The IRA

Early years Edit

McKeag's first group affiliation was with the white power skinhead gangs that existed on the Shankill and which were co-opted into the UDA's youth wing Ulster Young Militants.[2] McKeag then became a born-again Christian and married young to a woman named Alison.[3] His interest in Christianity would diminish as he became more involved in the UDA, whilst his marriage also broke up.[3]

According to Henry McDonald and Jim Cusack, the UDA gave an annual "Volunteer of the Year" award to the organisation's top hitman. The award, presented on the Shankill Road and usually consisting of a trophy in the form of a model gun and plaque made by loyalists prisoners, was dominated by McKeag from 1990 onwards and helped to ensure that he became known as "Top Gun" both to his UDA comrades and his republican opponents

Decline Edit

In June 1998 McKeag, a keen motorcyclist, suffered serious injuries when his vehicle collided with a car being driven by a member of the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF). He suffered a number of broken bones and required several operations, including the insertion of pins into his leg, and as a consequence he also developed an addiction to painkillers.[1] He also had a collapsed lung and stomach damage and for a time had to wear a urostomy bag.[26]

A celebrated figure within loyalism for his exploits, cracks began to show in 1999, notably at an event at the Royal Antediluvian Order of Buffaloes on the Corcrain estate in Portadown

Wait no what

the Royal Antediluvian Order of Buffaloes

This was a late night drinking club in Glasgow, pre-opening hour liberalization, it's connection to Loyalist headbangers is news to me. This is excellent stuff though, you're definitely onto something - though not that different from the sort of Glasgow gangland scumbags that you can read about in the Sunday Mail most weekends.

Had to stop. Too depressing

Shameful in its Benson and hedges stained eastenders dramatics

XP it definitely has the ring of local press egging on local thugs doesn't it

as far as i'm aware my irish-american family never donated neither directly nor indirectly (eg noraid) to the ira

and ireland exists as an abstract cultural notion recreated and distorted in parts in a completely different context

wrt these loyalists, what is there to say about these characters really. like tom says, scum of the earth

don't want to get too deeply into it but it's the whole machiavellian aspect of the ira that always comes to mind personally

1916 violence expedited ireland's 'independence', but it could have been reached without violence, just that it would've taken longer imo

i guess i'm more ashamed than anything else and it's depressing and best to laugh it off but glad i live in a country where people don't recognize my surname or associate it with anything related to the ira

IRA vs ROTH IRA vs SEP-IRA

GOJIRA ftw

Adair heard that Dodds' cousin William "Muggsy" Mullan had been drug-dealing with the Shoukri brothers, Adair's rivals in North Belfast, and so Adair ordered Mullan to pay him a £10,000 fine or leave Northern Ireland. Mullan's family scraped together £7000 which Dodds took to Adair but he refused to accept it and Mullan was forced to flee. Winkie's brother Milton "Doddsy" Dodds met some Adair's men in a bar and asked them why the brigadier had treated his brother so badly but Donald Hodgen punched him and later that night Adair's ally Fat Jackie Thompson led a punishment squad to Doddsy's house where he was beaten with baseball bats. The following day Winkie Dodds decided he had had enough of Adair's erratic behaviour and he and his wife left the Shankill

you could make this one into a children's book with pictures and a line on every page. "Winkie Dodds Leaves Shankhill"

Billy Wright's entry is somewhat fascinating. Less tawdry and somewhat more messianic than the usual, but on the same tawdry local legend scale.

Gusty Spence
Gusty spence.jpg
Gusty Spence in 1972, when UVF leader. It was taken while he was at large following his escape from prison.
Born Augustus Andrew Spence
28 June 1933
Belfast, Northern Ireland
Died 25 September 2011 (aged 78)
Belfast, Northern Ireland
Residence Shankill Road, Belfast
Nationality British
Other names "The Orange Pimpernel"

The orange pimpernel

s/b tangerine pimpernel imo

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Graham_(loyalist)

i'm blaming you deems, for the fact i just spent 10 mins googling variants of "why was john graham called bunter"

They seek him here, they seek him there, so they do.

not sure if anyone's looking for books about all this -- rather than wikipedia paragraphs -- but one place to start is eamon collins's "killing rage", written by an ira assassin-turned-informer a couple of years before he was found beaten to death

it's the opposite of loyalist (in every sense) but it gives you a bleak glimpse of who'd been high-ranking and respected and effective within an org, and why it turned on him and he turned against it (reasons less the ones he gives out loud than screaming from the subtext of every other sentence)

this thread is genuinely making me want to record some of these as children's bedtime stories.

