Loyalists

The entire series is supremely well researched and presented. It is compelling reading. The three volumes feel very close to a comprehensive telling of a long, complex, terrible series of events with fair due paid to each of the focal groups.

read for a college class...good read!

If you've seen the documentary series by Peter Taylor then this book doesn't go over any new ground. In fact I found the book far less detailed than the documentary. Worth a read but not if you've seen it.

Peter Taylor is clearly a man that has learned a great deal from his time in Northern Ireland from 1972. I was born there in 1973 and often couldn’t understand why the troubles existed, 47 years latter having read his books and watched a lot of his documentaries understand how complex the situation was. Hopefully good comes from peace process so everyone around the World learns from the fears on all sides and needless loss of life.

Interesting, has more info then the documentaries. Peter Taylor should write a new edition on the subject given the passage of time since the Good Friday Agreement. A bit disconcerting how ordinary people could commit such evil acts, without remorse. The story of Billy Giles is very tragic. Just goes to show how bad war is.

The second volume of Taylor’s trilogy has all the merits of the first. It tells the story of the Northern Irish conflict from the perspective of Loyalist politicians and gunmen, without passing judgement and letting the protagonists speak for themselves. Taylor knows how to listen - the most underrated of all the communication skills - and he gets people to talk. The Provos sense of historical justice was matched by the Loyalists sense of threat. They did not see themselves as first class citizens defending entrenched privileges. The material conditions of working class Protestants in the late 1960s did not differ all that much from their Catholic counterparts. But they felt their state, and their way of life, was under threat from an enemy within. A deadly tit-for-tat followed a remorseless logic. Republicans challenged the Protestant state, killing its servants, whom Protestants did not see as occupiers or oppressors but defenders of their community. Loyalist paramilitaries served up retaliation against innocent Catholics, on the premise that if enough misery could be inflicted, the Catholic community would pressurise the IRA to cease its campaign. It is chilling to read the reflections of former killers, now in middle age, who realise the error of their ways but at the time saw no difference between ‘Catholic’ and ‘IRA’. ‘I know it was wrong but that was the way I saw it at the time,’ is a familiar refrain. One sees this kind of logic mirrored in the self-justifications of other terrorists – like the 7/7 bombers. Like IRA killers, most of these men were normal, in that they did not seem to have been born with a pathological desire to kill. The cycle of violence was broken by a growing realisation on the Republican side that Loyalists were not an excrescence of British imperialism but a separate, authentic tradition with deep set roots in the land that Catholics shared. Likewise, Loyalists came to see the political necessity of accommodating the broader nationalist demand for equality and respect. Even some Loyalist paramilitaries mooted the idea of a united but decentralised, federated island that could allow the two traditions to coexist. That sort of very radical thinking did not get very far but the realisation that violence was not the answer spread from the centre outwards, to all but the most violent extremes. Like the first volume, the book is mostly a collection of testimonies, situated against the background of the political history of Northern Ireland, leading up the Good Friday agreement in 1998 (incidentally, Senator Mitchell, a key American interlocutor in the process, had nothing but highest praise for Tony Blair’s leadership during this time). It is not an analysis of the ideological and sociological roots of Loyalism. Like the first volume. Provos, it seeks to explain, and relate how the participants saw things at the time. Recommended.

Very pleasing purchase. Found the book very informative. Excellent read!

Good book, however font was a bit small and few details not up to scratch. Noticed a few errors on the section of the book i was interested in..The UWC strike.