A Reply to Connal Parr
Academics are notorious bickerers and can lapse into self-indulgent defence of their work and its ‘value’. Hopefully, at times they can challenge views and readings that they find difficult without falling into hapless folly. Usually I have been challenged as a ‘terrorist’ fellow-traveller and myopic in my conclusion that there is a transforming loyalism. Water of a duck’s back given that such claims are motivated by well-established, regressive and ill-formed agendas.
Conall Parr’s review of my book The End of Ulster Loyalism? does not fall under that vein but I find his review to have missed out on what the book’s intentions were. In essence, few know off or appreciate the role of transformative loyalism and the impediments to it both internally and externally. This is clearly the aim and objective of the book but nothing in Connal’s review attends to that. He instead states that the book lacks ‘historical scope’ as it does not attend to the early violence of the Troubles, which is actually does on a chapter specifically on loyalist violence. An analysis that has never to my mind been completed before and which examines the diversity of such violence both spatially and over time and pinpoints that the violence of the late 80s and early 90s was tied to particular localised leaderships and to persons who were to be hostile to loyalist transformation. I am also derided for not looking at the violence of the 1920s and 30s. This is correct, but I am not a historian. Conall praises those who do not get ‘stuck in the well-established prison narrative’ but then follows this up with a paragraph on the ideas and personality of Gusty Spence that were developed via that very experience. Pot, kettle and black comes to mind.
I am further knocked for ‘jargon, using convoluted language about a subject which needs most of all to be understood’. Of course Connal’s own words such as ‘…is such an exotic notion in itself that it demands reiteration’ or ‘….groups are so fissile’ is itself jargon-free! Such ‘jargon’ is intellectual language and in particular there are two roles and audiences for those, who are academics, who write on loyalism. One is to embed loyalism within academic language. Much of what is opined within academic literature about loyalists is that they are merely fascists at worst and state agents at best. In challenging that, the tool of an academic book must be to fashion and develop academic language on loyalism. There is an academic audience, to be convinced, which uses what Conall calls ‘jargon’ but what I understand as theory. The second audience is more popular and in my defence I have written and undertaking many interviews on loyalism which I hope Conall would appreciate has been done in a ‘jargon-free’ manner. That has included work on alienation, educational disadvantage and conflict transformation.
My thesis that there is a transformative and a regressive loyalism is according to Connal a thesis that is a ‘bit of a mouse’. To be honest I am not sure what that means. Again this goes back to the point of influencing a readership within which many have never considered that loyalists have diverse ideas, beliefs and opinions. Nor have they considered that positive loyalism is criminalised along with regressive loyalism, or that funding has been used politically to control the former. The thesis may be known to Conall but it is generally unknown beyond a minority. At no point does he explain that the book examines how ideas and beliefs that framed loyalist transition are dealt with.
I am also criticised for not naming all respondents. This is an issue of ethics and if a respondent wishes to remain anonymous there isn’t much one can do. People are nervous when discussing their opinions, some haven’t event told members of their families that they were ‘involved’ and others remain vulnerable and require protection. The Boston Tapes saga also holds out the need to take ethics seriously. I am not and never have been in the business of undertaking research that leaves respondents vulnerable, and neither do I pop into a community, take what I want and leave nothing in return. Research to me is a commitment to social justice and not a game, career-builder or fascination with balaclava studies. Therefore, ethics is vital and under no circumstances would I sit in the ivory tower and leave any person who helps my research in a vulnerable state or to be questioned by others.
With regard to what I see as ethics Conall develops the idea that anonymising respondents means that they sound the same and ‘speak with one voice and are broadly similar in mind and thought’. A conclusion which is hard to fathom given the voices presented that are hostile to progressive loyalism and those who articulate sectarian rhetoric. To call protecting respondents via the consideration of ethics as a ‘foremost error’ is simply wrong. Conall does accept that the chapter on health, employment status and trauma based upon survey work produces ‘fascinating details’ but only speaks to the issue of home ownership, missing out on what is a study of need, suffering, family breakdown, strain, ordeal and doubt.
The use of the quote by David Ervine “I don’t want to wake up every morning and ask myself ‘Am I British or Irish?’ I want to think ‘Am I late for work?’” is held up as contradictory to the ‘self-destruction’ of the flag protestors. I doubt that it is contradiction at all but instead it is an affirmative of alternative thinking between the strands. Many progressive loyalists took issue with the flag protestors and the nature and meaning of its leadership. To not acknowledge that is a refusal to accept such a thing as a progressive loyalism.
Progressive loyalists hold the line and what Conall calls a ‘grey area’ between progressive and regressive loyalists simply misses the nature and conduct of the former. Without a progressive loyalism there would have been retaliatory acts following ‘dissident’ republican violence, multiple punishment attacks, more civil disturbance and an undermining of the peace process. I understand the point he makes about the grey area but there is more difference between the two than he contends. When flag protestors state there is ‘nothing in our areas’ you can be sure that some of them reject projects such as Alternative, SKAINOS and Lisburn PSP which each aim for loyalist transformation and inter-community partnership building. During the flag protest when I contended, at a meeting in Belfast, that there were projects and initiatives led by progressive loyalists embedded within community the reply came back; ‘sure we wouldn’t have anything to do with them. They just run around after Taigs!’ Evidently, a clear blue sea between such persons and the progressive minded.
The ultimate issue for me is the failure to even describe the vast bulk of what the book refers to. There is nothing in Connal’s review that relates to the evidence produced on loyalist violence, state collusion, the nature and forms of criminalisation, the debacle over CIT, the evaluation of restorative justice, the analysis of re-imaging, the destabilising impact of ill-health and alcoholism, loyalist feuding, C Company and the LVF or the context of idea building.
Peter Shirlow is a Professor of Conflict Studies at QUB.
