From young citizen to volunteer

On 13 October 1994 the Combined Loyalist Military Command (CLMC) called a press conference in the historic Fernhill House situated in Belfast's Shankill area. The CLMC was a conglomerate of the main loyalist paramilitary protagonists that had been involved in the violence of the previous 25 years in Northern Ireland – the period commonly referred to as ‘the Troubles’. The assembled press watched as representatives of the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), Red Hand Commando (RHC), Ulster Defence Association (UDA) and the Ulster Freedom Fighters (UFF) listened intently to Gusty Spence, who had been arrested in 1966 for the sectarian assassination of a Catholic barman, read a CLMC statement. The press conference, which announced the loyalist paramilitary ceasefires, came seven weeks after the Provisional Irish Republican Army had called its own cessation of hostilities.

Six weeks after the CLMC declaration, an American newspaper interviewed a former loyalist prisoner named Eddie Kinner. As an active member of the Young Citizen Volunteers (YCV), Kinner had been arrested for murder in March 1975. The YCV, the youth battalion of the UVF, had a particularly violent reputation and Kinner, then 17 years old, was convicted as a ‘YP’ – a young prisoner – due to his age. Speaking to the Chicago Tribune, Kinner mentioned an (ultimately aborted) ambition to write his life story: ‘I want to put across my experiences, let people see what created me’.

Earlier in the 1970s, as a 14-year-old, Kinner had been involved with the Shankill Young Tartan (SYT). The Tartan gangs were large groups of teenage boys from working-class Protestant communities who found themselves embroiled in the emerging conflict. Kinner recalls: ‘I had a haversack that I wore to school; on that I had “SYT” for Shankill Young Tartan. The “Y” (of ‘SYT’) went to the “YCV” for YCV, and (connected to the ‘V’ in) UVF. I seen that as my graduation’. In the chaotic and violent maelstrom of early 1970s Belfast, many young loyalists would follow a similar path.

Structure

This book primarily seeks to examine, through interviews with Kinner and a range of his contemporaries, how the rapidly deteriorating political and security situation in Northern Ireland in the late 1960s and early 1970s led to Tartan gangs emerging from normal youth subcultures and transforming into quasi-paramilitary groupings.