Football and Fighting

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Tartan Gangs and Paramilitaries: The Loyalist Backlash

In late 1969, Tam Dalyell picked up a phone message in the lobby of the House of Commons summoning him to the Home Office – Jim Callaghan was peeved. On his arrival, he was made to wait for a few minutes while Callaghan finished some work at the far end of the long room that served as his office.

Eventually, Callaghan turned his attention to Dalyell and asked why he was planning a fact-finding trip to Northern Ireland. He wondered what Dalyell could hope to achieve that he, as home secretary, could not. Then he came from a more conciliatory angle. He explained he did not want any of Scotland’s MPs to visit the province, confiding he did not take Gregor Mackenzie, his parliamentary private secretary and MP for Rutherglen, on his trips to the province. Maybe he was acting out of consideration for Mackenzie who would have been conspicuous among his Scottish Labour colleagues, most of whom had little interest in what was going on. 

But in reality, Callaghan was acting in deference to that vague, vapourish consensus that Scotland was vulnerable. Despite sectarianism being a subject worthy of minimal scrutiny, the existence of marrow-deep tribalism in parts of the country was discreetly recognised. It is hard now to assemble a series of events that might have led to the same darkness falling on Scotland and harder still to imagine how a visit by an MP might have flicked the switch. But writing in his autobiography more than 40 years later, Dalyell nevertheless concluded: 'At that point in time, Callaghan was right and I was wrong. I did not go. Scotland was tinder dry and the troubles could easily have spread to the land of Rangers and Celtic'.

Then as now, the Old Firm offered a lively but distorting reminder of the population exchanges between Scotland and Ireland. But it would have required the secretion of powerful toxins to transform the 90-minute paramilitaries at Ibrox or Celtic Park into meaningful auxiliaries of the big boys in Ulster. 

Dalyell eventually went to the province in 1971, apparently convinced there was now little chance of the conflict spreading. He travelled with the blessing of Willie Whitelaw who would go on to become the first secretary of state for Northern Ireland after the prorogation of Stormont the following year. As part of the trip, Dalyell met Gusty Spence, the imprisoned godfather figure convicted of baptising the modern Ulster Volunteer Force with the blood of Peter Ward, an innocent Catholic killed outside the Malvern Arms in 1966. Dalyell recalled: 'Apart from the substance of the hour-long discussion, an uncomfortable impression was forming in my mind of how much those in the position of Spence positively enjoyed the conflicts and being part of worldwide attention'.

Spence was untypical of many of his subordinates in the UVF and in the wider world of loyalist paramilitarism because his actions presaged the unleashing of historical forces that would later serve as the pretext for bloody individual acts. But Dalyell had alighted on the common thrills to be had and the stature to be seized with the weakening of social prohibitions against violence. 

In his book 'Tartan Gangs and Paramilitaries: The Loyalist Backlash', Gareth Mulvenna tells the story of young men who were members of Protestant gangs in the early years of the troubles and in doing so he adds detail to the connections that exercised Callaghan and others. A number of those interviewed for the book later joined the loyalist paramilitary groups as the IRA’s terrorist campaign wrought terrible damage on working-class Protestant communities that had previously been characterised by institutions offering a set of values and a pathway by which to progress in life. The sense of societal breakdown was heightened in communities sensitive to the prospect of betrayal, programmed to be territorial and in which martial values were inculcated starting with membership of the Boys Brigade.

Mulvenna argues that the gangs of Belfast, and his account focuses heavily on Belfast, were initially an element of industrial working-class youth culture common to many UK cities both in the 1960s and before. But the very different circumstances in Northern Ireland during those midnight years of the early troubles were sufficient for them to assume a very different social function. Skirmishing with Catholics at the Unity Flats after a Linfield game was ennobled in the context of wider attempts at communal self-defence but such activity, given the context, also contributed to a coarsening of attitudes and a vulnerability to paramilitary come-ons. For those hungering to do more, there were older men in the shadows and doorways willing to eat up such ambition.

As one woman told Max Hastings, hinting at the mean calculations of the period, the tartan gangs were 'our boys of tomorrow' and one gang was criticised because its members had been in Glasgow for the Scottish Cup final between Rangers and Celtic when a local pub was bombed by republicans. How they would have prevented this from happening is unclear but some apparently viewed the mere presence of the gangs as a deterrent. In abnormal times, the actions of the tartans came to be endorsed by desperate communities in a way that would be unthinkable in other times and places. 

In Liam McIlvanney’s novel 'All the Colours of the Town', his Glaswegian reporter Gerry Conway is informed, while investigating loyalist paramilitary links between Scotland and Northern Ireland, 'Your town’s hard but Belfast is different'. This was certainly the case when McIlvanney was writing and was increasingly the case in the late 1960s but a number of Protestant youth gangs in Belfast still viewed Glasgow as a source of inspiration. Mulvenna writes: 'Given the long-standing interactions of Ulster-Protestants "across the narrow sea", various customs and rituals were undoubtedly transported to similar gangs in working-class Belfast and the loyalist community in particular'.

The future playwright Robert Niblock is quoted recalling his regular trips to Scotland to attend Rangers games and explaining the appreciation this gave him of Glasgow’s gang culture, including the importance of sectarian allegiances. Niblock’s experience was common: Two members of the Shankill Young Tartan stole a vital box of scarves from a Glasgow gift shop when they were over for a Rangers game, while one tartan gang based in Rathcoole was even named in honour of the Rangers player Kai Johansen. The widely adopted tartan moniker was partly intended to pay homage to Glasgow gang culture but also had nods to the wider historical affinities between Scotland and Northern Ireland that girded Protestant identity. Tartan identifiers such as scarves were adopted to finish the standard outfit provided by Wrangler, Ben Sherman and Doc Martens. 

Mulvenna suggests that the 1971 murder of three young soldiers from the Royal Highland Fusiliers was even more traumatic for those in Northern Ireland with emotional links to Scotland because it happened just nine weeks after the Ibrox disaster. Recalling Kevin Myers’s assessment that the IRA presumed Scottish soldiers to be Protestants and Rangers fans, Mulvenna states: 'Young loyalists, many of whom travelled to Scotland to watch Rangers or participate in Orange parades, undoubtedly saw something of their own way of life reflected in the three soldiers, whom they regarded as almost kith and kin'. Another rung had been descended.

In the wake of the deaths, the wearing of tartan increased as a mark of tribute but for some gang members it also hardened their belief that something more was required to counter the IRA. On joining the paramilitaries, they left behind a street culture that could claim some connection with the rest of industrial Britain and embraced a fate that was particularly Northern Irish. Death or jail were the fates promised and often achieved. Some of those who ended up in jail came under the tutelage of Gusty Spence and maybe it was a former tartan gang member who was directed to fetch a cup of coffee for Tam Dalyell that day in the Maze. 

Mulvenna has made an important contribution to existing work on the loyalist paramilitaries, including that by Scottish academics Steve Bruce and Ian S Wood. The book is among the best accounts of the sweaty, bloody chaos of the early troubles and further confirmation that the best work about the conflict is that which uses oral history to full effect. Mulvenna understands that the power of judgement lies in its restricted application. That’s not to say the book offers easy absolution but it does attempt to balance empathy with the need for ethics in times of turmoil. And in allowing once young men obsessed with football, fighting and fashion to tell their stories, he allows us glimpses into a culture that regards Scotland as being closer even than just across the water.

'Tartan Gangs and Paramilitaries: The Loyalist Backlash' by Gareth Mulvenna is published by Liverpool University Press

 

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