Struwwelpeter or the Shankhill Butchers, fingers are going to be chopped off either way.

gusty spence is an interesting one, one of the first members and prominent leader of the newfangled uvf, committed some sectarian murders - the just shoot some taig looking fella outside a bar on the falls type if i remember - renounced violence in jail and was pushing for a political end to the conflict from the maze, basically having a more progressive and conciliatory outlook towards the nationalist community than most mainstream unionist politicians of the time

then david ervine, basically a very sound seeming bloke with good left-wing politics

a fairly reasonable guy if you ignore the whole bombing nationalist civilians part

my favourite story though, that illustrates the monstrosity of loyalism, is long kesh being closed and in the republican wings what's left over is literature and books on the irish language, history, political theory. the loyalist wing's reading material consists primarily of body-building magazines.

I'm glad it stopped. I still don't understand why it is that it stopped. Most places violence just doesn't end. Ever.

the david ervine part of this book is good reading, he's about as sympathetic as a loyalist bomber can be, though he is circumspect about his crimes, basically not admitting to anything other than the crime he was convicted for - he was caught by police driving a car with a bomb in it. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Voices-Grave-Two-Mens-Ireland/dp/0571251692

There's very interesting people on both sides, absolutely, I'm kind of focusing on the wyrd side of the loyalist divide here. I've half a theory that their religious, professional, communal, historic or whatever outlook tended to push them down less identikit paths than the republican terrorists template.

What Jim says there might make sense in that light. Paddys in for several, but the liturgy of the cause is present in the bloc because there's a coherent somewhat shared ideology based not only on Catholicism ( which we can presume to be prone to more uniformity of form and product than the various protestantisms across the province?) but in the broad trend of extreme left politics besides, and if not quite agreement in that latter then certainly a shared belief in the fervency with which one should properly engage in a politic.

Loyalists idk they're just lads swung a hammer, kept tidier farms and liked to shoot paddies. Book clubs aren't really in it.

This lad frinstance, obv wanted a religion regardless of whatever religion it was, but that need for creed doesn't seem tied in to his desire for buggery of minors or his sectarian hatred

Whereas yknow with yr Catholic nationalist it's all in a package.

John McKeague
John McKeague.png
McKeague in a BBC interview in 1976
Born John Dunlop McKeague
1930
Bushmills, County Antrim
Died 29 January 1982
Albertbridge Road, Belfast
Cause of death Gunshot wounds
Nationality British
Occupation Shopkeeper
Notable work Loyalist Song Book
Home town Belfast
Title Leader of the Red Hand Commando

Chris Moore, in his investigation into the Kincora scandal, insists that McKeague was never a member of Tara but that he and McGrath had met to discuss trading weapons between their two groups and that following these meetings McKeague had become a regular visitor to Kincora, where he was involved in several rapes of underage boys living at the home.[13] Although making no comment on his membership or otherwise of the group Jim Cusack and Henry McDonald insist that McKeague shared the far right conspiratorial views advanced by McGrath and UPV leader Noel Doherty.

couple interesting mid-80s essays by -- i know i know hear me out -- tom paulin, on paisley and the DUP as a political movement with roots in (as TP argues it) the puritan revolt during the english civil war, paisley's reading list put together mainly at bob jones university maybe, but echoes stuff you find in bunyan etc

it's collected in "writing to the moment" which is a fvck awful title, tom, no wonder i'm the only one who bought and read it

Loyalists idk they're just lads swung a hammer, kept tidier farms and liked to shoot paddies. Book clubs aren't really in it.

http://www.booksinstore.uk/shop_image/product/004118.jpg

couple interesting mid-80s essays by -- i know i know hear me out -- tom paulin, on paisley and the DUP as a political movement with roots in (as TP argues it) the puritan revolt during the english civil war, paisley's reading list put together mainly at bob jones university maybe, but echoes stuff you find in bunyan etc

this does sound legit interesting

is there a consensus best or most comprehensive book about the post-bloody sunday era of "the troubles"?

btw my brother was in Ireland on an internship program at the same time as the Omagh bombing. One of the victims (a 12 yr old boy) shared his full name. i am pretty certain there was never any panic about that particular bit (he was in Dublin.)

separate from that i remember my brother saying it was the darkest moment he'd ever felt a part of, just being in Ireland at the time.

