) in Belfast from that period. Such aspects of Belfast life are pretty much ignored when it comes to the traditional narrative (which suggests that alternative lifestyles/cultures did not exist in the city until punk). In your research of this period, what has been your most surprising find?

GM: This is probably partly where I got the impetus to write about Sammy, Freddie and Anthony. A lot of the backdrop to their lives and deaths will be Belfast of the time, and the pop cultural events that characterised the decade as well as the violence. There were certainly alternative lifestyles and cultures that long predated punk.

In the 1960s working class kids would rent rooms on Clifton Park Avenue and do acid. There were always Teds, mods, rockers, bikers etcetera before punk. We both know that there’s an unforgivable myth peddled that bands didn’t play in Northern Ireland. It isn’t true and it isn’t helpful for cultural historians. Neither are depictions that paramilitaries are a people apart – they were all men and women who had lifestyles and interests outside their organisations. I’m interested in looking at all people in their different dimensions. I find it fascinating.

In terms of the most surprising find – I’m not sure any one stands out at the moment, but certainly in The Exorcist research I had a chuckle when I read about Pastor Dale Gaver. In an ad from the North Down Christian Centre for their Bible Adventure Land they promised that Pastor Gaver could play the organ and accordion at the same time. Punters at Bible Adventure Land could also receive the ‘power of Exorcism’ before being evangelised at by a man called Steve Orange.

The 1970s in Northern Ireland was certainly bloody and horrific, but it was also as zany, seedy and hilarious as anywhere else in the UK. 

⏩ Christopher Owens was a reviewer for Metal Ireland and finds time to study the history and inherent contradictions of Ireland. He is currently the TPQ Friday columnist. 

⏭ Gareth Mulvenna is the author of My Life in Loyalism. His earlier work was  Tartan Gangs and Paramilitaries.

2 comments:

  1. Great article thanks Christopher, will definitely give this a read.

    Regarding Hutch's humour, I remember that piece of shit Adair showed his face on the Shankill along with his dog and Billy quipping, "Who the fuck puts a teeshirt on an Alsatian?"

    Doesn't sound so funny when it's written down but there was a very Belfast humour behind it at the time!

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  2. It is a very good piece - Loyalism needs to be more widely discussed to be better grasped - that includes more loyalist voices. Hopefully with this and through the work of Brandon Sullivan and pieces from Her Loyal Voice and It's Still Only Thursday TPQ helps facilitate a more rounded understanding of the phenomenon.

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