UVF - The Endgame

by Henry McDonald

Now that Northern Ireland’s “troubles” appear to be over, with old enemies the DUP and Sinn Féin sharing power, what will happen to the hard men of loyalism? The Ulster Volunteer Force emerged during the first sparks of Northern Ireland’s Troubles in the mid-1960s. Their campaign of violence quickly marked them out as one of the most extreme loyalist groups. Henry MacDonald and Jim Cusack provide a fascinating insight into the UVF’s origins, growth and decline. They follow the careers of some of the key players in the UVF, including Gusty Spence, Billy Wright and David Ervine. They catalogue the atrocities in which the UVF were involved, including the Dublin and Monaghan bombings; the emergence of the notorious renegade Shankill Butchers; and the various bloody feuds that have infected loyalism. They trace the paramilitary organisation from the violent margins, through the horrors of the 1970s and 1980s, to its shaky 1994 ceasefire and its crucial (if sometimes reluctant) role in the peace process that led up to the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998.

Genres: Ireland, Nonfiction

450 pages, Kindle Edition

First published December 12, 2012

About the author

Henry Patrick McDonald was a Northern Irish journalist and author. He was a correspondent for The Guardian and Observer, and from 2021 was the political editor of The News Letter, one of Northern Ireland's national daily newspapers, based in Belfast.

He was born in a Catholic enclave of central Belfast in 1965, and was a student at St Malachy's College. He briefly attended Edinburgh University before gaining a degree from Queen's University Belfast.
In his youth, McDonald involved in the Workers' Party, a left-wing party that emerged from Sinn Féin in the early 1970s and was associated with the Official IRA. He travelled to the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) with the youth wing of SFWP in the early 1980s.

After taking a journalism course at Dublin City University, McDonald began his professional writing career in 1989 at the Belfast newspaper The Irish News. He wrote extensively about the Troubles and related issues, with a particular focus on paramilitary groups in Northern Ireland, like the Ulster Defence Association (UDA) and Irish National Liberation Army (INLA). He wrote a book on the INLA, INLA – Deadly Divisions, which he co-authored with his cousin, Jack Holland. The book was first published in 1994.
McDonald also wrote on Ulster loyalist paramilitary groups and co-authored books on the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) and UDA with Jim Cusack. He also wrote a biography of Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) leader David Trimble, a personal biography Colours: Ireland – From Bombs to Boom, and, in 2017, Martin McGuinness: A Life Remembered. He was, for a period, a security correspondent for the BBC in Belfast.
In 1997, McDonald became the Ireland correspondent for The Observer, and assumed the role for The Guardian in 2007. He was based out of the paper's London office from 2018 to 2020. He then returned to Belfast, where he wrote for The Sunday Times, and worked as the political editor of The News Letter, headquartered in Belfast.

McDonald's first novel, The Swinging Detective, was published in 2017, and his second, Two Souls, was published by Merrion Press in 2019. A third novel, called Thy Will Be Done, was forthcoming at the time of his death.

Reviews

[Conor Tannam · Rating 3 out of 5]

Page after page of violence and sectarian killings made this a tough read but a worthwhile one.

[Jamie Bookboy Fitzpatrick · Rating 4 out of 5]

Authors clearly trying to be as neutral and apolitical as possible. They’re definitely comfortable equating the Loyalist and Republican paramilitaries as equally deserving of condemnation.

This is a very well researched book which clearly took years to put together.

Doesn’t just cover the UVF but also the UDA and various splinter/satellite groups like LVF and RHC.

A comprehensive history of loyalist paramilitarism but is afraid to argue in any direction. Will read their INLA book soon

[Wayne Hughes · Rating 5 out of 5]

Can be heavy going in parts with all the different organisations but stick with it you won't be disappointed

[Tania]

Very heavy reading. Full of historical fact and statistics. I find it difficult to grasp that my cousins and aunts and uncles lived through this. I am forever grateful to be Canadian.