IN 1968 FUTURE RED HAND COMMANDO FRANKIE CURRY, A THIRTEEN-YEAR-OLD NEPHEW OF IMPRISONED UVF FIGUREHEAD GUSTY SPENCE, WOULD INADVERTENTLY CAUSE THE BIRTH OF A LOYALIST YOUTH SUBCULTURE THAT WOULD GREATLY INFLUENCE EVENTS DURING THE VIOLENT EARLY 1970S IN BELFAST. By Gareth Mulvenna Frankie Curry and some of his Rangers-supporting friends were in a Shankill street … Read more
‘The only consideration which activated the minds of the Unionist powers . . . was that two-thirds of the population of Londonderry were Catholics. They sited the university in the heart of Coleraine . . . [a] unionist-dominated area.’ This assertion in Gerry Fitt’s maiden speech at Westminster in 1966 is still widely believed, but … Read more
Sir, —It is unfortunate that Paul Bew’s article in the last issue (HI17.4, July/Aug. 2009) should be entitled ‘The Blind Leading the Blind’.In it he says that, unlike Bernadette Devlin, he ‘did not see anydelighted policemen’ at Burntollet where he was present in January1969. Everyone else who was there did. In the account published … Read more
In the early 1960s I began to attend Ian Paisley’s Free Presbyterian Church, which seemed obsessed with ‘Romanism’ and Romish conspiracies. It was claimed that the Catholic Church wanted an Ireland Romanised from end to end as a springboard from which to take possession of England. The Irish state elevated the Catholic Church to a … Read more
Is not the pastness of the past,’ asks Thomas Mann in The Magic Mountain, ‘that much more profound, more complete, more legendary, the more immediately it falls before the present?’ The stories told about the civil rights era invite a positive response to this question. Indeed, the mythologising of the movement began as the events … Read more