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 role in the peace process that led up to the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998.

This fully revised edition discusses the McEntee Report into the Dublin and Monaghan bombings; the death in January 2007 of Progressive Unionist Party leader David Ervine; and the announcement in May 2007 that the UVF were renouncing violence and putting their weapons “beyond use”.