Connal Parr’s Response to Richard Reed

I was interested to read my review of The End of Ulster Loyalism? ‘demonstrates an inability to self-reflect’. When reviewing a book you tend not to reflect on yourself, but it is a shame Richard Reed found it ‘disappointing’. As it originally appeared in the Dublin Review of Books back in March, I hope Reed hasn’t been living with this ‘disappointment’ in storage for too long.

The historian Marc Mulholland once said in an introduction to a symposium at Queen’s University Belfast that those who thinks they are working through something new on Northern Irish Loyalism always declare, at almost every opportunity: ‘No-one has looked at or written about Loyalism’. I understand Reed places himself very much in this regrettable mould. It gives rise to an unfortunate condition where a – usually insecure – mind believes they ‘own’ a subject. This emerges more than a little in the way Reed sees my opinions as ‘dangerous’, which ‘must be resisted in the strongest terms if damage is not to accrue to the profession and to our understanding of loyalism’. Not only are these views part of any healthy debate, I suggest someone like Reed does not represent ‘the profession’ and that he is no guardian whatsoever for ‘our understanding of loyalism’ (if he was, I fear things would be in an even worse state than they are already). Aside from being an incredibly pompous thing to say of oneself, part of the problem of the mindset which takes hold is that people consider a subject ‘their territory’, leading invariably to a mediocrity which does real damage to ‘the profession’ and an ‘understanding of loyalism’. In terms of the recent study of Loyalism such a person is of course a plastic Columbus, walking the well-worn path Sarah Nelson, Jim McAuley and others did back in the 1980s and early-1990s.

In this sense Reed is correct to see himself as the slight tangent in my original review’s criticism of ‘younger academics’ who have failed to name their interviewees. Now, if no less an historian than Richard English can write a history of the IRA (2003’s Armed Struggle) and manage to name all those he talks to (including some who would have been involved in the military operations of the organization), why can this not occur in a study of Loyalism? Were Loyalists less dangerous than the Provisional, Real or Continuity IRA? Writers like Carolyn Gallagher and Martyn Frampton have completed studies of Loyalist paramilitaries and dissident republicanism respectively, managing to name almost all their interviewees.

It is not a question of ethics. As Reed seems so interested in what I have been writing, at least since March, I have a memory of an entirely connected deficiency in his own research. Reed gave the game away when he referred in his imaginatively-titled journal article ‘Blood, thunder and Rosettes’ to an interviewee as a ‘trade unionist’ who had mediated between the UVF and the Dublin Government in the early 1990s. This person was not – as Reed protests – a member of the UVF or UDA he needed to ‘protect’ (though the latter are also alluded to and bizarrely never named either). To those with any knowledge of the subject, we all know it to be the Reverend Chris Hudson who very happily talks openly to people about this experience (in Henry McDonald and Jim Cusack’s UVF book, as in several others, he was named from the start). This proves that Reed does not make the decision ethically but as part of a debilitating practice set down, copying examples from journals because he thought he should and demonstrating the regurgitation of bad habits worth confronting. He mentions Tony Novosel – and knows him ‘well’, though what this has to do with anything I’m not sure – who makes the correct choice in distinguishing between necessarily protecting those who need to conceal their identities out of ethics, with those – including Dawn Purvis and Billy Hutchinson – who are individually acknowledged in Novosel’s recent book as interviewees. Part of my objection to The End of Ulster Loyalism? was that the insights of ‘UVF Respondent’ et al were interesting and, making a mockery of the ethics argument Reed has parroted, were not related to their paramilitary activities and careers. There were political and intelligent comments from people talking about their everyday lives, and we never discover their names.

Reed sloppily misquotes the review as saying Irish Republicanism ‘is much less fragmented’ than Loyalism. My original review quite specifically stated that ‘mainstream Irish nationalism’, i.e. Sinn Féin, is much less fragmented than Loyalism. If Reed believes the Workers’ Party and dissident groups are ‘mainstream’ Irish nationalists then he is at least being consistent with his lack of knowledge thus far. Indeed, Anthony McIntyre and Ricky O’Rawe, as former members of the Provisional IRA (they’ve been named, look), have proven that it is impossible to remain a part of the mainstream party once they dissent and have suffered attacks for it as a consequence. Almost as careless is the conflation of the UVF circa 1965 with Carson and Craig’s UVF. The broader, mass movement (100,000 strong) of 1913 does not stand up to comparison with the reactivated UVF, which was structurally more exclusive in membership as well as being drawn from a primarily working-class base.

Reed has a problem with my review’s original claim that ‘Loyalist paramilitaries are not, and have never been, an authentic mouthpiece of the Protestant working class’. Doubtless Loyalist paramilitaries are authentic to their own experience and comrades. But the self-appointed ‘community leaders’ who appear on TV or radio to speak on behalf of ‘the Protestant working-class’ from a paramilitary background – who several Loyalists have assured me are often motivated financially to do so – have been rejected by no less a process than parliamentary democracy. The PUP made a breakthrough in 1998 and Hughie Smyth’s dedication to his constituency has been rewarded with a council seat for decades, but it is quite offensive and ludicrous – as my original review stated – to claim UDA men and their immediate spokesmen as oracles of the Protestant working class, as Reed has it. Many consider paramilitarism a blight on their community and the vast majority of working class Protestants have voted with their feet by not backing in large numbers candidates associated with paramilitary groups (despite the encouraging efforts of the likes of Ken Gibson and John McMichael). There may be ‘unease’ about dissident republicanism from the Protestant working class, but they do not turn round to members of Loyalist paramilitaries and request a military response. A long-established theme is that many in such communities regard the Police and security forces as adequate in a response to the dissident threat.

I would like to distance myself from the theory Reed values, which has the same shortcomings already alluded to concerning jargon. I’m fascinated to hear that Orwell has been cited so frequently in journals as an ‘arbiter of academic standards’ – I’ve read a fair few recently and have yet to see much reference at all. Commendably however, Reed talks of how we should ‘stop seeing loyalists as objects in a zoo to be stared at, and rather to see them as fellow humans’. That he thinks theory and jargon – or bad writing – is the way to transcend this is where it all collapses for him. At the moment it is Loyalists, among other disillusioned groups, who see the academic world as a zoo; its inhabitants spouting jargon which has no resonance whatsoever to their daily lives, political understanding or existence. This is one of the reasons, I suggest, why Loyalists do feel alienated – because of a world where people are writing about them in abstract language they don’t recognize or appreciate, who are so dislocated from their subject that they do not even use the real names of people. Loyalism, when written about academically, is not understood by Loyalists themselves. I am asked, who are ‘the people’ who are prevented from understanding this work because of ‘obfuscatory’ language? Personally speaking, they are every Loyalist interviewee I have ever met as well as those I speak to off the cuff at events, launches, meetings. Fascinatingly, Reed argues that when someone tries to look at the subject differently, through the eyes of ‘angry playwrights’ or ‘literary references’, that they are in fact peddling jargon – not the stuff Reed and those he has felt compelled to defend have been writing for a while now!

Those Loyalists are right to feel separate from the academic world. Who can blame them for feeling alienated given the misunderstanding, poor practice and jargon on display from those who contribute to it, and block them from entering in?

Share

Comments are closed.