couple interesting mid-80s essays by -- i know i know hear me out -- tom paulin, on paisley and the DUP as a political movement with roots in (as TP argues it) the puritan revolt during the english civil war, paisley's reading list put together mainly at bob jones university maybe, but echoes stuff you find in bunyan etc

it's collected in "writing to the moment" which is a fvck awful title, tom, no wonder i'm the only one who bought and read it

― mark s, Thursday, 9 March 2017 18:12 (twenty-nine minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Calvinism foundations and all that alright, and presbyterianism as prevalent throughout the north is surely only the Scottish variant but Paisley's lads are just fundamental baptist or whatever of the type celebrated in the Fred Phelps threads

I'd read more into this stuff, it appeals and repels on a number of interesting levels, but I mean it's hard to find the time when the wikispiral just never ends.

i went through a crazy period of reading about the troubles like a man possessed but i never read enough about the loyalists, feels like something i'll definitely come back to at some stage.

Yeah it's more than just the local interest there's definitely something there I'd like to see well investigated

my prob blase southern view is that ulster unionists were/are a bunch that's fairly retrograde. i realise that's versus ira or whatever at the extremes, but it often felt like some of the worst people in europe were these bible basher racial hatred types. that said i've met many people from the north born in one religion or the other, and over the years they didn't care or weren't brought up in a way that gave them any major anger.

ultimately tho, i don't see deep racial hatred even in an org like sinn fein. nor homophobia, etc.

i've also been wanting to read more about 'the troubles' but jeez it's hard to sift through it all -- any thoughts on "Making Sense of the Troubles"? the copy i've got is already been updated and i feel like a sucker

it was a hard time to sift through for both sides

SIFT were a particularly nasty bunch of breakouts from the 1972 conference iirc, led away after refusing to recognise the legitimacy of a vote on mustache be full beard for the modern provo

I can't recommend any of these yet gbx cos I only looked it up earlier but...

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2002/feb/22/bestbooks.politics

Tim Pat Coogans "The Troubles" is very good too

Coogan is faultless, thorough and relatively impartial that I can tell by Jesus he is a chore to read

One of our fallen heroes late of the parish has brought my attn to the following:

https://www.amazon.com/Longest-War-Northern-Irelands-Troubled/dp/0192802925

thanks guys

xpost - lol @ that Amazon reviewer 'how can anyone have a book about Northern Ireland without photos' idk my feeling is anyone who lived through any of that should be pretty right for photos for the rest of their lives basically just saying

i'm like twenty minutes into the first episode of peter taylor's documentary series on the loyalists and jfc paisley is such a sleazeball

That Peter Taylor series is a great primer on the troubles. The books are actually not that great iirc, in that they don't expand sufficiently on the docs.

paisley = hall of fame for alltime punchable twats

reread the paulin-paisley essay last night: it's really good -- a deep dive into the rhetorical structure and intellectual (which are also anti-intellectual) roots of paisleyism, why/how it emerged when it did and why it was so effective (it's not *simply* bible-bashing clannishness)

the strongest stuff is maybe about the class roots of the DUP's relentless war since the 60s on official unionism (the "tyrant o'neill")

paulin is a protestant republican himself, iirc, and he's trolling a *bit* perhaps by fashioning more of a coherence than is there -- he notes several contradictory elements but deftly uses the noting to "save his theory", which is fair enough in the context of explaining rhetorical force... the force is real and the contradictions evidently don't diminish it, so don't treat them as points of weakness, bcz they're not

cf freud on the kettle joke (CW: jeet heer at this link; also trump's face)

point here not so much that paisley is like trump -- there are similarities but also important differences -- but that "kettle logic" is very effective in a particular kind of class insurgency, which the Troubles were

(tbh paulin's semi-trollish argument that the deep perhaps inadvertant logic of paisleyism and the DUP is actually ultimately also (ie like irish nationalism) a species of separatism, despite itself, probably slightly reflects his own politics and wishful thinking a wee a bit too much… he's goading paisleyites here, but he's not wrong that there's a deep ambivalence in the DUP abt the nature of their britishness)

sorry this doesn't really belong on a thread abt the IRA tho, does it?

No I think it's a good angle, thanks for bringing it in

Anyway, fault will be mind for rebooting thread purely to marvel at the unionistas

That said, tisnt the first time they done it on us wha

he's not wrong that there's a deep ambivalence in the DUP abt the nature of their britishness

That's no understatement.

by not-entirely-odd coincidence:
http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/devolution/2017/03/ian-paisley-jr-northern-irish-aelection-dup-were-caught-napping