Tartan Gangs and Paramilitaries: The Loyalist Backlash

Gareth Mulvenna

Liverpool University Press, £16.99

Review by Gerry Braiden

MARCH 1971: the upsurge in political and communal unrest across the North Channel, what would in a few short years became known as The Troubles, arrived in Scotland. Three young Royal Highland Fusiliers – two teenage brothers from Ayr and a 26-year-old colleague from Glasgow – were shot dead by a Provisional IRA gang which had invited them to a party. But the murder of 'The Three Jocks', John and Joseph McCaig and Donald McCaughey, also had a cataclysmic effect on the narrow red brick streets of Protestant working-class Belfast.

Young Loyalists, with a long attachment to the west of Scotland through trips to watch Rangers FC or via the Orange band scene, saw the murdered as their own kith and kin. Youths who had begun to ape the codes and conventions of Glasgow's 1960s gang culture and the emerging football hooliganism of major UK cities, had already been forming into clearly identified tribes. Now they found themselves at the forefront of much of Belfast's early unrest.

To commemorate ‘the Jocks’ these gangs adopted clan tartans, both a mark of their bond and denoting their particular area or streets. The Tartan Gangs – a mass phenomena of the early years of Ulster's conflict and the reservoir from which Loyalism drew its first wave of foot soldiers and future leaders – had its icons and martyrs. The Loyalist Backlash, as it was dubbed, would come bloody and fast.

Efforts to get to grips with Ulster Loyalism and the impact of the past 50 years on its internal dynamics and world view is still a niche pursuit amongst historians and sociologists such as Gareth Mulvenna. While the grand narratives of how Civil Rights protests became the bloodiest conflict in western Europe since the Second World War are well rehearsed, Mulvenna's Tartan Gangs and Paramilitaries dissects an under-explored mass movement which became a key protagonist during the upheaval of the period. It's a story of how a fairly ordinary youth subculture of the early 1970s took up the mantle of paramilitary Protestantism, many of the Young Tartans soon finding themselves at the vanguard of a vicious sectarian war.

The story of the early Troubles is too often told within the context of seemingly random tragedy or major political events. In this narrative, 1969 is Year Zero, with Operation Banner, Direct Rule, Bloody Sunday, Internment. Instead, in Tartan Gangs Mulvenna places this history in the context of Wrangler and Harrington jackets. Here, T-Rex, Rod Stewart and Black Sabbath are as important as Lord Carson, King Billy and the pillars of Ulster Unionism. A Clockwork Orange is as much as a touchstone as The Battle of the Boyne.

An oral history, the book is based around the testimonies of those who made what the author describes as a "dramatic, short and violent" journey to paramilitarism, murder and jail. Many of Mulvenna's subjects are in part victims of circumstance, their road to taking up arms rooted in that maelstrom created when a provincial city became embroiled in extraordinary events. But he also roots them in a Loyalist lineage, from the militias of the Scots Planters in the 1600s through early Orangeism, the Young Citizen Volunteers of the First World War, and even the Boys' Brigade.

By my own early teens in late 1980s Belfast, the Tartans were a rarely referenced relic, a memory largely erased by endless atrocities, or living on only in surviving graffiti. In 1972, though, they were such a feature of the emerging conflict that the BBC dispatched Max Hastings to make a documentary on the gangs in the Woodstock Road area of East Belfast. During the film one woman prophetically points out: "These are our boys of tomorrow."

Mulvenna covers in detail the role of the Tartans in the evacuation of Protestants from mixed areas in 1971, an episode immortalised in popular culture on the iconic cover of Dexy's Midnight Runners debut album and discussed in the book. Also explored is their role in targeting isolated Catholic families who had remained in mainly Protestant areas after 1969. (My grandparents and unmarried children were forced from the Woodstock Road in spring 1972 following the murder of a teenage friend and neighbour, a killing linked then and now with local Tartans.)

Tartan Gangs makes an important contribution to one of the most contentious features of post-conflict Northern Ireland, namely the notion of 'legacy'. The author has publicly expressed frustrations that amid much focus on issues of collusion and the role of the state, the Loyalist experience, still generally portrayed as brutal and unsophisticated, remains at the edges of the “uncomfortable conversations”. Mulvenna’s study is a valiant attempt at teasing out the often overlooked motivations of Loyalism, its notions of defending its areas, its cultural and social way of life and where Republicanism is viewed, not as part of a world revolutionary movement, but as the catalyst for sectarian carnage in their communities. Avoiding the inherent voyeurism of much literature on Irish paramilitarism, it satisfies a grim fascination with the culture of violence surrounding my youth and childhood.

Mulvenna concludes with a warning from history. The context is of course different. The Northern Ireland of my youth is a world away, a previous time and existence that witnessed an appallingly high death toll. Only now are the histories of others beginning to shape our wider comprehension of the era and challenge our own narratives. Born into 'the Backlash', Tartan Gangs feels like a vital piece in that understanding.