{"id":1785,"date":"2013-05-15T12:29:29","date_gmt":"2013-05-15T11:29:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.longkeshinsideout.co.uk\/?p=1785"},"modified":"2013-05-20T11:21:14","modified_gmt":"2013-05-20T10:21:14","slug":"connal-parrs-response-to-richard-reed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.longkeshinsideout.co.uk\/?p=1785","title":{"rendered":"Connal Parr’s Response to Richard Reed"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>I was interested to read my review of The End of Ulster Loyalism? \u2018demonstrates an inability to self-reflect\u2019. When reviewing a book you tend not to reflect on yourself, but it is a shame Richard Reed found it \u2018disappointing\u2019. As it originally appeared in the Dublin Review of Books back in March, I hope Reed hasn\u2019t been living with this \u2018disappointment\u2019 in storage for too long.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

The historian Marc Mulholland once said in an introduction to a symposium at Queen\u2019s University Belfast that those who thinks they are working through something new on Northern Irish Loyalism always declare, at almost every opportunity: \u2018No-one has looked at or written about Loyalism\u2019. I understand Reed places himself very much in this regrettable mould. It gives rise to an unfortunate condition where a \u2013 usually insecure \u2013 mind believes they \u2018own\u2019 a subject. This emerges more than a little in the way Reed sees my opinions as \u2018dangerous\u2019, which \u2018must be resisted in the strongest terms if damage is not to accrue to the profession and to our understanding of loyalism\u2019. Not only are these views part of any healthy debate, I suggest someone like Reed does not represent \u2018the profession\u2019 and that he is no guardian whatsoever for \u2018our understanding of loyalism\u2019 (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 \u2018their territory\u2019, leading invariably to a mediocrity which does real damage to \u2018the profession\u2019 and an \u2018understanding of loyalism\u2019. 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.<\/p>\n

In this sense Reed is correct to see himself as the slight tangent in my original review\u2019s criticism of \u2018younger academics\u2019 who have failed to name their interviewees. Now, if no less an historian than Richard English can write a history of the IRA (2003\u2019s Armed Struggle<\/em>) 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.<\/p>\n

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 \u2018Blood, thunder and Rosettes\u2019 to an interviewee as a \u2018trade unionist\u2019 who had mediated between the UVF and the Dublin Government in the early 1990s. This person was not \u2013 as Reed protests \u2013 a member of the UVF or UDA he needed to \u2018protect\u2019 (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\u2019s UVF<\/em> 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 \u2013 and knows him \u2018well\u2019, though what this has to do with anything I\u2019m not sure \u2013 who makes the correct choice in distinguishing between necessarily protecting those who need to conceal their identities out of ethics<\/em>, <\/em>with those \u2013 including Dawn Purvis and Billy Hutchinson \u2013 who are individually acknowledged in Novosel\u2019s recent book as interviewees. Part of my objection to The End of Ulster Loyalism?<\/em> was that the insights of \u2018UVF Respondent\u2019 et al<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n

Reed sloppily misquotes the review as saying Irish Republicanism \u2018is much less fragmented\u2019 than Loyalism. My original review quite specifically stated that \u2018mainstream Irish nationalism\u2019, i.e. Sinn F\u00e9in, is much less fragmented than Loyalism. If Reed believes the Workers\u2019 Party and dissident groups are \u2018mainstream\u2019 Irish nationalists then he is at least being consistent with his lack of knowledge thus far. Indeed, Anthony McIntyre and Ricky O\u2019Rawe, as former members of the Provisional IRA (they\u2019ve 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Reed has a problem with my review\u2019s original claim that \u2018Loyalist paramilitaries are not, and have never been, an authentic mouthpiece of the Protestant working class\u2019. Doubtless Loyalist paramilitaries are authentic to their own experience and comrades. But the self-appointed \u2018community leaders\u2019 who appear on TV or radio to speak on behalf of \u2018the Protestant working-class\u2019 from a paramilitary background \u2013 who several Loyalists have assured me are often motivated financially to do so \u2013 have been rejected by no less a process than parliamentary democracy. The PUP made a breakthrough in 1998 and Hughie Smyth\u2019s dedication to his constituency has been rewarded with a council seat for decades, but it is quite offensive and ludicrous \u2013 as my original review stated \u2013 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 \u2018unease\u2019 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.<\/p>\n

I would like to distance myself from the theory Reed values, which has the same shortcomings already alluded to concerning jargon. I\u2019m fascinated to hear that Orwell has been cited so frequently in journals as an \u2018arbiter of academic standards\u2019 \u2013 I\u2019ve read a fair few recently and have yet to see much reference at all. Commendably however, Reed talks of how we should \u2018stop seeing loyalists as objects in a zoo to be stared at, and rather to see them as fellow humans\u2019. That he thinks theory and jargon \u2013 or bad writing \u2013 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 \u2013 because of a world where people are writing about them in abstract language they don\u2019t 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 \u2018the people\u2019 who are prevented from understanding this work because of \u2018obfuscatory\u2019 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 \u2018angry playwrights\u2019 or \u2018literary references\u2019, that they are in fact peddling jargon \u2013 not the stuff Reed and those he has felt compelled to defend have been writing for a while now!<\/p>\n

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?<\/p>\n

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