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Northern Ireland's Lost Opportunity is a unique in-depth investigation into working-class Loyalism in Northern Ireland as represented by the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), the Red Hand Commando (RHC) and their political allies. In an unorthodox account, Tony Novosel argues that these groups, seen as implacable enemies by Republicans and the left, did develop a political analysis of the Northern Ireland conflict in the 1970s which involved a compromise peace with all political parties and warring factions – something that historians and writers have largely ignored. Distinctive, deeply informed and provocative, Northern Ireland's Lost Opportunity is the first study to focus not on the violent actions of the UVF/RHC but on their political vision and programme which, Novosel argues, included the potential for a viable peace based on compromise with all groups, including the Irish Republican Army.

As the previous chapters have argued, the political thinkers in the UVF and RHC from 1974 on, and possibly earlier believed, that the conflict had reached a stalemate. Therefore, unlike Unionism, they had begun to develop proposals to create the breathing space they believed necessary to let the politics of compromise work. Spence’s speeches, the various proposals from the UVF and the RHC and those found inCombat, Sunday News, Orange CrossandLoyalist News,and the RHC’s 1975 Ten-Point plan, all pointed out ways to accomplish this. Simultaneously, their work and Spence’s speeches held that because the politicians could

With the defeat of progressive Loyalist politics in 1974–75, some elements in the UVF, the RHC and those outside those organisations, continued to work on ideas and documents to end the conflict and speak out against the continuing horrible, sectarian and mindless violence. After the failure of Loyalist politics and the PIRA ceasefire, violence raged throughout 1975 and into 1977 with the UVF and RHC as well as the UDA continuing to kill at a terrible rate, and in fact outkilling the PIRA in 1975.² In the ‘curious contradiction’ mentioned above, while the UVF and RHC continued to carry

The previous chapter analysed the UVF’s and the RHC’s new thinking and how they tried to enact their ideas. That chapter showed clearly that the traditional narrative of all Loyalists as ‘backwoodsmen’ and/or ‘Neanderthals’ does not hold, and that by putting forward very progressive and inclusive political proposals some elements of Loyalism stepped beyond what everyone expected of them. Furthermore, the last chapter demonstrated that, contrary to the accepted wisdom, Loyalism was not simply reactive. In this period, progressive Loyalist political thinkers led the way in terms of politics and sought a way to end the conflict in a compromise

It is fitting that we start this final chapter with the same quote that began this book. Fitting because this is the end of the study of this part of Loyalism’s journey in 1987, a journey that was, at times, the darkness and at other times the light in the darkness. Yet, this study faces the same problem as Roy Garland did when he wroteUVF: A Negotiating History. At the end, one of his UVF subjects asked him ‘will it [Garland’s account] be believed?’² Garland writes, My response was to point to the hard data available in the pages

In 2007, a Republican mural on the Whiterock Road in Belfast read, ‘Collusion is not an Illusion’. The mural displayed a gun with the inscription ‘Authorised by MI5’ [Military Intelligence – Section Five], and with the words ‘APPROVED, On Behalf of her Majesty’s Government’ stamped on it. The gun hovers over a shrouded body lying on the ground with crosses, marking the many years of the conflict, near the foot of the body. For even greater impact, the mural has a quote attributed to Gusty Spence, one of the first UVF members to be convicted of murder in 1966 as a

While some would argue that Spence, Mitchell and Ervine’s quotes are nothing more than rationalisations or a way of avoiding responsibility for their actions, the work in this and the following chapters will clearly demonstrate that these insights were part of a larger rethinking and analysis of how Northern Ireland descended into violence in 1969. This study argues that these three quotes were not rationalisations, but rather encapsulate how these UVF political leaders accepted Spence’s analysis of Unionist rule as ‘50 years of misrule’, and came to understand how this ‘misrule’ led to the violence of the ‘Troubles’. Subsequent analysis

Although aiming his criticism at Unionism in 2003, Patrick Murphy, put into words what many people already believed about Loyalists and how they spent their time in prison.² Murphy, like Todd, dismisses the impact prison had on individual Loyalists and Loyalism, while reinforcing the stereotype of Loyalism as unthinking, unable to grow politically while in prison and unprepared to challenge Unionism once out of prison. Recently, Anthony McIntyre, a former PIRA life-prisoner, now a Ph.D. and commentator on Northern Ireland, disputed this stereotype from the Republican side, arguing that not all Republicans developed politically while in prison. He claims that,

Oliver Wright, a former British official in Northern Ireland from 1969–70, once portrayed Northern Ireland as it had existed from partition until 1972, as ‘a state of tyranny; a minor form of tyranny, not the Stalinist form of tyranny. But that was what the Stormont parliament was about.’² While there were no gulags as in the Soviet Union, there was repressive legislation, naked violence and, at the founding of the state, many sectarian killings. In particular, the Belfast Pogroms, between 1920 and 1922, resulted in the deaths of approximately 463 people and the injury of more than 1,100 others,