Crimes of Loyalty: A History of the UDA

Ian S. Wood

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0748624279 ISBN 13: 9780748624270

Publisher: Edinburgh University Press, 2006

Sectarian murder, torture, bloody power struggles and racketeering are what for many define their image of the Ulster Defence Association. Yet as Northern Ireland's Troubles worsened in 1971 and 1972, it emerged with a mass membership to defend Loyalist areas against the IRA and to uphold the Union with Britain. By 1974 it was able to defy the will of an elected government and it went on to formulate political strategies for working-class Loyalism. Ian S. Wood uses his specialist knowledge as well as extensive interviews to recount these events and the ruthless war waged by the UDA on the nationalist community. He explores issues such as the UDA's descent into criminality and its relationship with the 'secret war' conducted by Britain's undercover services and he assesses what impact the organisation had on the outcome of Europe's worst political and ethnic conflict between 1945 and the break-up of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia after 1990.

Review:

The most substantial study yet made of the attitudes of those whose (in their own favoured phrase) 'only crime was loyalty'... this book provides a mass of original material on which other analysts will gratefully draw. --Charles Townshend, Keele University American Historical Review

Ian Wood's book Crimes of Loyalty: A History of the UDA, fully captures, from a Protestant perspective, the final deterioration of Irish politics and its slide towards full-blown ethnic hatred from 1969 onwards. --Neil Mackay, Scottish Review of Books

The book makes an outstanding contribution to one of the greatest challenges currently faced by the United Kingdom: the bringing of peace to Northern Ireland!Wood is a historian who looks profoundly into motivation of all kinds, avoiding the mindless cliche of so much outside comment, knowing the force of moral judgment lies in the scarcity with which it is used. --Owen Dudley Edwards, Honorary Fellow, Edinburgh University

About the Author:

Ian S. Wood is the author of two studies of Winston Churchill and a biography of the Scottish Socialist John Wheatley. He has written Ireland During the Second World War and God, Guns and Ulster, a history of paramilitary Loyalism, and also edited Scotland and Ulster. He was for many years the editor of of the Scottish Labour History Journal and has covered the conflict in Northern Ireland for several newspapers including The Scotsman and Scotland on Sunday. He was a lecturer in History at Napier University, Edinburgh and still teaches part-time for the Open University.