Ulster loyalism

Ulster loyalism, as portrayed in the book, is an especially zealous form of unionism: a commitment to the British Crown expressed as a defense of Protestant authority and of Northern Ireland’s place within the United Kingdom. Its force appears not only in political conviction but in the capacity to mobilize crowds, mark territory, and confront those who challenged the existing order. The attacks on civil-rights marchers and the later destruction of Catholic homes show how that defense could move from public rhetoric to organized violence and mass displacement.

Political identity and mobilization

The book sets loyalism against an alternative political vision advanced by Dolours Price and other supporters of People’s Democracy. They hoped that working-class Protestants and Catholics could recognize shared economic hardships and build a united, socialist Ireland. Eamonn McCann argued that Protestant workers were not the marchers’ enemies, but victims of a system shaped by landed and industrial unionists. This appeal to class solidarity met a politics in which religious identity and loyalty to the Crown were treated as grounds for defending the established order.

Ronald Bunting, known to his followers as the Major, embodied the hardening of that politics. A former British Army officer and high-school mathematics teacher, he had once held more progressive views; after Ian Paisley cared for his dying mother, Bunting came under Paisley’s influence. As an Orangeman, he belonged to a Protestant fraternal tradition defined in opposition to the Catholic population. When the marchers set out from Donegall Square, Bunting and his supporters jostled and jeered them, tried to seize their banners, and raised the Union Jack. Asked why the protesters could not simply be ignored, Bunting answered, “You can’t ignore the devil, brother.” The remark cast political opponents as a threat that could not be left alone, making confrontation appear a form of defense.

That sense of threat had a wider political setting. Protestants feared becoming a demographic minority, while it was uncertain whether London would intervene if their position weakened. Many in England seemed indifferent to the province, and the British government’s history of relinquishing colonies made abandonment seem possible to some unionists. Loyalist militancy therefore drew force from a double anxiety: the prospect of being outnumbered at home and the suspicion that the British state might not come to the rescue. The book places those fears alongside the peaceful marchers’ attempt to redraw the conflict’s boundaries, from Catholic against Protestant toward young against old, and shows how sharply the two political visions collided.

From confrontation to the Burntollet ambush

As the march moved through unionist strongholds, the contest over public space became increasingly physical. Local men with sticks blocked the students’ way, while police accompanying the march diverted it around villages. Supporters of Major Bunting walked beside the procession to taunt it; one carried a Lambeg drum whose heavy beat summoned other counterprotesters from nearby homes. The marchers had committed themselves to nonviolence, but some hoped that a violent crackdown, as in the televised Selma march, might expose injustice and provoke change. Their imagined alternative was a new division between young and old, future and past, rather than Catholics and Protestants. The opposing crowds were already making that distinction difficult to sustain.

On the eve of the march’s arrival in Derry, Ian Paisley and Bunting recast the civil-rights procession as a threat to Protestant history. Derry’s symbolic importance for loyalists rested on the 1689 siege, when Protestant forces loyal to William of Orange held the city against a Catholic army loyal to James II. Paisley portrayed the marchers as IRA men in disguise and urged his followers to defend the city as their predecessors had. After whipping up the crowd, he withdrew from the scene; Bunting, his designated adjutant, told those who wanted to play a manly role to arm themselves with whatever protective measures they considered suitable. That night, local men gathered large stones in fields above the road, with a sympathetic farmer lending a tractor to collect and position the projectiles.

On the final morning, Eamonn McCann reminded the marchers that their promise of nonviolence was about to be tested. Hundreds proceeded along a narrow lane toward Burntollet Bridge, where the road crossed the River Faughan. In the fields above, men wearing white armbands appeared along the ridgeline; then stones began to fall. Attackers emerged from the lanes and behind the hedges, throwing stones, bricks, and milk bottles and closing off the route near the bridge. Trapped in the middle of the crowd, Dolours Price and Marian Price climbed over a hedge as the barrage continued. The attackers charged down with cudgels, crowbars, lead pipes, and nail-studded planks. Marchers covered their heads with coats, stumbled blindly, and clutched at one another for protection.

The assault did not stop at throwing stones. As marchers fled into fields, attackers knocked them down and kicked them unconscious; a young girl was struck on the head with a spade. Two newspaper photographers were beaten and stoned, their film seized, and they were threatened with death if they returned. Bunting was present amid the violence, swinging his arms as if conducting the attackers; his sleeves were stained with blood, and he took a protest banner that someone set alight. The marchers did not fight back. Price found herself among young people with bleeding faces, then waded into the river as others were pushed from the bridge. An officer from the Royal Ulster Constabulary eventually helped her to safety, but the police response deepened the shock: many officers had done little to intervene, and it was later alleged that the attackers’ white armbands helped police friends distinguish them from the marchers. Many of Bunting’s men were members of the B-Specials, the armed police auxiliary.

Violence and displacement

The violence moved from the march route into Catholic neighborhoods. Loyalist gangs proceeded through Bombay Street, Waterville Street, Kashmir Road, and other enclaves, smashing windows and throwing petrol bombs into homes. Hundreds of houses were gutted, forcing their occupants into the streets. Across Belfast, families boarded up doors and windows, moved furniture away from front rooms, and waited in back kitchens as if for a storm, grandparents clutching rosaries while they feared what might come through the glass.

Nearly two thousand families fled Belfast that summer, most of them Catholic. In a city of about 350,000 people, the displacement continued over the following years, when as much as a tenth of the population relocated. Some families were driven out by mobs of around a hundred people; others received a note giving them an hour to leave. They packed into cars, sometimes eight people to one vehicle, and thousands of Catholics eventually queued at the railway station for southbound trains to the Republic. The scale of flight made the defense of territory more than a contest over marches and symbols: it forced people from their homes and reshaped where communities could live.

The McConville family was caught in that upheaval. Local men told Arthur McConville that he had to leave, and he slipped away under cover of darkness to his mother’s house. Jean McConville and the children initially remained, hoping the tension would subside, but they too were eventually forced out, packing what they could into a taxi. Around them, cars burned at intersections and firebombed schools smouldered; sixty buses commandeered by Catholics formed barricades in the streets, making the city’s new territorial lines visible. The broken glass and rubble left behind became what a poet called “Belfast confetti,” an image of a city where political division had entered the domestic landscape.

Memory and the limits of attribution

The book distinguishes the loyalist violence that drove the McConville family from their home from the later, separate question of Jean McConville’s disappearance. Local men ordered Arthur McConville to leave during the 1969 expulsions; Jean and the children fled afterward. Years later, the IRA’s claim that Jean had informed for the military became part of the disputed account of why she was taken. The two episodes belong to the same landscape of fear and division, but the book does not treat the earlier loyalist threat as evidence of who later abducted her.

That distinction matters because the chronology itself remains contested. The children remembered Jean being beaten and questioned after going to bingo in early December 1972, then taken away the following evening; they believed the abduction occurred on 7 December. A police log later found by Nuala O’Loan recorded a woman identified as Mary McConville, at the family’s Divis Flats address, wandering in West Belfast at 11 p.m. after being beaten and warned to stop giving information to the military. The log dated that episode to 29 November, seven nights earlier than the children’s account placed it. If the log was reliable and the children’s abduction date accurate, more than one night separated the warning from Jean’s removal, a sequence more consistent with Brendan Hughes’s account than with the family’s remembered timeline.

The unresolved record does not undo the documented expulsions and attacks that made the McConvilles refugees in their own city. Rather, it shows why communal violence cannot be collapsed into one explanation: loyalist intimidation shaped the family’s displacement, while the circumstances and timing of Jean’s later abduction had to be examined through conflicting memories and records.