Abstract
In this book, Gareth Mulvenna focuses on the progression of street gangs consisting of young men and teenagers, known as the Tartans, into loyalist paramilitary organisations during the Northern Ireland Troubles – a topic which has received scant consideration from scholars and others alike. The book is written in a style that makes it easily accessible to academics, students and anyone with a general interest in Irish history.
Mulvenna demonstrates how street gangs had been part of Northern Irish society for a long time and he convincingly argues that the Tartans emerged from ‘normal youth subcultures’ (p. 2) that would have been found across the United Kingdom. He shows how music, fashion and sport were all important for the identity of these gangs. He relates the story of this evolution mostly through the use of oral history interviews with those who were at the forefront of this transition.
One of the central arguments of the book is that the Tartans were thrust into the defence of their communities, eventually joining loyalist paramilitary organisations, in response to the ongoing violent campaign of republican paramilitaries. Mulvenna is quite right in this assertion, a theme which he continually repeats throughout the book.
However, despite the strengths of the book, it has several notable weaknesses. First, the author fails to identify the other motivations for the violence carried out by loyalist paramilitaries. He ignores the violence that these paramilitaries inflicted on their own communities exercising power and control; almost 20% of all Protestants killed during the conflict were murdered by loyalist paramilitaries. He also fails to highlight the fact that on many occasions, loyalist violence was in direct response to attempts at political progress, such as the 1973–4 Sunningdale Agreement. It should also be noted that loyalist violence preceded and continued after the mainstream Irish Republican Army’s (IRA) campaign.
There are also some concerns surrounding the author’s methodology. There is no arguing that oral histories are of great value, especially when they have been triangulated, but the problem here is that virtually no corroboration of the selected interviewees’ narratives in relation to their involvement in the Troubles has been sought. For example, suggestions that there was intelligence on innocent nationalist murder victims being members of the IRA are not seriously questioned. Perhaps, the author should have heeded Eric Hobsbawm’s (1997) warning in On History that ‘memory is not so much a recording as a selective mechanism’ (p. 206).