Crimes of loyalty: a history of the UDA Ian S. Wood (Edinburgh University Press, £15.99) ISBN 9780748624270 Lord, oh lord, what a depressing book! Militant loyalism is one of the truly awful traditions that has blighted this island, and Ian Wood’s history of the Ulster Defence Association illustrates that point in almost all of its … Read more
Sir,—I followed with interest the debate on Peter Hart’s interpretation of the 1922 Dunmanway massacre (John M. Regan, HI 20.1, Jan./Feb. 2012, Platform; Jeffrey Dudgeon, HI 20.2, March/April 2012, Letters). Hart’s reputation is unlikely to be damaged by Regan’s analysis, however. To somebody who knows the area, Regan’s handling of data is so slipshod and … Read more
Luck and the Irish: a brief history of change, 1970–2000 R. F. Foster (Allen Lane, £20) ISBN 9780195179521 Bemused is the word that comes to mind. Roy Foster seems bemused by what has happened here in the past three decades, particularly the past ten years. He is not alone in his mystification. In fact, many … Read more
Sir,—Jeffrey Dudgeon’s reply to John M. Regan (HI 20.2, Jan./Feb. 2012, Letters) raises the possibility that Frank Busteed was an IRA officer partly responsible for killing ten loyalist Protestants from 26 to 29 April 1922. While evidence is tenuous, Peter Hart’s withholding of this and other (more crucial) evidence indicating a non-sectarian explanation in The … Read more
Sir,—Do most academic historians of revolutionary and post-revolutionary Ireland conform to a ‘constitutional narrative’, driven by a moral imperative to subvert republican interpretations of Irish history? Has their shared political agenda led to widespread and deliberate distortion, suppression, ‘elision’ and even falsification of the evidential record? Have they repeatedly abused their academic positions by indulging … Read more